
Is "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" a valid argument? - ultimatedelman
http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/10975/is-guns-dont-kill-people-people-kill-people-a-good-argument
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zhaphod
Yes. People kill people. But people don't kill other people with bare hands.
May be they do but it would be such a minute fraction that it is not worth
talking about. So given that people do need weapons to kill other people which
weapon is more destructive given the current statistics. Right now there are
about 30000+ gun deaths in USA. Of that about ~18000 are homicides. Which
other weapon can cause so many deaths? If we allowed people to carry grenades,
C4, tanks, or even nuclear weapons on a regular basis we would see lot more
people getting killed. But we don't allow that. Given this scenario allowing
free availability of guns is what is causing these many deaths. This is borne
out by statistics from other countries which ban such free availability and
use of guns. So yes people kill people. But it wont be so easy to kill so many
people if guns are restricted to law enforcement officials.

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LyndsySimon
> But it wont be so easy to kill so many people if guns are restricted to law
> enforcement officials.

Ever hear of Democide?

Far, far more people have been killed by their own government than at the hand
of their fellow citizens. The American Second Amendment is designed to prevent
just that.

~~~
zhaphod
So what you are saying is you are ok with 10000+ deaths year over year for
many many decades to counteract an extremely remote chance of US federal
government behaving like Saddam or Assad? On top of it even if US Feds wanted
to murder their own citizens they would have to employ the Army as police are
controlled by state government. We all know where the state govt will land if
it comes down to killing their citizens. Also, another issue is that Army in
US is not mindless enough to obey the Fed govt to kill 100s of 1000s of
citizens. And even if they did taking on the US army by militias with their
puny machine guns is laughable.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> So what you are saying is you are ok with 10000+ deaths year over year for
> many many decades to counteract an extremely remote chance of US federal
> government behaving like Saddam or Assad

The violent crime rate has been trending down in the US for decades, and
continues to do so. You seem to be making the assertion that banning firearms
would result in fewer deaths due to violent crime - an assertion that is not
borne out by reality. Further, the number of people killed by government
action in "peacetime" exceeds this number by many orders of magnitude.

> We all know where the state govt will land if it comes down to killing their
> citizens.

We do? I seem to recall several instances of states acting in exactly that
manner. I'm originally from Arkansas... are you familiar with the "Little Rock
Nine"? The governor called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent
desegregation in Little Rock's Central High School.

I have no idea why you would believe that the state government would protect
unarmed citizens if the feds came calling.

> And even if they did taking on the US army by militias with their puny
> machine guns is laughable.

That's fantasy. No one is proposing this. Any action that brought the US
military to bear against the American people would be met with a great deal of
resistance from all corners of society - including from within the military
itself.

~~~
waps
You don't get it. The entirety of (current) leftist ideology falls apart if
force is ever used on any large scale. So "it can't happen", right ?

The same goes for intelligentsia's hate for violenc. Keep history in mind,
intelligentsia will order "their" forces to do horrible things on their behalf
against defenseless people, but touching a weapon themselves, no no no no no.
What should be understood is that they have nothing against violence. They
just want the guarantee that the plebs can't use violence against them, and
that they, personally, can never be forced to commit violence, so they cannot
be directly blamed for things, even things that are obviously their fault.
Like, say, you will not find a single French philosopher accepting
responsibility for the French revolution's aftermath, despite the fact that
they were very, very much responsible for it.

What should be understood as well is that figures like Gandhi epitomize this
behaviour. He's commonly misunderstood. He's a very religious Hindu man from a
Brahmin family. His hatred for violence does NOT come from a desire for peace
(no more than any other human, he wants a peaceful city to live in, like
anyone else, but he certainly does not want peace at any price), it comes from
being raised to never, under any circumstances do any work, certainly not
manual labour, and certainly not risky work, like committing violence against
other human beings. Such a thing would massively lower his karma, it'd be like
forcing a jew to celebrate his birthday with a pig barbecue. He has, however,
ordered large numbers of both soldiers and civilians to commit violence on
others, or threaten them, he even ordered genocides. And even more often, he
has often created or contributed to situations that he knew perfectly well
would erupt in violence. He is at least partially responsible for the tens of
millions of deaths during India's partition.

