You hear this retort often when anybody brings up the inescapable fact that the prevalence of guns in American society is a huge factor in our otherworldly homicide rate.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
Yep. Bob Costas sure stepped into that one with his halftime rant on “Sunday Night Football” discussing the murder-suicide involving Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher.
OK, sure, that is the case. Even unmanned drones need somebody to program them and push the button.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people – but guns make people who want to kill people a helluva lot more effective.
Steak knives can also kill people. As long as the people who want to use a steak knife are willing to walk up to another person, physically jab the knife into that other person, risk having that other person fight back and maybe turn the knife on you – and that’s not accounting for the willingness to deal with what promises to be an enormous amount of blood.
You want to shoot somebody? You can be 10 feet away, 20 feet away, 50 feet away, 50 yards away, if you’re a good shot. The other person is much less likely from even the shorter distances to be able to wrestle the gun away from you. And the only amount of physicality involved is pulling a trigger – not hard.
And … there will be blood, but at a distance. It can feel quite impersonal.
The same comparison can be applied to … cars, toaster ovens, dictionaries and whatever other item you want to insert here as being something that could be employed to kill another person.
Hell, you can put a pillow over somebody’s head while they’re sleeping and kill them. As long as you have access to them while they’re sleeping, and the strength to hold a person down that you could expect would fight back.
Guns don’t require a lot of strength, cunning, bravery. Access to a gun and a bullet, ability to pull a trigger. That’s what it takes to be successful.
Am I making an argument here for greater gun control? No. The toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say. Americans on the aggregate own more than 300 million guns – more than one gun per person.
Any form of gun control would only work to take guns from the generally law-abiding to the effective benefit of those with criminal intentions.
Just saying here that the retort … guns don’t kill people, people kill people … doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Because guns make people really good at killing people.
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