C'mon. Guns are dumb. Smartphones are smart. It's entirely possible to set up a smartphone in a way that blocks access to certain apps, limits how many hours you can use an app in a day, etc etc.
The only way your parallel works is if guns had the ability to selectively target bad guys.
I’m a pretty sophisticated technology and mobile user. I’ve built out MDM and MAM solutions for significant deployments of smartphones - setting up limits on individual phones is complex, time consuming, and unreliable. The median user can probably implement a time limit on iOS, but I’d guess 40% of them don’t do it correctly the first time.
A gun is easy to secure. You either don’t have one, lock it, or lock the ammo and gun separately. Physical controls prevent accidental discharge and are easily understood by reasonably intelligent people.
The gun argument is a bad comparison because the rational people who use guns as a tool get drowned out in the noise of paranoids and people selling gun swag.
Sure, smartphones aren't the problem _in themselves_. But blocking apps is also not the solution.
Maybe a philosophical divergence though:
> Sure, smartphones aren't the problem _in themselves_.
It is time we start to accept that some technologies are vile, and yes, they are a problem _in themselves_.
The modernist mind (ie. the human mind as it exists today) cannot accept this because it seems like a fetishistic argument. Consider the evil monkey paw, that thing itself is evil. A modernist will refuse to accept such a reality. We have conditioned ourselves and each other that each inanimate thing is just an inert tool, applied in good or bad judgement. In a materialistic sense this is true. It is also completely trivial. Taking a step back, and surveying the totality of the environment, how some technologies just seem to be misapplied consistently, how some technologies leave a wake of destruction, how some technologies seem to cast an evil spell on everybody in its orbit.
This is the reality in which we find ourselves. The only way out is true. Smashing the idol is the only way to ban the evil spirit.
Source: was a kid not that long ago.
She doesn’t like being embarrassed that she’s not on social media, so she fakes it to fit in.
Her Grandma didn’t smoke, but all her friends did. So she kept a pack in her purse for years, never touched it. But had to fit in.