This person is celebrated by leftists, by the lower ranks because "he is a man
of peace" and they can just deny real history because they're 15 years old and
haven't ever touched a history book with more than 50 pages (they also revere
complete monsters like Che Guevara of course). The higher ranks are well aware
of history, yet they love him for his cunning use of violence. How he caused
huge battles while moving his forces right under the nose of the enemy. How he
created situations that got millions of muslims killed (in revenge for what
they did - not saying there wasn't any justification) without ever ordering
anyone to fire a gun (he did make sure they had more guns than the enemy of
course). How he kept getting his way by creating situations that were
completely intolerable for his enemy, e.g. preventing villages from getting
food, preventing government departments from operating by cutting
communications, destroying the means of escape for refugees by sabotaging
train lines, ... Thereby forcing his adversaries to start the attack, usually
at a disadvantage. But he is no more a man of peace than Adolf Hitler, and for
the same reason. Which is another reason they revere him. This guy killed
millions, maybe more than Hitler ever did, because they disagreed with his
ideology. He did so without so much as ordering a single person killed. And of
course, they revere him because he won.

No matter how pure your leftist ideology, you will be skinned alive by
intelligentsia if you don't achieve leftist policy being imposed. E.g. the
kibbutzim movement in Israel is widely reviled by leftists ? Why ? I've never
met people more dedicated to living as leftist ideology dictates. They failed
to take over Israel, that's why. Their failures made Israel a more rightist
state than any rightist politician could ever have achieved.

Violence, arms and people choosing for themselves is just completely and
utterly incompatible with leftist ideology on pretty much any level you can
imagine.

Leftist policy, enforced sharing, massive government expansion, ... can only
work if it's imposed from above by a privileged group of rulers (and
intelligentsia would quickly leave leftism if this ever changes). But it's not
just that. Generally leftism requires that large scale violence doesn't exist,
or doesn't matter.

For example, obviously if war threatening America is a real risk, then a large
well-funded military is an investment you can't seriously criticize.

If a large internal threat is possible, whether government or otherwise, then
you can't argue against gun ownership. Hell, you might even advocate a DUTY to
bear arms, something along the line of what Switzerland does [1]. You should
see foreigners panic to the most normal of things there : someone comes to
work with an assault rifle in his backpack, casually put beneath their desk,
lots of ammunition in the same bag, because they leave for mandatory training
that evening. Not easy on American nerves that one, let me tell you.

Generally most big government policies would never succeed if there is a
serious risk of a large part of the population resisting force. Which is of
course exactly the point of the second amendment, but a byproduct is that it
makes leftist policies very, very hard to implement.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland)

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kijin
That statement was never meant to be a rigorous philosophical argument. It's a
rhetorical device, nothing more, nothing less.

So if you try to criticize your opponents on the basis of how weak the "Guns
don't kill people" argument is, you'll end up committing the strawman fallacy
just as much as they do.

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soneil
Most these arguments seem to completely miss the actual issue.

It's quite normal to hear a crime described in terms of "Motive, Means,
Opportunity". People bring the Motive. Guns bring a Means. Neither exists in a
vacuum.

"Gun control" boils down to how you propose to attack this. So far, we haven't
found a good way to control Motive. So we're left with restricting Opportunity
- eg, metal detectors on US schools - or Means, eg, gun control in the rest of
the civilized world.

------
krapp
The question at hand is whether killing people with guns should be more or
less easy than killing people with anything else, or whether the potential of
guns to kill more people with less effort than a block of wood or a knife
means there should be regulations controlling the sale and use of the guns,
which are not applied in equal measure to other things.

In the United States, a cultural belief has arisen holding access to and
ownership of guns to be sacred, due to the right to bear arms in our
Constitution.

Being a country with a large rural population, and a history of "Wild West"
frontiersmanship which made living off the land necessary and in some cases
vigilantism the only means of order available, many see guns as simply a tool,
or a necessary means of self-defense. Some believe the threat of revolution is
the only way to keep the government in check, and that more guns among the
population equates, essentially, to an equitable redistribution of the
government's monopoly on violence, whereby gunplay among the people is more
just than gunplay against it.

