Guns kill people the same way spoons make you fat.
Let’s dissect that assertion, shall we? It’s designed to transfer responsibility away from the metal and on to the user. But is it fair? Are guns really no more dangerous than spoons?
Give somebody an ordinary dessert spoon, even one loaded with chocolate peanut butter ice cream or some other such popular and unhealthy foodstuff, and that person will not become suddenly fat, even if they use
it on themselves. I’ve spooned ice cream like that into my body on multiple occasions, and I’ve never been particularly fat.
Give somebody an ordinary loaded gun, on the other hand, and if they use it on themselves they may well become suddenly dead.
Factor in human frailty – the capacity to make a mistake – and the risk of a gun killing someone (this poor boy, for instance) is obviously infinitely larger than the likelihood of somebody becoming fat because of an instance of misusing of a spoon.
Finally, lets compare the severity of the outcomes. Being fat isn’t necessarily a big deal, as Health At Every Size research shows, and even if it does bother you, you stand a good chance of being able to do something about it. Being dead, on the other hand, is so universally undesirable that everyone reading this – yes, you – is without doubt currently pursuing multiple strategies to try to avoid it.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this last night.
I think design intention comes into it a lot too. An argument I hear often from gun proponents is that it’s also very easy to murder someone with a knife or a car.
However, there seems to be something to be said about that fact that a gun was designed to kill people making it psychologically easier to use in that way, not to mention simply more convenient.
I was unimpressed to notice recently that a few days after I wrote the post above, someone created Facebook page titled, .
The opening wall post on that page reads, . Well, it seems likely some of them would; but for the rest of them, why make it easier (unless you think killing people is laudable)?
That is to say, as counterfactuals go, it’s fairly indisputable, but it’s also fairly pointless. People killed people before mustard gas or plutonium-239 were ever used as weapons, too, but that doesn’t mean it would be hunky-dory for everyone to have jars of the stuff about the house.