“Guns don‘t kill people, people do“
An essay by Wim Riecken
The argument “Guns don‘t kill people, people do“ is often used in the context of the heated
discussion on stricter gun laws and gun control in the USA. The primary users of this argument are
gun advocates and gun regulation critics. It is a combination of two statements, stating that guns
aren‘t the ultimate cause of gun-related deaths and instead the people deciding to use them illegally
and pull the trigger are.
This would lay the blame of the individuals committing mass killings and their general intentions or
mental health issues and would display the weapon as only a tool and a direct cause. A person
deciding to murder would be the ultimate cause instead. These statements might not be directly
logically false, after all, it‘s the bullet from the gun hitting the victim, but the problem with this
argument is the missing conclusion. What are you supposed to conclude from this argument? That
there should be no gun regulation at all or not any more gun regulation than there is? That the
increase in mass killings done with guns is irrelevant to whether there should be gun regulations?
So, this tells us nothing about whether the direct cause, the guns, should be regulated or made
illegal. For example, you could say: “Rocket launchers don‘t kill people, people do“. But that doesn't
conclude that rocket launchers should be legal or unregulated. The single purpose of a rocket
launcher is making it easier to harm and kill large groups of people, so this argument would be
irrelevant to the question if it should be legal, what it of course shouldn't be. Because other things
are direct causes of people’s death, but obviously shouldn’t be illegal. For example, you could replace
the word rocket launcher with “cars“ and not be wrong, because people die due to the direct cause
of a cars. But none of these arguments logically or by implication conclude to saying if these things
should be illegal or not. If you look at the example with cars killing people, cars shouldn‘t be illegal
even though they kill people, because our society relies on them, it‘s not their purpose to kill and
they are regulated in ways minimizing their threat to humans.
So, this argument on its own is not very effective at proving a point in a gun control debate, due to its
missing conclusion, while at first, it seems quite convincing. Other arguments of the same category as
“stop blaming the guns and start blaming the person“ have the same problem. If guns should be
illegal, is another question. But after all, like the rocket launcher, they do make killing people easier
to accomplish. Then again, like cars, using them for mass murder is not their intended, official
function (at least they aren‘t supposed to be), guns have other purposes than killing, e.g., gun sports,
self-defence or hunting.