The gun itself is always guilty

When mass shootings occur in the US, an frequent argument of the gun lobby is that the weapons are not the issue, because, the guns don’t shoot from their own volition. Someone has to pull the trigger. That someone is the guilty party, not the gun. Therefore, there is no need to limit the number of guns.

There is a problem though with that line of reasoning though.

Guns are tools specifically design for one purpose, and one purpose only: kill people. By contrast, consider the knife. It can be used as a weapon, but it has many other uses too. The ax? You can use it to kill people, but also to cut down trees. But the gun is different: it has no other purpose whatsoever but to kill people. It has been optimized for that sole purpose. The teleological raison d’être of the gun (including all manners of handguns and rifles), is precisely to kill as efficiently as possible, and you cannot use a gun for any other purpose. Guns exist only to harm and kill.

It is disingenuous to argue that guns are not guilty: their very existence makes them irrevocably guilty. They are guilty the moment they are created, there is no way around that.

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