Guns don't kill people; people kill people

AchillesSinatra
AchillesSinatra: I'm getting a little tired of hearing this crap, so let's subject it to a little analysis.

Guns don't kill people? Is the suggestion that inanimate objects do not kill people? Well, that's not gonna work: We routinely hear that hundreds were killed in a typhoon and thousands were killed by a tsunami.

Perhaps, then, the suggestion is that guns, unlike typhoons and tsunamis, do not kill people without human assistance? Therefore, guns don't kill people.

That's not gonna work either. We're told that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands were killed by the atom bombs in Japan. It would appear that atom bombs DO kill people.


Conclusion: Unless one is gonna distort the English language beyond recognition to serve their own bellicose ends, it is a fact that tsunamis and typhoons kill people, it is a fact that tortoises kill people (ask Aeschylus), it is a fact that atom bombs kill people, and it is a fact that guns kill people.


The alternative is to say: "Guns don't kill people . . . and neither do tsunamis and atom bombs".

But people might laugh if you said that.




For the linguists out there, you might find it interesting that the English "kill" is standardly rendered into Mandarin as "sha" (殺).

The Chinese recognize a distinction that we English speakers do not, however: "Sha" applies only to "agent" (i.e., having a mind) killing. That is to say, you can be sha-ed by a homicidal maniac, you can be sha-ed by a hungry tiger even, but "He was sha-ed by a typhoon (他被颱風殺了)" makes no sense in Chinese.

So, in Chinese, it makes perfect sense to say "Guns don't sha people; people sha people".

In English it does not.
(Edited by AchillesSinatra)
3 years ago Report
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AchillesSinatra
AchillesSinatra: P.S.


Gosh, for years it has been bugging me that when people said "Guns don't kill people; people do" I smelt a rat, but couldn't quite put my finger on what was fishy about it.

Call it a Eureka moment

A bit like Bertrand Russell said of the so-called "ontological argument" for God's existence: "It's obviously specious, but it's very hard to say exactly WHERE it fails"
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