Do guns really kill people?

Doctors who head a leading medical journal wrote something earlier this month that grabbed my attention. “Guns kill people,” Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a team of other doctors wrote in an online editorial Oct. 9. “More background checks; more hotel, school and venue security; more restrictions on the number and types of guns that individuals can own; and development of ‘smart guns’ may help decrease firearm violence. “But the key to reducing firearm deaths in the United States is to understand and reduce exposure to the cause, just like in any epidemic, and in this case that is guns.”

The editorial, “Death by gun violence — a public health crisis,” comes after a gunman sprayed a crowd at a Las Vegas concert with bullets, leaving 58 people dead and hundreds wounded.

“The solution lies in not just focusing on Las Vegas and the hundreds of other mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the last 14 months, but rather to underscore that on average almost 100 people die each day in the United States from gun violence,” the editorial states, citing numerous studies as evidence. “Guns do not make individuals, their families or homes safer, and they result in far more deaths to loved ones than to an intruder intending to cause harm.” A wire service story about the editorial, which I posted to The Courier and Daily Comet’s Facebook pages, sparked more than 50 comments, most panning the doctor’s opinion. Several posts resorted to the well-worn phrase, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” I’ve never found that cliché convincing, and it is even less so contrasted against the doctors’ reasoned call for tougher gun restrictions and greater involvement of the medical profession in reducing shooting deaths.

Using the same logic, you could argue that tanks don’t kill people, people do. Sarin doesn’t kill people, people do. Nuclear bombs don’t kill people, people do.

If those statements sound absurd, it is because they are. One of the biggest problems with the “Guns don’t kill people” phrase is that it lacks a conclusion, David Kyle Johnson, an associate professor of philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, wrote in a 2103 essay for Psychology Today. Since the argument is usually given in the context of a discussion about gun regulation, by gun advocates, I assume the conclusion has something to do with that,” Johnson writes. “But what exactly? That there should be no gun regulation at all? That there should not be more gun regulation than there is? That the increase in mass killings done with guns is irrelevant to whether or not there should be gun regulations? Who knows? And an argument without an obvious conclusion is hardly an argument at all.”

Johnson makes no judgment about gun control. His focus is solely on the logic — or lack of logic — in the “Guns don’t kill people” statement. Sure, people are the “ultimate” cause of murder. But, he adds, simply deciding to murder won’t itself result in a death. Executive Editor Keith Magill can be reached at 857-2201 or keith.magill@houmatoday.com