Is 'guns don't kill people, people kill people' a good argument?

Question

I'm hearing the argument X doesn't do Y, people do Y in quite a few guises. For instance, in its original form:

Guns don't kill people; people kill people.

Presumably, therefore, guns are OK.

Cars don't kill people; people kill people.

Again, the inference is that fast cars are OK.

And more recently on BBC business news:

Securitising debt doesn't destablise financial institutions; people destablise financial institutions

Again leading implicitly to ... these kind of financial instruments are perfectly fine so lets start using them again.

Instinctively these kind of arguments feel invalid. Can anyone perhaps use some more rigorous or formal type (logical?) analysis to demonstrate their validity/invalidity. Is that even possible?

What I am interested in is an analysis of this particular form of argument using the tools of philosophy. When it was just used by the gun lobby it just seemed like a rhetorical tool. But it's now bleeding over to other areas so I'm interested in the form of that argument and it's validity. It's almost incidental that it's gun control. As an aside there is a really good podcast about the philosophy of gun control if anyone is interested in those particular issues.

Answer 1

This line of argument is basically a strawman fallacy, which is when you construct a weaker version of your opponent's argument in order to then disprove it. In this case the weaker argument is that "guns kill people" all by themselves. No one actually believes that or argues that. Even the most committed gun control advocate acknowledges that firing a gun takes human intervention. The stronger argument being concealed by the strawman is "people with guns kill more people than do people without guns."

It's also a black or white fallacy in that it is an attempt to frame the debate as two mutually exclusive choices, when other options may exist. You'll often find these two fallacies together, where the debater creates an artificially weak version of your position, and then tries to frame it as the only alternative to his or her position.

IMPORTANT: The fact that this particular argument is fallacious does not mean we can therefore be justified in rejecting the conclusion the argument is intended to support (that in itself would be an argument from fallacy error), it just means we cannot take the argument as providing any actual support for the conclusion.

Answer 2

To complement Chris' answer I'll try to deconstruct some of the reasoning in the arguments a bit.

Suppose we claim that "guns don't kill people; people kill people." The only reasonable way to parse this into a slightly more formal statement is:

Guns are not responsible for killing people; people are responsible for killing people.

I can think of perhaps one other way to interpret the sentence, which would be:

Guns do not cause people to die; people cause people to die.

But this second formulation is patently false - if people cause people to die [using guns] (which they do), then the guns they use cause people to die via bullets, which cause people to die via massive brain damage/haemorrhaging/etc. The only way we can claim that people cause other people to die without granting that guns cause other people to die is by rejecting transitivity of causation: that "A causes B" and "B causes C" does not imply "A causes C." Certainly there are some philosophers (especially within the free will debate, e.g. Carolina Sartorio) who reject transitivity, but definitely not within this context.

Here, the only way the second statement can be true is if "PEOPLE cause GUNS" and "GUNS cause BULLETS" and "BULLETS cause DEATH" (some details left out, obviously), and from this we conclude "PEOPLE cause DEATH" but not "GUNS cause DEATH." This is a very strange thing to do - the only way we could conclude that people cause death is if we trace the process of causation through guns. Then we'd be forced to agree that guns, too, cause death. The only way out of this is some extremely arbitrary rule somehow excluding guns from being a cause of death while still being used to prove that humans cause death.

Note that it is not a valid response to leave guns out of the causal chain altogether - it is undeniable that guns cause bullets to fly into living bodies and turn them into corpses.

Thus we must return to the first interpretation, one of responsibility or agency. Simply, the argument is that guns don't kill people because they are not agents which can be held responsible for their actions. One does not charge a pistol with murder; one charges the human who used it to commit the homicide.

This is a fair enough claim, but as Chris points out it is fallacious in being used to arrive at any sort of conclusion. It indeed constructs a strawman which claims those in favour of gun control somehow hold guns responsible for murder. Of course this is not in general true - if one uses firearms murder statistics as evidence in favour of gun control, they are roughly making the claim that the humans responsible for murder have access to weapons that can easily cause death. Then, by the only reasonable reading, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is technically true but wholly irrelevant to the argument being made by gun control advocates.

Answer 3

"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is not an argument, it's a slogan. It may be the case that this slogan is just a way to get people to discuss the role of individual responsibility in what policies the government ought to adopt with respect to guns or something like that. Or perhaps it is just a signal that a person has some particular position that can be described in more detail if others are interested. I think interpreting it as an argument in its own right is not a good idea.

Answer 4

This is a black-or-white fallacy. While logically it checks out as true and is difficult to disagree with in real-time discussion; the intention is to frame the argument using an oversimplification of the context, and to the exclusion of other options. Such as excluding middle cases or alternatives.

Also called false dilemma, fallacy of false alternative or excluded middle.

Of course in this case, you could come back with:

"People with guns kill more people using guns than do people without guns."

