July 25, 2012
The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun
Does the old rallying cry "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" hold up to philosophical scrutiny?
Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:
The commonsense view of technology is one that some philosophers call the instrumentalist conception. According to the instrumentalist conception, while the ends that technology can be applied to can be cognitively and morally significant, technology itself is value-neutral. Technology, in other words, is subservient to our beliefs and desires; it does not significantly constrain much less determine them. This view is famously touted in the National Rifle Association's maxim: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
To be sure, this statement is more of a slogan than well-formulated argument. But even as a shorthand expression, it captures the widely believed idea that murder is wrong and the appropriate source to blame for committing murder is the person who pulled a gun's trigger. Indeed, the NRA's proposition is not unusual; it aptly expresses the folk psychology that underlies moral and legal norms.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 06:31 AM | Permalink
Comments
It's nice that Latour's (very commonsensical) observation is getting some traction.. I'm sure the NRA guys themselves know very well that being a person with a gun feels differently from being a person without one; what makes them bad is that they are unwilling to admit that having a gun can help/force you to become a worse person than you would be otherwise, even apart from the fact that it becomes so much easier to succeed in your attempts to inflict harm.
Posted by: Foppe | Jul 25, 2012 6:42:22 AM
A maniac with a Swiss army knife would not have killed as many theater goers before someone intervened with a choke hold.
A automatic with many rounds of ammo made the difference.
Guns + human nature do kill people in large numbers when attached to large magazines.
The NRA is not out to protect the 2nd Amendment rights of the US Constitution; it's out to protect the 1st Amendment corporate rights of the gun industry to make as much money as possible over as many dead bodies as the people of the US can stomach.
What the NRA expects in return is some of that money.
Posted by: Jim | Jul 25, 2012 3:13:50 PM
A automatic with many rounds of ammo made the difference.
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There were no 'automatics' used in the shooting. It damages the credibility of those in the 'get the guns' crowd when they fail to learn the basics about firearms. E.g. confusing automatics and semi-automatics, misapplying 'assault rifle', and calling magazines 'clips'.
Posted by: Brian | Aug 1, 2012 7:37:33 AM
Isn't this, Brian, a similar fallacious requirement to the Atheists' jape that the Theists are employing the Courtier's Reply?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/24/the-courtiers-reply/
If as fast as you pull the trigger a bullet comes out without having to cock the weapon...it's automatic. Not knowing distinction between semi-automatic and full-automatic, whether experts would call it a clip or a mag or if it is an "Assault-Weapon", does not really invalidate peoples objections to the state of things in a country where the prevalence of guns & ammo seems tightly related to its being the world leader in gun deaths.
Posted by: Carlos | Aug 1, 2012 12:19:24 PM
Carlos,
So the courtier's argument is supposed to saying (like your argument) that certain distinctions are nitpicky or eye-glazingly bad, and just distract people from the lack of substance to the view. Suppose that's right in the gun case, whether or not it's right in the religion case. I think there still might be an important difference between the two cases though. In the religion case, if the argument is right, it leads to 'ignore theology.' But the parallel gun argument, doesn't lead to 'ignore the US constitution and precedent and so on' since there's nothing guaranteeing that a constitution on any given issue will in fact be sane.
So it might be that the notion of 'arms' deployed in the 2nd amendment analytically continues to "handguns" and "shotguns", but not "assault rifles." [I speak myself as someone with no knowledge at all about guns. They have point-and-click interfaces as far as I'm concerned. I don't know the things in Brian's differ.] Or it might cover all of them, or none of them, since it's all supposed to happen in things called 'militias'
Hence the mechanism of amendments, if the doddering old thing thing says something unfortunate.
of course, in practice, practically all the people who think guns are bad think the constitution permits restricting them, while those think guns are awesome thinks the constitution loves em. But that's a statement about convenience and motivated reasoning, since amendments are hard. It isn't (at least obviously) how a judge should act.
And nitpicky distinctions are the very stuff of law; everything in the recent healthcare case turned on whether the government can force people to buy broccoli (which it intuitively seems hard to accept) versus whether it can tax people who won't (which intuitively seems right, though it's the same damn thing)
Posted by: prasad | Aug 1, 2012 12:54:07 PM
put differently, an implicit step in the God case is something like 'God doesn't talk gibberish' so if a position is stupid that seems to count against it being divinely inspired (and hence worth following). the analogous constraint in the legal case is rather weaker (though not non-existent either)
Posted by: prasad | Aug 1, 2012 1:02:00 PM
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