Guns make killing more effcient

The argument

Guns kill people because they are weapons that making killing easier and more efficient. The claim is about capability rather than intent: what a weapon determines is not whether someone wishes to do harm, but how much harm that wish can be converted into, and how quickly. The comparison with other weapons makes the point concrete. A murderer can often kill one person or two with a knife before being stopped, because each attack requires closing the distance, overcoming resistance and beginning again, and every one of those steps gives bystanders time to intervene or to flee. But, in order to reach a level of mind-blowing deaths, in order to end that many lives and destroy an unimaginable number of families, you need a gun. Distance, speed and repetition remove precisely the frictions that limit an attacker armed with anything else, so the ceiling on how many people one person can kill is set by the weapon rather than by the will behind it. That is also why guns exacerbate situations and turn bad situations into deadly massacres. A confrontation that would otherwise end in injury ends in death when a firearm is present, because the weapon compresses the interval in which the outcome is still reversible. The NRA makes the argument that guns don't kill people. But guns kill people more than any weapon, and the behaviour of those who commit these crimes is itself evidence: mass murderers intentionally choose military-style assault weapons because they know they can do the most damage in the shortest period of time. They are selecting for the capability the weapon supplies. Guns do kill people because if such high-powered, military-style weapons were not so easily available, there would be fewer massacres, less deadly shootings, and lower death tolls.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Guns are only efficient in the hands of efficient killers. It takes a person who knows how to operate a gun to kill people. In order to operate these high-powered, military- assault weapons, it takes a person who has somehow managed to obtain a gun and is comfortable firing it. The problem is the systems that allow unfit people to do this. In the United States, among those who are not allowed to purchase or possess a firearm are people deemed a danger to society and patients involuntarily committed to mental institutions. Thus, guns are supposed to be kept of the hands of people who are unfit to operate such dangerous weapons. But, there is an issue with the system, with the rules and regulations that do not keep firearms away from unfit people who are then able to learn how to operate these weapons. It is not guns that make killing a lot of people easier and efficient; it is insufficient laws and a broken system that needs to be addressed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The comparison holds but establishes something narrower than the conclusion. Firearms plainly raise the lethality of an attack, which is a claim about weapons and outcomes rather than about where responsibility sits. Most firearm deaths are also suicides and single-victim homicides rather than the mass attacks the premise takes as its case. [Rejecting P2] Weapon selection shows intent operating through the choice of tool — a person deciding how to do the most harm in the least time — which sits closer to the opposing slogan than the premise allows. "Fewer and less deadly massacres" is a plausible claim about availability, and it argues for restricting access rather than showing that the object rather than the person kills. [Rejecting C] The conclusion trades on the slogan's ambiguity. Read as the claim that guns make killing far easier and far more lethal, the premises support it; read as the claim the position sets against "people kill people", they do not, because a weapon's efficiency is a fact about what a person is able to do with it.