... Until you see a chart like the one below.

Ultimately, the data wins.

References:

1. The black-or-white fallacy
2. Description of like fallacies on wikipedia

Answer 5

I think you can view the "X doesn't do A; Y does A" formulation as either

(a) a response to an equivocation meant to elucidate it

OR

(b) an equivocation itself

Working with the classic "guns don't kill people; people kill people", we can parse this into slightly more helpful language:

Guns don't cause people to die; people cause people to die.

In this formulation, there should be an obvious equivocation. On the one hand, guns most surely are the means through which some people do die. On the other hand, guns definitely do not have intention. The solution is that there are multiple types of causes (here I'm echoing Aristotle). There are on his view material causes, efficient causes, formal causes, and final causes.

Aristotle defined the material cause as the matter through which something is effected, i.e. its the bullet going through someone's body that kills them.

The efficient cause is the agent that intends the effect. This is the intentional shooter.

The formal cause is the essence that maintains a thing as what it is (not applicable here).

The final cause is the goal towards which the action was done. The agent wanted to kill someone because they were cheating on him.

Returning to the modified quotation,

Guns are not material causes; people are FALSE (in the case that matters)

Guns are not efficient causes; people are TRUE

Guns are not final causes; people's intentions are TRUE

I take it that the point of the original statement is to deny that guns are involved in the reasons (final causes) that people die. This, however, might be non-responsive to the real claim being suggested by advocates of gun control. Gun control advocates may be making the claim instead that (1) guns can function as material means of killing = "guns kill people", (2) removing guns as a material means will make it harder to kill, therefore we should removes guns because "guns kill people."

But I'm not really sure who is committing the equivocation. I say that because the real argument of the gun control advocate is really that we need to remove things that make the material means of killing easier -- at which point their claim is only incidentally about guns. (Do they also want to ban knives? bleach? air compressors? cars? space heaters?)

Conversely, gun freedom advocates are emphasizing a model of agency -- that what we should concern ourselves with is that people are the efficient causes and have the final causes. And that eliminating one means for them to kill does not necessarily remove their ability to kill. It's a classic liberal position in relation to negative freedoms.

Answer 6

To quote Eddy Izzard: Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. The whole thing is a sophistry: A clever but wrong argument with the intent of deceiving people.

First, it is a fact that guns do kill people. Just like leaking gas pipes, badly working brakes and so on kill people, so do guns kill people. Not very often, but often enough to make the statement "guns don't kill people" wrong. If we add cases where clumsy people with no intent of using a gun kill or hurt themselves or others by accident, that number is a lot higher. We can debate whether a gun that goes off while it is being cleaned counts as "guns kill people" or "people kill people".

Second, it is much harder for people without guns to kill people. It is not impossible, but it is easy and requires no preparation to kill someone with a gun, while most other weapons make it a lot harder. Just try hiding on top of a view tower with a hammer in your hand or a bottle of poison and start killing people. It doesn't work. With a gun, it is a lot easier.

So I change the argument to the much more correct:

Guns rarely kill people, but people with guns do quite often, and people with guns find it much easier to kill people than people without guns.

Answer 7

The argument is valid. The 'gun' is only a tool. Granted it's a tool for destroying things. And it's a common/popular tool for hurting/killing people (having been promoted by the videogame and film industries). But if you remove accessibility to that specific tool, people who want to hurt/kill people will find another tool. Maybe a more powerful one.

Answer 8

When used in the argument in favor of gun control, the argument divides the world in a very black and white scenario: either a gun kills someone, or a person kills someone, with no gray scenarios in between. Any real life situation is not black and white, it's a complex situation full of preconditions and probabilities.

So for the argument to be used in the situation of gun control, we'd need to know what is more dangerous overall: 1) a world with guns 2) a world without guns and of course, this is also a black and white scenario, but we'd have to view these as two ends of a spectrum of gun control (no control vs absolute control).

Then we would have to decide whether it is easier in general to kill with the aid of a gun, or without the aid of a gun. We would have to oppose that also to using another inanimate aid regularly available. E.g. if it is equally easy to kill someone with a hammer, then hammers could be equated with guns, and they should follow all the same rules.

Put in a formula we would calculate P(fatalities) = P(availability) * P(effectiveness) * P(motive)

This could be done for any object, whether inanimate or animate. Of course objects don't have motive, but we could say that a tsunami e.g. has 100% motive to kill you, since it is aimed at you and cannot be stopped or avoided easily. It is also very effective, but luckily not very available.

I think the biggest flaw is the implied 'person without a gun'. Since we're used to saying something like this in an 'exclusive or' context, e.g. "I am not blind, I am deaf". In that sentence you're implicitly saying that blind people cannot be deaf. So it can be rephrased as A)"guns don't kill people, people without guns kill people". Unless it is meant as B) "guns don't kill people, people kill people with the use of guns". So the first thing in the argument is to ask the person which version they mean to communicate.

