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Zero; a firearm has neither agency nor volition. The question, in order to be sensible, would have to be one of how many people were killed, by other people, wh
by aaronem 13y ago
Zero; a firearm has neither agency nor volition. The question, in order to be sensible, would have to be one of how many people were killed, by other people, who used a firearm of Gospodin Kalashnikov's design to do so.
- enscr 13y agoThere we go again... Chicken or egg might be easier to resolve than guns vs people
- franklinho 13y agoChicken or the egg is quite easy to solve. It's the egg. "Since DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) can be modified only before birth, it can be argued that a mutation must have taken place at conception or within an egg such that a creature similar to a chicken, but not a chicken, laid the first chicken eggs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_or_the_egg
- JTon 13y agoWhile fascinating, I think you've taken the statement far too literally
- franklinho 13y agoTotally aware, but I can't resist when someone brings up this conundrum.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vacri 13y agoChicken or egg is easy to resolve: things were being born from eggs before chickens existed :)
- codex 13y agoA large boulder has no agency or volition, but landslides still kill people. Cause of death need not be singleton, either.
- aaronem 13y agoIn days gone by, such events were described as "acts of God"; today, they might be called the result of random chance, or of emergent behavior in a system seeking the lowest energy state available to it. Either way, they are not germane to the point under discussion here.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yawz 13y agoSo, in absolute, nothing is good or bad, until you decide how to use it. So nothing should be banned, illegal, etc. until somebody does something wrong it it. Then we can catch and charge that person. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me. You're not going to use a fire-arm to water your plants. You know its purpose when you see/buy/own one. Fair enough, one doesn't need a fire-arm to kill someone but making the killing much easier with a fire-arm cannot be considered innocent or neutral.
- saraid216 13y agoBut Super Soakers! AHAH!
- nether 13y agoWe settle by duel: you bring a person, I'll bring a gun.
- aaronem 13y agoYou will find, sir, that the challenged party is universally given the privilege of selecting the weapons to be used in a duel; otherwise, it would be far too simple to challenge someone to duel with a weapon with whose use you are supremely competent and he is entirely unacquainted, the result being no sort of contest at all but rather a sort of murder under color of long-cherished custom. Of course, yours isn't intended to be taken as a genuine challenge, but rather as some sort of rhetorical point. I fear, though, that said point entirely escapes me. You seem to be attempting to argue that a firearm makes a more effective weapon than a human carcass, a point on which I cannot imagine there is any controversy; I do not, though, see how that bears upon the statement that no weapon aims and fires itself, independent of human agency -- or do you contend that the AK-47, in addition to all its other fine qualities as a weapon, can do this as well?
- saraid216 13y agoLadies and gentlemen, the etiquette of murder.
- thenmar 13y agoOh come on, pull your head out of the sand. Guns are a complicated issue, and pretending it's this simple makes you sound like a caricature of an American conservative.
- aaronem 13y agoEven most automatic firearms are relatively simple, as machines go; what's complicated are the politics of the modern United States on the subject of this particular class of machine. Is it somehow "conservative" to say that I've never really understood why that should be? One person, who wishes badly enough to kill another, will invariably find some tool to use in the attempt, and firearms are far from the only tools which can be used to inflict lethal injury on a human being. There is no more inherent controversy in this statement than in the statement that, should you find yourself with a nail to drive and no hammer with which to do so, you'll find some other expedient and drive your nail with it -- perhaps you'll hit it with a crowbar, or half a brick, or so forth. Using a hammer is the easiest way to drive a nail, but the variety of means by which to do so is, if not necessarily infinite, then certainly bounded only by the limits of human ingenuity. If you wish nails not to be driven, why then does it make sense to ban hammers, rather than to place nail-driving beyond the pale of law -- and then enforce that law, as firmly as you find necessary to discourage whatever recalcitrance you encounter on the part of inveterate carpenters?
- thenmar 13y agoAre you really so lacking in perspective that you don't understand how guns lower the bar of "badly wishing to kill another" significantly?
- aaronem 13y agoWould that the human urge to kill were so tractable! I find your optimism refreshing.
- vacri 13y agoIt actually is that tractable. Plenty of murders are 'heat of the moment' things, where a lowered bar is significant. You seem intent on casting all gun violence as serenely premeditated. It very much isn't.
- rwissmann 13y agoYou are wrong. It is not even a question of perspective or moral position. For something to kill me that something does not need to have agency or volition, it simply has to cause my death. A volcano or an asteroid certainly have neither, and yet they are quite capable of killing. 'To be killed by something' can imply a relation of causality just as much (or more) than one of moral responsibility. Stop trying to distort the meaning of natural language to suit your specific political agenda.
