(December 24, 2012 at 1:52 am)Rhythm Wrote: Most guns are fired by humans (and most nails are similarly driven by humans- albeit humans holding hammers), though potentially other trigger pullers (and nail drivers) can be leveraged. In both the analogy and the problem invoked, it isn't the tool but it's divergent use by human beings that's a major problem.
I'm not so much arguing - as stating- that your statistics fail to implicate an inanimate object for crimes or actions for which human beings are clearly accountable. When people commit crimes, it is the people that need to be held accountable, not whatever tool they happened to be holding when they did so (if they want to off themselves, im not going to bitch about the method they chose to handle that - imho, that's their own business). To suggest otherwise is to offer up a convenient scapegoat. That, I would argue.
When people choose to kill other people in this country, guns are the most popular choice. If we agree that a gun is a tool, we have to ask what that tool's primary purpose is. In the case of firearms, the purpose is to eject pieces of metal designed to maim or kill at a high enough velocity to maim or kill. Using a gun to kill or maim is not a divergent use; that's the point of them and they are constructed with this in mind. There are other things you can do with a gun, such as shoot targets, or disassemble the chassis and make homemade Transformers out of the loose parts, but you can practice target shooting with non-lethal weapons and you can build tiny robot figurines out of anything.
The argument from my side is that not only are guns designed to harm or kill, they are designed in such a way that it is just as easy to kill many people as it is to kill one person. When the Second Amendment was written, top-of-the-line firearms could fire one shot per minute, assuming that the shooter was skilled. Now a single person can fire dozens or hundreds of rounds per minute. It is right to blame the shooter for the violence, but a shooter is only as lethal as his weapon allows him to be. You don't get Virginia Techs and Sandy Hooks if the assailants were armed with a hammer or a knife. If your response to this is 'bombs', you can't just go to a bomb store and buy bombs. You can build one, but this takes time and knowledge. You can't decide, on the spur of the moment, to build a fertilizer bomb and blow up a federal building or construct a fistful of pipe bombs and lob them off a highway overpass if you're completely ignorant in the ways of bomb-making, so let's not let that disingenuous diversion enter the conversation. It would require a lot of planning, reading and making. If you have a gun, you can, lock, load, and become infamous in minutes.
There are examples of countries where guns are far more rare and far more restricted, and if they have a strong infrastructure and are internally-secure, gun violence in these countries is dramatically less than it is here. There is too much data to write off the correlation as mere coincidence. We need to see what they are doing and figure out how we can adapt it to ourselves. As long as we keep pretending that guns are not a problem, we're going to keep seeing thousands of people die every year because of them.