To refute: A) prove that it's easier to kill people with the use of a gun than a non-regulated item, such as a hammer B) guns are still part of both equations, so by taking out guns we take out the loss of lives. Think about gun accidents, where people clean their gun and it accidentally kills their wife. Or a child playing with a gun, and it accidentally goes off. Or a bullet ricochets and hits an innocent bystander. So in all those cases, it wasn't the intention of the person to kill, but it still happened because of the existence of guns.

To just take it one step further, and go completely reductio ad absurdum: if people kill people, then we should initiate people control instead of gun control in order to prevent killing. I think that's way more scary!!!

Answer 9

A proper argument includes premises and a conclusion. Claims of the indicated form may be legitimate parts of a larger argument, most notably an argument that proposed regulations are poorly targeted at the problem they are supposedly intended to "solve", but does not really constitute an "argument" in and of itself. Arguments involving the use of such claims have varying degrees of validity, depending upon the causal relationships among the subjects of the claim and the regulations at issue. In most cases, a proper argument would require a claim with somewhat more detail than will fit into a soundbite, but the lack of such detail in the soundbite doesn't really mean anything. To really determine the validity of an argument, one must examine the argument itself, rather than just the "soundbite" version.

Answer 10

If this was a legitimate argument, it would hold true even if 'guns' were replaced with a more virulent form of killing tool like 'cruise missile' or 'nuke'. Why do we bother trying to keep these 'weapons of mass destruction' out of the hands of the general public if it's only people that kill people not the weapons?

If drones with lethal attack capability enter the market in the same way as guns have (it's unlikely), you will probably see an increase in that type of death as it makes it that much easier to kill someone if you don't even have to put yourself at risk.

Yes, people kill people, with the most effective weapon to hand.

Answer 11

I think the argument is invalid because you could (and should) add "with guns":

guns don't kill people; people with guns kill people

So here the conclusion would be to restrict guns heavily as they are heavily restricted already in most Western countries.

Answer 12

Guns do not kill people insofar as they act alone. An action (typically an operator) is required. Bullets do not kill people either, they just sit there like stones.

Analysis, or breaking down all the parts and taking a view of them individually, is how I reached this conclusion.

Is "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" a good argument. Yes, insofar as good means efficacy.

Answer 13

The arguments are valid, however there is some instrumentation in their use in order to divert attention and to blur the issue.

The problem comes down to a matter of intentionality.

Consider the following arguments:
1) X not <action> Y <action> Y
and
2) X not <action> Z, Y <action> Z

From the logical point of view they are valid, but from the point of view of the pretense of its use, we can say two things:

- Pretend to remove X as a cause 
- Pretend to assign Y as the cause 

To counterbalance the arguments one might say:
The fact that "X not <action> Y", does not exempt X as indirect cause of "<action> Y" or "<action> Z" and therefore does not invalidate a reflection on the use that Y makes of X.

In conclusion: It is not the logic of the arguments that makes feel them as not valid, but is the use people make of the arguments which can vitiate them.

Answer 14

Right, lets do some arguing.

X doesn't do Y people do Y

On the face of it, it does seem silly; there is something of an implication here that only people act, and everything else is static. That is obviously not true.

However, the initial statement is the 'soundbite'-form. What is really being said is:

X will not do Y to an individual without the involvement of some external person(s).

This is the form that is at the heart of the argument. And the test for its validity is will X do Y to an individual if someone external is not involved beyond setting up initial conditions.

For many inanimate objects, this is certainly true; a gun by itself will not act upon anyone, for example. Neither will chairs, knifes, beach balls, etc. In order for these objects to do anything something else must initiate the action, and the most common culprit are other people.

For animate objects, this could be false. A speeding car or a crashing wave both have the potential to do things to someone even with (maybe even especially with, in the case of a car) no one else involved.

At this point, I will acknowledge that there is some give in the 'initial condition' statement. A car at rest is an inanimate object and not likely to leap out an hurt someone, and a bullet fired from a gun has become an animate object and increadibly dangerous without anyone's intervention.

For institutiona practices and company policies, it is litterally imposible to remove the people from equation in the first place. This becomes the strawman arguement because policies without people cannot posibily be dangerous. But, policies always involve people. Someone has to implement the policies, after all.

Bottom line is that this is a bit more case-by-case than Chris or Commando have asserted. When making the argument or the counter-argument you have to have a very go idea of what the X is, how X can do Y, and whether or not X needs someone else to do Y.

Answer 15

I don't think so.

When Chinese first discovered gunpowder, they used it for centuries only in the production of fireworks. Weapons needed skill to be used, and this alone probably avoided major violence.