- mseebach 13y agoYou are yourself partaking in distortion by downplaying the original question's implication of moral responsibility. Why does it matter how many death this particular design has caused, in particular in the context of its inventor dying, as opposed to the myriad of other gun designs, if not to imply moral responsibility?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mikecsh 13y agoThat's such a BS comment that gets trotted out every time something like this is discussed. It's meaningless. The invention of the AK47 and its ease of manufacture led to its proliferation which led to more people being able to kill than would otherwise have been possible. Don't wilfully ignore the underlying message by using bullshit quips.
- gaius 13y agoIn Rwanda they had AKs but the instrument of the massacres there was the humble machete.
- aaronem 13y agoObviously, had Rwanda's government banned machetes, those massacres would never have happened, or would at least have been much more limited in scope. (I always know better than to engage in snark. I hope you'll forgive me for not having been able to restrain myself this once.)
- xorgar831 13y agoDemonstration by Indiana Jones of how determination is really the only difference between the two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzcOCyHDqc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzcOCyHDqc
- aaronem 13y agoThis (the "no difference between AKs and machetes" stuff, which you seem to have edited out) would be a telling response, except that the Hutu had AKs; they did their killing with machetes not because machetes were all they had, but because machetes were what they preferred. Thank you, all the same, for helping me boil down this argument to its very bones. I'm talking about killing; y'all are talking about guns -- but there doesn't seem to be a general recognition of the distinction between the two. I've flailed in the direction of recognizing that distinction before, but thinking about your response was just what I needed to put my finger squarely on it. Thanks again! I greatly appreciate that.
- migrantgeek 13y agoSounds like a BS way to change the argument. I don't think the parent poster was suggesting that these guns somehow rose up and chased down another person to have them killed. We all understand people were the root cause. Guns don't cause violence but they definitely help. I've spent time in Iraq as a soldier and a contractor. I've personally used a blade and a firearm against another human being. As a civilian I own an assault rifle and a pistol because I am very confident in their abilities over knives and my hand to hand skills.
- aaronem 13y agoI do not wish to seem disrespectful or presumptuous in arguing with one who has so much more experience in these matters than I. But does it matter, to a dead man, precisely how his carcass came to be rendered inanimate? Does it matter to the man who killed him, beyond perhaps the degree of effort required, what sort of tool he used to do so?
- dclowd9901 13y agoI get you're being rhetorical, but your point deserves challenge, so I'll mutate it by raising the point that, for the question to be sensible, we must ask how many of those killed would not have been were it not for the robust, cheap, easily mass-produceable nature of the gun. We can assume these individuals would still have wanted to kill each other one way or another, but the availability of such a gun made it "more" feasible.
- aaronem 13y agoA potentially interesting counterfactual, to be sure. Can you define it closely enough to support further discussion? Given that the AK-47 has found its most extensive use in conflicts well below the level of open warfare between nations, and given further that the 20th century saw plenty of people killed with sticks, axes, machetes, or bare hands, merely to conserve ammunition in such conflicts where the AK-47 was available and indeed extensively used, I tend to consider that the null hypothesis involves all or most of those, who died with 7.62x39mm rounds in them, having otherwise still died by whatever means their killers found convenient. I grant that the absence of that particular weapon would have necessitated the use of others; I grant further that this difference, in the aggregate, might have affected the ultimate outcome in at least some cases; I do not grant, however, without compelling argument, that there would be a meaningful difference in the total number killed.
- dclowd9901 13y agoObviously when you get to this level, it becomes difficult to tease out variables, as now you're dealing with individual cases. By and large, you could draw comparisons between guns and other methods/means of killing: Gun advantages + Lets you kill from a safe distance + A lot of killing potential (potentially 1 death for every bullet) + Also useful for other methods of killing (you can certainly bludgeon someone to death with a gun just as easily as shoot them) + An individual can potentially kill many more people per unit of time through the use of tactical advantage (sniping, guerrilla warfare, etc.) All of these benefits are lost by having to use something more primitive, and all of them aide directly in the extermination of life. I think it's fair to say, at the least, that `gun` is far more potentially deadly than `!gun`. Let's say, for instance, I saw a caravan approaching. Four people, in close proximity to one another. If I was equipped with even a semi-automatic weapon, I might not chance a guerrilla encounter. Forget hand-to-hand combat. Four on one would almost certainly lead to my death. Encounter averted. Now let's say I'm equipped with an AK. Fully-automatic. At the very least, I can kill one immediately and then create chaos in the caravan by laying cover fire. If they are not similarly equipped, it would probably be a slaughter. Before dismissing this scenario as contrivance, consider that if we are to assess individual interactions with such a device, we have to consider what it would mean on the fringe cases. If avoidance of violence is the ultimate goal, which of these scenarios would get us closer to that goal?
