ICYMI - The Insanity of “Guns Don’t Do the Shooting”
While intent is important in violence, so too is the tool used
Recently, GVPedia President, Devin Hughes, delved into the most glaringly obvious characteristic about guns that somehow gets obscured in the gun debate — they are designed and created to kill.
In case you missed it, here’s the op-ed, below.
“The only purpose behind ‘the gun doesn’t do the shooting’ and its clichéd corollaries is to distract from the reason people focus on guns themselves — their inherent lethality.”
The Insanity of “Guns Don’t Do the Shooting”
By: Devin Hughes
After last month’s mass shooting at Florida State University that left two people dead and five more injured by gunfire, President Donald Trump gave a terse statement to reporters, including, “These things are terrible. But the gun doesn't do the shooting, the people do."
Trump’s statement is a common refrain by pro-gun advocates, often accompanied by the similar slogan, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” which was popularized by the National Rifle Association. The overarching message is that guns don’t fire themselves (except when they do) and that firing a gun requires a finger at the trigger by a person with agency.
Therefore, gun advocates contend, the problem isn’t with guns, but instead is found in people’s hearts — or mental illness, video games, rap music, wokeness, altitude, or anything else that isn’t the firearm and ammunition.
The mantra that guns aren’t to blame is only true in its most irrelevant sense: guns don’t have any decision-making capacity and will just sit there doing nothing unless the trigger is pulled.
The only purpose behind “the gun doesn’t do the shooting” and its clichéd corollaries is to distract from the reason people focus on guns themselves — their inherent lethality.
There is a reason every modern army in the world arms its soldiers with firearms. Soldiers carry firearms into combat because guns are a useful and effective tool in war. They’re specifically designed to kill and/or inflict grievous bodily injuries, a role at which guns excel. And that is of grave societal concern off the battlefield.
Guns are lethal. While intent is important in violence, so too is the tool used. A fist-fight may leave bruises and broken bones, but very rarely more serious injuries. A gunfight, on the other hand, is highly likely to leave grievous injuries and fatalities. Guns escalate arguments and disputes into lethal encounters.
The same applies to suicide, which is often an impulsive act. A gun is vastly more likely to make the attempt lethal versus other means, and is all too often readily accessible by someone in the midst of crisis. The lethality of firearms is why their presence in a home doubles the risk of homicide and triples the risk of suicide for all occupants.
Ironically, even though the gun lobby is willing to blame any other factor they can find when a gun is used to harm, they embrace and highlight the lethality of firearms when marketing them for self-defense.
The mere presence of firearms are falsely said to deter “bad guys” given their fear of that lethality, while “gun-free zones” are fraudulently claimed to attract would-be killers. Indeed, Director of the NRA Research and Information Division, Josh Savoni, bluntly stated in 2021 that: “This is why no matter the policy, our messaging continues to focus on self-defense.”
Yet the NRA’s position is the opposite of reality. As I’ve written in-depth previously, guns do not make us safer and do not decrease your risk of injury in self-defense scenarios. Conversely, academic research conclusively shows that guns have an escalatory impact on violent crime and increase suicides. Data clearly demonstrates harmful uses of firearms vastly outnumber defensive uses.
While guns may not do the shooting in the most naive form of analysis, they are lethal tools that make it much easier to inflict carnage. The fact that this basic, common sense fact has to even be explained is the result of decades of disinformation and fear-mongering that must be continually debunked.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
First of all the data does not support the proposition that existence of guns in our society is the root of gun violence. Given the number of guns in our nation, well over 350 million, the amount of gun violence does not support the contention that the existence of guns is the problem, the causality rate is too low.
Further the assertion that gun violence exceeds the defensive use is not supported by the data. A CDC funded study on the defensive use of firearm reported that guns were used defensively between 250,000 and 2.5 million times a year. A number that greatly exceeds gun deaths annually..