People kill people...
except, they don't. Not normally. I was brought up in a town of 50,000 people, on the West coast of Scotland. My childhood and teenage years were the 50s and 60s. Our parents had lived through the horrors of the 2nd World War. Now, they were living through the peacetime hardships of shortages and rationing. But of one thing they were certain: the killing had been an aberration; normality had returned, where people live in peace. Where people don't kill people. Where people don't need guns.
On cue, within minutes of every new firearm atrocity, the tired old gun lobbyists (hereinafter, the Globbies, ok?) crawl out of the woodwork with their tired old incantation – Guns don't kill people... People kill people, and every time I shake my head and think – not in my World, they don't. And before any Globby tells me that small-town Scotland is a very sheltered corner of the planet – check my Profile page for where I've lived and worked since leaving there. I still say, fifty years later – not in my World, they don't.
Guns don't kill People... Bullets kill people
It's a truism that without ammunition a gun is a pretty useless weapon. It could serve as a bludgeon of sorts, but the balance is all wrong, It would be no match for a baseball bat, far less a machete. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Let's step back and quietly consider some aspects of violence.
For one adult to kill another in unarmed combat, assuming both are in reasonable health and physical condition, is actually no mean feat. It requires either great effort and determination, or considerable knowledge and technique. Or, just conceivably, diabolical 'luck'. It also requires an absolute awareness and total involvement with what you are doing, something the vast majority of people would pull back from, in total revulsion at the enormity of the act, and its consequences.
Bring a knife into the equation and everything changes. We are all capable of lashing out in anger and, with a knife in hand, a single strike can be fatal (though usually it is not). But again, let's step back, to small-town Scotland and the day one lad brought a flick-knife to school.
He had no intention of using it, of course. He just wanted his moment of glory impressing his friends or maybe frightening a few juniors. Inevitably, he was uncovered and the knife confiscated. On the following morning the Headmaster addressed the school: Unable to make an impression on his fellows on equal terms, the culprit had sought an unfair advantage. In trying to command fear in others, he had merely betrayed his own fear. In trying to be the bully he was not physically cut out to be, he had shown himself to be – a coward. The psychology was exactly right. No-one ever again brought a knife to school.
The Headmaster was right. A knife is a coward's weapon. Yet, while it gives an unfair advantage, it still requires a degree of closeness to, and interaction with, the victim. A quick and lethal thrust does not compare with the white-knuckled sweaty intensity of wringing out a life, bare hands around the throat, and yet... A knife will still transmit its passage back from blade to haft to hand. You will feel the changes from cloth to soft tissue, to muscle wall, to vital organ. The scrape of steel on bone. You will know what you have done and most of us could not do it, or live with it afterwards. Quite literally, you will have blood on your hands.
At best, then, the knife is a half-way house. The true coward's weapon would further reduce the involvement between killer and victim. This is where the gun comes in. The gun, or at least its bullet, kills at a distance. There is no need for the killer to feel any involvement whatsoever with the victim. You point, s/he dies. It feels no different from shooting at a target. Easier still is the semi-automatic weapon where you don't even need to know who or how many have died. Isn't this the very epitome of cowardice?
Guns don't kill people... Cowards kill people
What we've seen thus far is a progression, from unarmed equals, to knife-wielding wimps, to gun-toting cowards, to the craven cowards with semi-automatic weapons. Is this the limit of inhumanity? Sadly no, it is not. Crasser still are those who kill by proxy, who pay others to do their dirty work. Those who profit from the manufacture and sale of weapons. Those who foment conflicts and wars to advance such sales and maximise their personal fortunes.
As it is simply distasteful to dwell too long among such miserable specimens, let's look instead at the opposite end of this continuum to see what manner of people can be found there. These are the people who never pull a gun or draw a knife. Who rarely if ever raise a fist. Who will argue and agree to differ. Who will walk away and get on with their lives. Some are quite famous: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus of Nazareth. Most are relative unknowns on the World stage: me, my friends and work colleagues, the grocer on the corner, his wife and kids. Most folk, in fact - the people who don't kill people.
Thank you for reading.
