Guns kill people.
Isn’t it obvious?
President Obama shed tears on Tuesday as he called for new gun safety measures, and some critics perceived weakness or wimpishness. Really? On the contrary, we should all be in tears that 225,000 Americans have already died of gun violence in his seven years in office.
The shame is not a president weeping a bit, but that he has not been able to prevent roughly as many people dying of guns in America on his watch as have been killed in the Syrian civil war (where estimates range from fewer than 200,000 to more than 300,000). Yes, the American gun toll includes suicides and, yes, Syria is a smaller country, but it’s worth a cry that a “peaceful” America during Obama’s tenure has lost roughly as many lives to gunfire as Syria has in civil war.
OK, so let’s assume (not an assumption I’d enjoy taking without a grain of salt) that Kristoff’s statistics are correct.
And let’s further assume that his premise — that guns kill people — is correct. That people are not responsible for killing because the instrumentality of the killing — in this case guns — are.
How is that any different from the endless arguments over abortion?
Like this:
This incidence of abortion has resulted in a tremendous loss of life. It has been estimated that since 1973 Black women have had about 16 million abortions. Michael Novak had calculated “Since the number of current living Blacks (in the U.S.) is 36 million, the missing 16 million represents an enormous loss, for without abortion, America’s Black community would now number 52 million persons. It would be 36 percent larger than it is. Abortion has swept through the Black community like a scythe, cutting down every fourth member.”
Or this:
Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.
What is the difference between guns and abortion? Whether fetuses are people or not, it is beyond dispute that people use guns to kill other people, and people use abortion to kill fetuses.
Right?
It seems obvious — obvious beyond debate — that behind every deliberate shooting is a decision by someone to shoot someone else, and behind every deliberate abortion is a decision by a mother to terminate her pregnancy.
Why is there such an obsessive focus by activists on the methodology involved?
Why can’t it be simply admitted that some people kill people using guns, and some mothers kill fetuses using abortion?
I realize that the latter is legal and the former is illegal but I’m talking about actual responsibility here, and I’d love to know what I am missing.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit for the link, and a warm welcome to all!
Comments
15 responses to “They kill people!!”
the dead first graders of newtown say no guns are good guns and good guns are NO guns. how many children have to die before you say enough?
[…] DO LET’S CONSIDER THE ACTION, NOT THE METHOD: They kill people!! […]
Use Less Onion, Boingo; or perhaps something better than Vapour Rub, for less of a greasy scumbag look
As for the rest? I marvel at how firearms somehow achieve sentience and kill people. Instead of being wielded by some murderous asshole
captain*arizona,
A gun in the hands of Jeanne Assam saved hundreds of lives in 2007. How many of those children in Newtown would have been alive if one of their teachers had been armed and able to kill the attacker early in his rampage?
Your argument cuts both ways.
A slightly revised version of the following was published in the New York Times
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2015/12/tis-easy-to-tout-success-of-gun-control.html
T’is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik’s 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.
Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place — as well as in Paris’s Bataclan a couple of weeks ago — carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2015/12/tis-easy-to-tout-success-of-gun-control.html
The Left cannot abide any suggestion that the member of its coalition, who are responsible for innumerable deaths (and many other crimes) are moral agents who should be held responsible for their deeds. That’s why they resort to hate speech whenever such a suggestion is made. Note, however, that they’re perfectly willing to demonize peaceable Americans who’ve done nothing but purchase a firearm, as if mere ownership of a weapon is morally equivalent to gunning down a helpless crowd.
Comparisons of guns to abortion enrage the Left like nothing else. Their usual response is soaked in venom, which suggests that we ought to continue to draw it and press it home.
the obvious difference between killing via gun and killing by abortion is that gun killing kills a person who many people know, who has touched the lives of people
abortion kills a fetus, a potential person who is known only to the mother (perhaps in a smaller way to the father, potential sisters, brothers, etc.).
it is, to some extent the same phenomenon of mourning – we weep at the death of those who we know well; we shrug at the death of those we known of, we have no emotion for the death of the many we neither know or know of
I sometimes compare abortion to issues related to our other constitutional rights. For instance, in response to often asked “Ok, you may want A gun to protect yourself, but why does any one person need multiple guns,” what would happen if the immediate reply focused on limiting some other constitutional right? “Why does anyone need more than one abortion? I mean, at some point you’ve had enough of them.” Or, “Why should one person be permitted to publish more than a single article per year in major newspapers? That’s just narcissistic and unfair.”
Does anyone remember when SUV’s went on a murderous rampage and the news was full of “SUV kills 4 in rollover.” Note the similarity
If guns are the problem instead of the people wielding them, then we should expect to see the number of shootings, homicides, etc. at gun ranges to exceed those in gun free zones. Whenever my liberal friends want to rag on this, I just tell them, “Get back to me when the number of mass shootings at gun ranges begins to approach those in gun free zones.” Usually get crickets from them in response.
I’ve always wanted this T-shirt, which makes the point clearly…
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qGMpRB2fKN0/Txv8lcY2jyI/AAAAAAAAA2E/kDbXMFzYejs/s1600/guns-dont-kill-people.jpg
I am waiting, but certainly not holding my breath, for the gun control people (GCP) who care so much about mass shootings take aim (yeah, a pun) at Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans et. al. homicides which far exceed mass shootings by certifiable mentally ill people or terrorists.
One answer I have seen from the GC side is that those illegal killer guns come from places like Indiana which has no background checks, (do not know if that is true re background checks) and unnamed innocent people buy them there and smuggle them into the restrictive areas to sell to street thugs.
Meanwhile, Obama commutes sentences of people who possess or used guns illegally. (Check the recent list.) So it must be the gun, after all.
And yes, if one in three American adults owns at least one gun, yes, there should be mass shootings every single day in the USA. Waiting….
Why do anti gun people only care about dead kids? They sure as hell don’t give a dang about alive kids the way they leave them unprotected.
I think it depends on your definition of “person”.
And we don’t agree on that.
gunner barry why do conservatives care about fetues ;but are always trying to cut welfare spending for babies after their born? the newtown children’s blood is on the nra’s hands!