I agree: guns don’t kill people
I reeled with horror when I heard about the recent gun massacre in the USA. Twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, when Adam Lanza burst into the school and opened fire in two first grade classrooms.
This is the latest in a string of gun related massacres in the USA this year – the Clackamas Town Centre shooting, the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting and the Aurora shooting in a cinema. Yet, it is this latest massacre which has prompted many searching questions into gun control in the USA.
Many are now looking at the statistics related to gun crime in the US. The US has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world and the highest firearm homicide rate in the developed world. In fact the firearm homicide rate in the US was 5.5 times higher than Italy, the next highest. In 2000 there were a total of 10,801 firearm homicides in the USA, compared with only 1,260 in the European Union (with a larger population). Click here for more data.
Yet, the gun lobby have consistently resisted changes to toughen gun laws (though there may be some weakening of that resolve by some now). An argument often used by the pro-gun lobby is that guns don’t kill people - people kill people.
This argument is actually correct. A gun requires a user to intentionally (or unintentionally) murder someone. I heard the same argument in my days in insurance about the perceived insurance risk of high performance vehicles: cars don’t crash, drivers crash. The rationale being that if we insure the "good" drivers, then the perceived insurance risk of a Ferrari is little different to that of a Toyota Corolla.
I actually agree with this idea. It’s true that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. At one level this is quite plain and simple. Yet, this raises the question of the human condition. Can a human be trusted with guns? Can we trust the human heart enough with such potentially dangerous weapons?
The famous atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens was once asked the question, ‘Is man intrinsically good or bad?’ He responded emphatically, ‘Man is unquestionably evil’. This is an uncomfortable truth. But it’s a reality nonetheless. This is the problem with us all. We are selfish, lawless and ultimately evil. The Bible calls this condition, the human condition: sin.
Jeremiah 17:9, ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’
We are sinful people. And at our heart, we are also violent. Keith Ward in 'Is religion dangerous?' makes the observation that 'human history as a whole is a history of warfare and violence' (p67)
Guns don't kill people, people kill people - this is true. But how does this analysis change when we acknowledge that people are intrinsically evil and violent? Would this perhaps encourage greater care in who we allow weapons? If we allow easy access to high powered weapons, what would we expect, given the sinfulness of the human heart? We would expect gun massacres. The recent tragedies should not surprise us. I would also suggest that if nothing is done, they won't be the last.
As an insurance underwriter I came to the conclusion that I couldn't rate a Ferrari the same as a Corolla - they were inherently different regardless of who was behind the wheel. A Ferrari represented a different risk. Similarly I think we must treat guns with care. Yes, guns don't kill people, but underneath people are violent and sinful, thus we need to think very carefully about who gets access to guns.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-pile-of-empty-bullet-cartridge-cases-5202422/
