It’s pointless Kaboodle. Gunz are teh evilz and they have no purpose other than to kill babies on their way to school.
No .22 was ever designed for any other purpose than to kill people!! MWA HA HA HA HAAA! As said, it takes a long, long time but that’s why they’re even more eviler than the high-powered sniper .223 AK47 automatic assault sub machine gun rifle.
I don’t think any Ruger civilian firearm was designed to kill people. But that doesn’t matter because they’re scary.
“Am I arguing semantics or making pointless distinctions?”
Absolutely. Guns are designed to kill people. People have been thinking about a creating ways of killing each other since day one.
They were designed to kill people, quickly and easily. Face it. Throughout time people have just invented other ways of using them.
Yes, however most weapons of war are not specifically designed to reliably wound or maim without killing.
The OP is arguing semantics, however I believe he is technically partially correct. But not for the reasons he states.
Military and police firearms (and their ammunition) are, in fact, designed to kill people. The caliber, muzzle velocities, weight and all the other engineering variables are choses with a specific purpose - to make the soldier armed with the weapon as efficient as possible in killing and wounding the enemy. A weapon like the M-16 or M4 series of riffles are designed to be as light as possible for the soldier carrying them. The ammunition is designed to be small with a high muzzle velocity so as many rounds as possible can be carried and yet each round is still as leathal as possible withing the typical engagement distances a soldier is likely to encounter (about 300m IIRC).
I should note that this is a departure from earlier Enfield and M14 battle rifles which were basically designed to fire a big heavy bullet that would take out a targer a mile away. Weapons designers specifically designed “assault rifles” (without getting into that debate, we are talking about specific military issued weapons like M16s, AK-47s and so on) based on the experiences soldiers had in combat with the earlier types of weapons.
Other weapons like hunting rifles, I would imagine, are designed to kill whatever game they were designed to hunt.
.22s I could argue aren’t specifically designed to kill. They are designed for target shooting. A typical .22 rimfire cartridge is not the most efficient ammunition for taking down a person.
In the end though, it is a semantic debate with no real purpose. A meat clever or a wood ax is not designed to kill as a Japanese katana, a Scottish claymore or a cavalry sabre is designed to kill. But it will lop off your head about just as nicely. I would recommend the same restrictions for someone wielding a cleaver or ax that you would apply to someone wielding a sword, unless you happened to be going to a kitchen or the woodpile to use those tools for their intended purposes.
So Kaboodle, you may not be using your vintage M1 Carbine or AR15 rifle for it’s designed purpose when you take it out target shooting and more than that scemitar above the fireplace is being used for it’s designed purpose. But that does not change what the designed purpose originally was. So in other words, all firearms should be treated as lethal.
Well, if guns are designed to kill people, then they are failing in that in a big way. Many guns are used for hunting, many more are used for target shooting, more are never fired and good number are bought expressly to never fire as collector items.
I think, as a % fewer guns kill people than cars do. Cars then are better designed to kill people than are guns.:rolleyes:
Different guns are designed for different purposes, as msmith537 sez. She didn’t mention such guns as extremely expensive engraved collector items,* designed *never to be fired. Or skeet & trap shotguns, designed to “kill” clay targets
She does mention .22s, but some of them are designed quite extreme as target weapons only- large, unwieldy and chambered for .22 short, which is even more unlikely to be lethal- in fact there are some airguns which are more dangerous than a .22 short.
I have a good number of sword- which were “designed to kill people”. None of mine have, and I doubt if anyone would now say “swaords should be banned, they are only designed to kill people”
And it’ll never happen, considering how powerful their lobby is.
This reminds me of the official RAF policy during WWII that the targets of its nighttime bombing campaign was “housing”. Apparently blowing up houses was somehow aiding the war effort. It was just an unfortunate side effect that so many people were killed when their houses was blown up in the middle of the night.
I am a gun owner. That said, I can’t imagine that the Protecta Shotgun (or other “street sweeper” models) was designed against anything other than humans in mind.
It really has two purposes: police and dudes who buy it in some sort of survialist fantasy. I doubt if any significant purchased for the second purpose have been used to kill anyone. In fact a Google News search of Street Sweeper shotgun used in killing turned up no killings by this weapon.