With fire guns, any stupid ass can kill a honourable master easily. Consider the number of murders is a formula such as

n = k*p1*p2

being

p1 the probability that someone wants to kill somebody else p2 the probability that the person in p1 finds a weapon lethal enough (i.e. that may be used with success) k some constant

What your "argument" says is that only p1 matters. But of course the number of fire guns is directly related with p2, thus with the number of deaths.

Answer 16

A "bucket brigade," or "human chain," involves a line of people where items are passed from one person to the next. For example, passing buckets of water to a house on fire.

If you broke the chain of people, input would not arrive at the output.

Two things must both happen for a person to commit murder using a gun: - The person must have access to a gun - The person must want to commit murder

You can prevent murder by gunshot by removing either component.

• If guns are made to be extremely rare, then murder by gunshot will be rarer than if guns are extremely common
• If you convince people to never commit murder, then even if everyone carries a gun at all times, murder by gunshot will not occur.

The problem with the saying, "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is that it fixates on only one element of the bucket brigade. The reality is that you could remove either element of the bucket brigade, and the chain would be broken. You can attempt to remove the guns, or you can attempt remove a person's desire to kill another person.

Where I work for living, there is a drop-off location for dirty cotton gloves. The dirty-glove has a black plastic trash bag in it and it looks like a trash can. There is a sign saying "cotton gloves only," but the sign is difficult to read. Employees often put plastic trash in the dirty-glove-bin. We ear both plastic gloves and cloth gloves, and the glove-bin often contains as much trash as actual washable gloves. Different employees spend a lot of time removing all of the trash before putting the gloves into a washing machine. If employees did not put trash in the bin, then the gloves could go straight into the washing machine without someone spending the time to first remove all of the trash.

The following arguments both fixate too much on one component instead of the system as a whole:

• It is the employee's fault that the glove bin is always full of trash!
• It is the management's fault that the glove bin is always full of trash! They should not line the glove-bin with a black trash bag! Why don't they buy a bin that looks really different from a trash can? Also, they should put up a sign-up with bigger text, and in more than one language!

Whenever people talk about whose "fault" some outcome is, people almost always note that the removal of event X would result in a better outcome. Usually, it is plausible that if X did not happen first, then the bad thing would not have resulted. If event X did happen, but event Y did not, then the bad thing would not have resulted either. You can break the bucket brigade chain-of-causation at any link in the chain. There is not one unique chain link.

As another example, I was recently angry at myself, because I wanted a case to protect my cellphone, but I waited too long to buy one. My phone screen got scratched in the interim. I ordered a case on Amazon, but the order was canceled when I canceled my debit card. I thought something like, "If only I had not canceled my debit card, I would have a phone case by now!" However, even if I had not canceled my debit card, I still could have gotten a phone case earlier. I could have bought a cellphone case when I got the phone, but I decided not to buy one, because the in-person store charged many times what internet vendors charge for cases. If you do badly in chess, it makes no sense to fixate on one bad move. The reality is that 100s of things could be imagined differently. If your opponent had not made an even earlier mistake, you might have lost long before you arrived at your "bad move."

You can reduce the number of murders in this world by eliminating 1 of 2 factors:

1. reducing people's access to firearms
2. reducing people's desire to kill each-other.

Note that it is not the case that if no gun were available, a person would always commit the murder by another means. Knives, for example, involve a context of physical strength. If you increase how risky a stock is, while holding potential benefit constant, some people will still buy the stock, but fewer will buy it than before. If you shrink the set of options for how people commit murder, murder will still occur, though not as often as before.

Suppose there was a magic substance which killed dandelions, only dandelions, and had no environmental impact, etc... If you sprayed it on your lawn, would there still be weeds? Yes, there might still be Russian thistles, crab grass, purse-lane, bindweed (morning glory).

It is up to you to decide how many resources to invest in each bucket brigade link. For example, you could try putting 10% of your effort into reducing access to firearms and 90% into making people not want to kill each-other, or vis versa. What strategy is most effective, making guns more difficult to come by, or persuading people not to kill each-other?

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a very stupid way of viewing the issue. I am not saying that allowing people to have guns is stupid, only that this specfic justification for why guns should be available, is downright dumb. The saying "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" asserts that if you remove people's desire to commit murder, it would not matter how many guns they had. We could all be carrying guns by the armful, and no firearm-related homicide would occur. That is technically true, but not useful.

Answer 17

X does not kill people XY kills people. For example, Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people. We have mass killings in the UK, usually not employing guns. Someone can kill many more people with a gun than with a knife. How many people can someone kill with their bare hands, feet, jaws...? Btw, far more people are killed by nations and other groups than individuals. An individual human being without weapons is easily subdued by a group.

Answer 18

It's not a good argument.

The percentage of "people kill people" that include guns, is 81%. Four out of 5 murders are by gunshot.

People with guns, kill 400% more people than people without guns.

That's the missing information that makes the original argument poor one.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/