What kills people
The NRA gets mocked for the slogan, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” and while said organization would be attacked for whatever statements they might make, this one does deserve a certain measure of scrutiny. Of course, any pithy saying can get substituted for rational thought—see Robert Frost’s use of “good fences make good neighbors” as an example—but aphorisms when used rightly function as reminders of the many details that we should have worked through to comprehension. (As Twitter would do well to recall in regard to tweets of arithmetical questions, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally.) What, then, would be the instructive value of the NRA’s remark?
The saying is not necessarily original to the NRA, which should come to no one’s surprise, given the group’s willingness to blow in to any fight after the hard work is over and take credit for any successes. The Roman philosopher, Seneca the Younger, offers something similar in his “Letter LXXXVII: Some Arguments in Favor of the Simple Life”: “… a sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.” This gets bandied about in Internet discussions among the gun community, as if Nero’s sometime advisor and eventual victim were one of us, and I have to wonder if it would matter to those quoting him that the line in question comes from out of a consideration of the moral quality of wealth. More of the passage goes as follows:
“You are mistaken if you ascribe disadvantages to riches. Riches injure no one; it is a man's own folly, or his neighbor's wickedness, that harms him in each case, just as a sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer. Riches themselves do not harm you, just because it is on account of riches that you suffer harm."
The quotation marks here are to indicate Seneca’s speaking as an imagined Stoic, one whose point of view he treats as of doubtful value by the conclusion of his essay.
And this illustrates the difficulty that slogans pose for rational thinkers—and the danger of quote mining. Context will often entirely reframe the meaning, especially when what is cited was never meant to be used in later debates over other topics.
That caveat out of the way, however, it is possible to find some wisdom in analyzing the NRA’s slogan from a Greek philosopher who was as old to Seneca as Shakespeare is to us today, Aristotle. His statement of what have come to be known as the four causes provides us a means of understanding what, exactly, is going on in a shooting.
The four are the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. The material cause is the substance of the thing in question. Its formal cause would be its design or definition, what is it if we look it up in a reference book. An efficient cause is the motion put into the object—in modern terms, the act, the making or doing. And the final cause, called in fancy books the teleological, is the why of the thing, its intended purpose.
All right, then, consider a situation in which someone gets shot. There will be the shooter, barring extraordinary mechanical failures, and the victim—in some cases, the same person, in others not. A gun will fire a bullet that then penetrates someone’s body. How are we to work through the web of causation here?
The material causes involved are the subject of endless quibbling over bullet construction, powder charges, chrome lining of barrels, terminal ballistics in living bodies, and on and on. For purposes of moral accountability, we can let this one go.
The formal cause will elicit controversy on the question of what a gun is, as another slogan comes into play here, namely the notion held by many gun control advocates that guns are tools used to kill. At its base level, a gun is a device to contain the rapid burning of fuel that will propel a bullet down range. Aristotle’s clarity here helps us. Purpose is best dealt with in the discussion of the fourth cause.
The efficient cause in a shooting, assuming that everything is working as designed, is most immediately the squeezing of the trigger and the consequent working of the firing mechanism in the gun. That is of interest in cases of supposedly accidental shootings such as on a particular movie set of which I have nothing more to say. But investigators will also want to know the placement and actions of all participants, elements that are also efficient causes.
The moral question here will be the why of the event, what motivated the shooter to fire and what result was intended. This is the final cause or the final causes. Herein is found the NRA’s point that a killer will act to achieve a desired end regardless of the available tools. It is supposedly the intent alone that matters. At this point, the debate wanders off into claims and counterclaims about the effectiveness of preventing potential killers from obtaining particular tools as opposed to harsher penalties for wrongdoing—or, gasp, enacting progressive policies that make violence a less attractive solution—and we can cycle back through the causes to see if they offer any new insight.
It would probably be best to drop the slogan altogether and stick instead with a simple statement of facts, logic, and values. Anything that comes from—or passes through the marketing of—the NRA will be suspect to gun control advocates and to those who have little interest in firearms but are concerned over the number of people who get shot in America. Slogans motivate the already committed and browbeat those who must submit, but they do nothing to persuade free participants in policy debates.