- mikeash 13y agoApproximately nobody who reads "killed by an AK-47" understands this to mean anything besides "killed by a person firing an AK-47". And clearly you know what it means, as you proposed that exact interpretation in your comment. What's the point in arguing about it? It's an idiomatic phrasing that everybody understands.
- aaronem 13y agoI proposed no interpretation in my earlier comment; I identified the fallacy in the comment to which I responded, and restated the intended question in terms which made sense. "Killed by an AK-47" implies that, had the weapon been made unavailable beforehand, the killing would not have occurred. This has been tried many times in history. It has never worked. As I discuss in a comment elsewhere in this sub-thread, the range of human ingenuity is far too broad, and the human carcass is far too easily rendered inanimate, for the prohibition of one particular class of tools to bring about an end, or even a meaningful reduction, in killing. Banning firearms to save lives is precisely as absurd a proposition as banning hammers to prevent carpentry -- indeed, in a nation as historically awash with firearms as the United States, even more so.
- mikeash 13y ago"I proposed no interpretation...." "'Killed by an AK-47' implies that...." Do you seriously not see the contradiction here?
- aaronem 13y agoIndeed not; implication does not depend on interpretation; it seems to me that p => q implies !q => !p regardless of any opinion I might venture to hold on the subject. Perhaps I misunderstand. If so, perhaps you'll formalize the matter closely enough that I'm able to spot where I have gone wrong.
- mikeash 13y agoThis is not formal logic; it is human language. Deciding that a particular sequence of words implies something is interpretation. Yes, p => q implies !q => !p regardless of any opinion you hold. But you have decided that the original phrase means p => q, and that is interpretation. And one which is rather wrong, since everybody, including yourself, who reads the original phrasing will understand it differently.
- oijaf888 13y agoIf a stack of AK47's fell on someone and killed them, would you attribute that death to the AK47s?
- aaronem 13y agoOf course not; to do so would be foolish. The blame in that case would accrue either to the negligence of the person who stacked them, or, if they were blamelessly well stacked, to the carelessness of the person who brought them crashing down around his ears.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- IgorPartola 13y agoI cannot downvote you enough. This is a bullshit line of thought that detracts from the actual discussion. "Guns don't kill people... Toast toasts toast..." Please. Stop. We can discuss whether guns as a concept have a place in our society, but you spun up a discussion on semantics when none is warranted.
- aaronem 13y agoCan you downvote me more than once? If so, please feel free. A gun is a tool, not a concept. You seem no less inclined to argue semantics than I; the difference is that I don't consider a semantic argument, and a meaningful argument, mutually exclusive. Perhaps I'm wrong in that.
- IgorPartola 13y agoThe problem is that your initial comment is a rephrasing of an often repeated cliche that "guns don't kill people, people do". This then leads to a giant discussion of what is really meant by this. We start comparing guns to forks, saying that "forks can kill people! Should we outlaw forks?!" Someone then points out that forks have other uses, while guns have only one use. The problem is that a whole lot of breath is wasted on this straw man argument just to get to where we were before: that guns are a very effective tool for killing humans and nothing else. Personally, I am as you may have guessed for outlawing nearly all gun ownership. Outside of muzzle loaded hunting muskets nobody, not even the police should carry guns. The second amendment does not, as I read it, apply the way that the NRA interprets it, and even if it did, I would argue that it is in the 21st century a terrible idea. The original intent, defending against a tyrannical government, no longer applies as the government can now simply use a drone and a hellfire missile to take out any rebel force. And guns do more harm than good on US soil just as surely as CO2 does for global warming. I do not believe that any amount of education would prevent tragedies like Sandy Hook, and the NRA will not allow anyone to impose any type of compulsory background checks, etc. the solution it seems is to eliminate the single point of failure of this system: the guns. Australia did this and their mass shootings have decreased to zero or nearly zero since.
- curun1r 13y agoIf we presume that the AK-47 is a very well-designed firearm, and 50+ years of its use would seem to indicate that it is, then your response incorrectly presumes that the person who acted with volition would have been equally successful when using a firearm of an inferior design. A death that occurred solely because the weapon allowed a kill by an otherwise insufficiently-skilled marksman can be attributed to the gun rather than its firer. The number of deaths attributable to the AK-47 would then be the number of total people killed by people using AK-47s minus the number of people who would still have been killed with the best available alternative weapon. It's a much smaller number, but it's a positive number none the less.
- aaronem 13y agoYou place yourself in the position of attempting to quantify morality. I can only wish you the best of good fortune in so doing, and recommend that, should you succeed, you lose no time in applying for what would surely be a more thoroughly earned Nobel Peace Prize than any before or since.
- xorgar831 13y agoJust like napalm, mustard gas and nuclear weapons, yep, no volition there either. Just can't figure out why people misuses weapons to harm others... such a mystery.