Myth: Guns don't kill people, people do.
Fact: Both guns and people kill; guns make it easier.
Summary
This sound bite misses the point; people are indeed ultimately
responsible for pulling the trigger, but the national murder rate
would surely fall if widespread gun availability didn't make it
so incredibly easy to kill another human being.
Argument
This frequent pro-gun slogan is something that, upon reflection,
seems entirely true. But it's not.
In actuality, the first half of this slogan is demonstrably false;
guns do indeed kill people. But the point that the gun lobby is
surely trying to make is that they do not kill people by themselves;
they require a human to pull the trigger.
This argument is an attempt to divert attention away from the
fact that guns make it much easier to kill people. Guns do this
in two ways: enhanced ability and feasibility. We can see the
enhanced ability from suicide statistics: the most successful
suicide attempts are those that involve firearms. And this greater
ability also makes murder feasible in a greater number of circumstances.
To anyone entertaining murderous impulses, a gun makes it feasible
to attack larger people, multiple people, people from a distance, from
secrecy, etc. No one in their
right mind would try to rob a bank with a knife. But a gun inspires
confidence of success in a would-be bank robber, allowing a crime
to occur when it wouldn't have otherwise.
Gun control advocates argue that a certain, extremely small percentage
of the populace is actively contemplating murder at any given
time, and would if they could. They argue the murder rate would
drop if these would-be murderers did not possess the enhanced
ability and feasibility provided by guns. The above pro-gun slogan
responds to this argument illogically, by making an irrelevant
point.
A wit once described this irrelevancy thus: "Fingers don't kill people,
bullets do."
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