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.
That statement was never meant to be a rigorous philosophical argument. It's a rhetorical device, nothing more, nothing less.<p>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.
Most these arguments seem to completely miss the actual issue.<p>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.<p>"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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
People kill people, but access to guns (to whatever extent) <i>prompts</i> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.
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.