So culturally, yes it is a valid argument in that it reflects, albeit without
subtlety, the point of view of a large portion of the American public.
However, whether it is credible is up for debate.

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brandonhsiao
People kill people, but access to guns (to whatever extent) _prompts_ them to
kill people. It's not like people first decide whether to kill someone or not
and then think "hm, so are guns available?" The availability of guns
influences that initial decision.

------
PaulKeeble
How "true" this statement is (with all its flaws) really depends on the
country. If you look at gun ownership over the world as a whole and individual
countries we can see that some countries have very high gun ownership, like
the USA, but they do also share the homicide rate. This if anything shows its
possible to have guns within the community without large numbers of murders
and accidents.

In America the argument is regularly used to defend the position of
maintaining the gun laws as they are, as right, but its actually quite true
that as a culture Americans kill each other more than many other developed
countries. That isn't really the gun, they are the weapon of choice but as an
outsider looking in I see a lot of violence and it appears to be associated
with the cultural heritage in your country.

I visited Las Vegas earlier in the year and I spent some time in a range there
firing all sorts of assault rifles and pistols and such. I love firing weapons
and here in the UK I am limited in what I can do, no assault rifles for
example nor even a 9mm pistol. But one thing an ex marine working on the range
said was "I think the USA has a violence problem and guns make it worse". I
think that is the truth and until the USA really starts talking about why they
have so many people in prison, why its so disproportionately black people, why
the homicide rate is so high when compared to most other developed countries
the fix isn't going to be obvious. If you remove guns it might help reduce the
lethality of the violence, maybe more people will survive knife and other
attacks, but its not going to actually solve the underlying reasons for the
violence.

The problem is there are two sides to this, people using guns kill people, and
people not using guns also kill people: Guns AND People => Death is TRUE
People AND NOT Guns => Death is also TRUE

Guns are thus irrelevant, its a term that can be removed entirely and the
statement reduced to people killing people. The question is really do guns
increase the amount of deaths due to their relatively lethality and ease of
death dealing and that most probably is true compared to most other personal
weapons due to there range and the damage they inflict. But People killing
People as I have pointed out has dramatically different rates in different
countries, guns don't necessarily increase homicides that is all based on the
culture and laws of a country.

------
jlgaddis
I grew up in the country and, from the time I was a small child, there have
always been several guns around. They have never killed anyone.

------
zoowar
Lately, it seem like this adage would be better stated as, "Guns don't kill
people, gun laws kill people"

------
glimmung
It's a valid statement, but not a valid argument.

Guns make people more afraid, and frightened people with guns shoot people.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Personal experience tells me that carrying a firearm means that you are far
more likely to attempt to avoid even relatively minor confrontation.

~~~
glimmung
Since we are talking in general terms, I am not persuaded by an argument based
on a single individual's experience..

However well it works for you, there are any number of sad, frightened little
men like George Zimmerman who will shoot unarmed kids out of fear.

~~~
LyndsySimon
You need not take my word for it though - there are legions of armed Americans
out there, and their collective crime rate is exceedingly low.

------
stronglikedan
Yes. In fact, it's the only valid argument. Most people I that I know own a
gun, and none have ever killed anybody. People with mental issues kill people,
and they use more than just guns. I have a block of knives on my kitchen
counter that have the potential to be just as deadly.

~~~
ultimatedelman
Anecdotal evidence is not real evidence. Most people I know who own a car have
never killed anybody, therefore cars don't kill people. Only bad drivers kill
people. Sounds silly, right?

Also, your block of knives is orders of magnitude less deadly than a semi-
automatic weapon. Can you kill people with knives? Of course you can, people
did it for centuries. But there's a reason why army soldiers use a gun as a
primary weapon and a knife as a last resort.

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tensaix2j
Guns don't kill people, the mentally ill do.

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pistle
Hi. Welcome to hacker news. This is not reddit. Stop linking wildly afield
questions from stack exchange philosophy beta.

~~~
ultimatedelman
Hi pistle, I've been on Hacker News a while. I found the argument that took
place on this Stack Exchange to be very civil, interesting, and relevant, so I
posted it here among other intelligent people like yourself to engage in
civil, interesting, and relevant debate. It appears that other people agree
that this was, in fact, a valid post.

