Is "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" a valid argument?
philosophy.stackexchange.com
philosophy.stackexchange.com
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.
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.
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
You're dead wrong about the second amendment, or at least you are if you read it in its entirety.
That's really the problem here - not that government isn't made up of citizens (obviously, it is), but that the act of banning firearms sets up a major inequity in terms of real power. No one is saying "no one should have guns", they're saying "Only these people should have guns". That's a recipe for tyranny.
As for the purpose of the 2A, it's not exactly a long amendment. "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The verbiage was revised multiple times to make it more clear that the purpose was military, and applied to protection against internal threats as well as external. For example, take Tench Coxe's words printed in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette in June 1789:
"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
Noah Webster argued in support of this stance as well:
"Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States."
While obviously tyranny was not the only concern addressed by the amendment, it was absolutely an integral part of its original purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Guns make people more afraid, and frightened people with guns shoot people.
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.
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.