One of the arguments thrown out in defense of guns in America is that a knife can kill just as easily as a gun. “So it’s not the guns,” goes the supposed rationale. “It’s the people who are the killers.”

Well, that’s an interesting argument in context with a murderer who shot fifty people dead in a nightclub using an automatic weapon. He had a perfectly good knife on his person. Why didn’t he just use that?

Efficiencies

The answer is simple. Guns are a much more efficient method of killing people. Automatic weapons commodify the act of killing. They turn it into a commercial enterprise. Killing people wholesale without ever having to look them in the eye or have physical contact is made so much easier by the simple act of owning a weapon designed for mass shootings.

Automatic weapons have no place in civilized society. Australia banned them back in 1996 and there have been no mass shootings since. That’s the actual free market in practice, by the way. Just like chemicals that poison people, or medicines that cause dangerous or fatal side effects, some products are ultimately banned from public use. That’s what civilized societies do.

Uncivilized societies exonerate both manufacturers and sellers of such products by claiming the law protects them under the auspice of free enterprise. In the case of guns, the uncivilized society that America has become also promotes several brands of vigilante justice in response to the question of whether it is guns that kill people or people who kill people. The logic goes like this: “If you put enough guns on the street, the problem will fix itself.”

Death toll

Only that isn’t happening. There are still 30,000 people a year who die from various kinds of gun violence. More Americans have died from gun violence here at home than all the soldiers that have died in all wars fought on foreign soils. So the claim that the gun problem in America will fix itself is a massive lie. That lie is designed to do only one thing: sell more guns to enrich those who manufacture and sell them.

Blood for profit

The National Rifle Association is a commercial trade organization designed to sell guns. It claims to represent the Second Amendment as well, but that is nothing more than a ruse to do what its paymasters want it to do. Create more fear and sell more guns.

The NRA must cheer every time a mass murder takes place. Because that’s when their fearmongering constituency gets all riled up and worried the government is going to come take all their guns. So the NRA plays that game because it creates more profits for its association sponsors. It’s that simple. The NRA is the Chamber of Commerce for gun violence. Because it sells more guns.

Four types of gun owners

There are four kinds of gun owners in this world.

Erratic: People who own guns and act crazy.

Unintentional: People who own guns and accidentally shoot or kill others.

Intentional: People who purchase guns with the intent to harm or kill others, or themselves.

Responsible: People who own guns and abide by laws designed to manage their use.

That last category parallels the Second Amendment call for a “well-regulated” militia. Because without laws in place to govern how guns are sold, distributed and used, there can be no social order.

However, the first three categories typically have the most impact on American lives because gun violence is a vexation on the freedoms and liberties of all who live under the auspice of the United States Constitution.

Second rate ideas

The NRA and other gun proponents love to focus on the latter part of the Second Amendment rather than the former. That is, the focus on the “right to bear arms” supersedes all authority to regulate the type and use of guns in a free society.

But when erratic, unintentional and intentional people can still easily get their hands on murderous weapons and use them wholesale on the streets of America, the gun lobby is a massive failure of the Constitution and the citizens it is designed to protect and serve.

Even the police now fear for their lives on a daily basis in America. Do they fear knives? Sure, in close situations knives can be murderous. But what the police fear most is guns, and military-grade weapons in particular. Because the world is full of erratic, unintentional and intentional people with high-powered guns, rifles and automatic weapons. And there is no excusing the fact that America ignores that reality on a daily basis.

And people get killed as a result. Sometimes 50 at a time, and many more maimed, and lives devastated.

All because it makes someone, somewhere, very rich.

The Bible has something to say

The Bible says two important things about all of this. Thou Shalt Not Kill is one of the 10 Commandments. It specifically addresses the issue for which guns were designed, to kill.

The Bible also says that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” which covers the profit motive driving so much of America’s production and sale of high-powered weapons and guns in general. It seems sick to profit from the death of others, but that is exactly what the gun industry is all about in America. Case closed.