The Intent of a Gun is to Destroy

'Tis the season for arguing about guns, apparently, because some homicidal maniac decided to make it so.

One of the many, many arguments against meaningful gun control that really pisses me off is the idea that other things beside guns also kill people. This can take the form of, as in the really bizarre Fox News segment a few days ago that was featured, and annihilated, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, coming up with all the other creative ways that someone who committed murder with a gun could've committed the same murder without a gun.* Or it can involve the simple observation that most people don't die from being shot with a gun, and not even most people who die the kind of death where you suffer some kind of violent physical trauma are killed with guns. Cars, for instance, kill lots of people, and knives can be very effective as an alternate means of murdering someone. But you don't see anyone proposing to ban cars or knives, do you?

This argument entirely misses what I would call the intentions of an object. The intention of a car, for instance, is to transport a person over a moderate distance at a moderately high speed. That's why cars exist, it's what they're meant to do. In the course of being used to do the thing they're intended to do, when they're used wrong, people sometimes get killed, but killing is not the intention. Likewise with, say, heavy-duty kitchen knives: their intention is to cut cooking ingredients. They can be used in a non-intended way, to cut living human flesh, but again, killing is not the intention of the object. To kill someone with a knife, a human needs to add intent to kill. For a car to kill someone, a human needs to use it wrongly, though not necessarily with any ill intent.

Now, admittedly, one might protest my fairly obvious next point by saying that the intention of a gun is not to kill either. Setting this question as phrased aside for the moment, I will simply assert that the intention of a gun is destruction. Knives and cars and baseball bats and airplanes, though they can all be turned into highly effective weapons, are first and foremost designed for creative uses: cooking and driving and playing and flying. There is, on the other hand, nothing creative that a gun wants to be used for. You can use a gun in a work of art, I suppose, but people don't make guns to make art with them. They make guns to efficiently destroy things. The intended target might be a piece of marked paper on a wall, or a helpless defensive animal in the woods, or a tyrannical Brit (think 1770s), or a home invader bent on rape and pillage, and these acts of destruction we might want to condone. Well, some of us might, anyway. But the simple fact remains that all a gun wants to do is destroy stuff. Guns will sometimes just kill people because they feel like killing people, as when they misfire during cleaning or whatever. A society with a lot of guns in it is a society filled with tiny little objects filled with malice for whatever lies in their sights, and no wish other than to destroy.

Not only does this make guns an inherently violent object in a way that baseball bats or cars or even knives are not, it speaks to the logic of eradicating them. What do we lose if we get rid of guns? We lose nothing creative, for guns are not creative objects. If we eradicate knives, we lose the ability to prepare food efficiently, and to open packages. If we eradicate cars, we lose the ability to transport people efficiently throughout society. If we eradicate guns? I contend that we lose nothing of value, nothing except destruction. As a society we must eternally struggle with the fact that knives and cars and baseball bats can become instruments of destruction, for we have substantial reason to desire the continued existence of these things. There is, however, no logic telling us that we must struggle with the innate desire of firearms to become instruments of destruction. We have simply chosen to tolerate it, because some of us enjoy destroying the right kind of thing.



*If you haven't seen this, it really must be seen to be believed. The anchor describes in a fair amount of gruesome detail all the ways that the football player who recently committed a murder-suicide could've killed his girlfriend. The way she put it made it feel alarmingly like she was suggesting it would've been reasonable for him to strangle her, or asphyxiate her with car fumes in a garage, or whatever, if he couldn't get a gun to do it with.