Guns

"Guns" is the title of an instrumental musical piece by Harry Gregson-Williams from the soundtrack of the 2003 action film The Rundown, or Welcome to the Jungle. It plays late in the film when bounty hunter Beck (Dwayne Johnson), who had been afraid to use firearms for reasons that the film doesn't explain well, finally decides to use firearms when threatened by firearm-using villains. The piece's popularity was renewed when the "Nintendo On" hoax video used it as its background music.

But this page isn't about the song; it's about firearms, crossbows, and other projectile weapons.

Guns don't kill people
Gun control is a term used for state opposition to the private possession and use of firearms, especially by its proponents. Advocates of firearm bans explain their position because firearms are used to kill people. On the other hand, advocates of responsible firearm use believe that this sort of gun control misses the mark as a solution to the problem of violent crime. The pro-firearm crowd has several parody slogans used to demonstrate how misaimed they think gun control is:


 * Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
 * The implication is "don't ban guns; ban people instead." For one thing, banning all people is obviously impossible, except for certain fringe movements. For another, we already banish people convicted of gun crime to prison. So firearm opponents concentrate on preventing the crime from happening in the first place by eliminating the weapon. They reason that the fact that people are wicked shouldn't be an excuse to give people instruments of killing.


 * Guns don't kill people; bullets kill people.
 * The firearm doesn't break the body; the projectile does. (An exception in fiction is a tossed gun.) But banning ammunition is no better or worse than banning firearms. In fact, there exists non-lethal ammunition designed to incapacitate rather than kill.


 * Guns don't kill people; this gun kills animals.
 * A lot of firearm opponents put up a straw man that "killing" is the only use of a gun. They either ignore hunting or deliberately group it with other uses that promote "killing". Jews and Christians believe that through Noah, God gave humans dominion over the animals, including slaughtering them and eating their flesh as meat (Genesis 9:3), and hunting may help explain the longstanding alliance between U.S. firearm advocates and the religious right wing.


 * Guns don't kill people; knives kill people.
 * People who want to commit violent crime will improvise a weapon out of something nearby, even something commonly found in a normal household such as a carving knife. The martial art of Okinawan kobudō, practiced by three of the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, uses modified versions of ordinary household implements as weapons for self-defense.


 * Guns don't kill people; blood loss kills people.
 * The way to "ban blood loss" is to treat the wound. Often but not always, the same political party supports gun control and universal health care.


 * Guns don't kill people; doctors kill people.
 * Firearms were used in about 12,600 homicides in the United States in 2007. Medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 or possibly even more. [unreliable source] Advocates of responsible firearm use conclude based on Amdahl's law that governments ought to use resources on serious medical errors before firearms.


 * Guns don't kill people; idiots kill people.
 * There are two ways we can treat this. The first is to acknowledge that idiots will always exist and outlaw firearms, but then only outlaws will have firearms. The other is to educate the public through gun safety campaigns. To firearm advocates, gun control means hitting your target, the whole target, and nothing but the target. Along the same lines are people with untreated mental illness. Lack of social mental health care has been implicated as one of the causes behind the Sandy Hook massacre of December 2012.


 * Guns don't kill people; I kill people.
 * Obviously, a state wants to maintain its monopoly on violence. But the failure of representative government over the past centuries has occasionally resulted in violent revolution. In fact, because the United States is the result of such a revolution in the 1770s, it has carved out an exception for the militia. Firearm advocates and firearm opponents disagree on what the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution means by "a well-regulated militia": advocates support private clubs that train together, while opponents interpret "militia" as a state-regulated body such as the National Guard of the United States.