Some guns are designed for killing people.
It is precisely because they are very effective weapons that ownership is specifically protected by the US Constitution and also by the constitution of my state.
Until the anti’s summon the will and support to change the Constitution, arguments over semantics are all noise and no signal.
I have a Striker 12 gauge. It’s an interesting mechanical curiosity. It’s a very specialized piece of law enforcement gear when used with special-purpose cartridges. As a straight-up weapon to be used for shooting other people, it’s inferior to any conventional repeating shotgun that you might buy off the rack at WallyWorld.
The fact that these are regulated as destructive devices is an excellent example of a gun being (effectively) banned for being ugly.
I think a better analogy is that the cars aren’t designed as a form of transportation since, after all, autoracing is a popular pastime in much of the world.
Sorry, everyone as they were.
ETA: I really want a cite on the claim that more cars by percentage of those produced end up killing someone than guns.
200 million guns, and around 5000 gun homicides per year.
270 million cars, and around 50,000 automobile deaths per year.
About 10-1.
Let’s keep it simple, shall we?
Total registered passenger vehicles in the US (2006): 250,851,833 (Cite)
Total number of fatalities in the US due to passenger vehicles (2008): 41,059 (Cite)
I’m not sure whether or not that includes more unusual types of vehicle-related deaths or not (like carbon-monoxide poisoning or other oddities) and it does not discuss injuries (or their ancillary economic costs), but we’ll stick with this. Also note that the same caveats apply with guns.
Also note that these are absolute numbers. Deaths per miles driven does not have any corresponding statistic with regard to guns.
So, let’s go with guns. Since the US does not have a national registration scheme, it must be estimated. This study released in 2006 has it at 283 million with 95% confidence.
Going with Brady Campaign numbers (!) we arrive at 29,569 total deaths, of which an astonishing 57% were suicides (Cite-PDF).
You do the numbers. They can be nuanced, of course (see my caveats above), but there is no escaping that considerably more people die and/or are maimed as a result of cars.
Hey, you asked.
EDIT: This is Airman Doors, not MsRobyn. I forgot to log her out. shrug
I guess the analogue to a gun is an axe or spear…or better yet a bow. As opposed to a sword. The difference is that a sword is designed for one purpose…to kill other humans. It really has no other use. While a bow, is designed to kill…people or animals. Make it a multi-use tool as opposed to a single use weapon.
I have no problem with the statement that a gun is designed to kill…it’s what the tool is for after all. That it has other uses is good…but it’s designed to kill. Why this is a problem for some I have no idea…on either side of the question.
Also, why this means (or doesn’t mean) that guns should be banned…again, no idea.
-XT
Mate, I have to say that I am not typically favourable to banning weapons (nor on the other hand particularly convinced that American fantasies that individual ownership is any kind of guarantee of any particular politics, having been the gun-ridden 3rd world ratpits too often), but this line of argument is just silly.
Damned well said, Stealth Potato. The logical flaw in the “Guns kill -> Ban guns” argument isn’t the premise, it’s the lack of reasoning showing that the premise supports the conclusion.
The proper response to “Guns are made to kill people!” is “So?”. Once that question is answered, a rational debate can follow.
There’s only 16,692 murders in the USA total.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_01.html
But it does seem like my numbers were off by a little, since the FBI figures around 68% of those homicides were caused by guns. So, 11K+ gun murders.
It seems many people are equating what guns were first developed for (warfare) with what all guns ever made are designed for. The majority of guns are designed for killing (animals or humans), but some are not. One of my physics professors designed a rifle for competitive precision shooting. It had a tunable barrel and took small very carefully loaded cartridges. Sure you could kill someone with the ungainly thing, but it would probably be easier to club them to death than shoot them to death with.
But I would say this line of argument is actually more in the favor of those wanting to restrict gun rights. If you classify some guns as weapons and others as recreational implements, then it is easier to ban the ones that are designed to kill.
Jonathan
I know. Looking at the cite they came up with a total of 11,624. But the question I was addressing was not “how many murders?”, rather “how many deaths?”, which includes suicides and accidents. I was astonished at the number of suicides, myself.