After the shooting at Wednesday’s Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, I wrote fast and I wrote angry for the Kansas City Star:
Guns ruin everything.
There’s no nice, nuanced thing to say about the shooting Wednesday at the end of the Chiefs’ Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City. No “on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” equivocating about the death and injury and stupidity that happened because there are too many damned guns in the hands of too many damned idiots in this country.
No, it’s simple. Guns ruin everything.
Everything.
They make it impossible to send your kids to school without a little bit of fear.
They make it impossible to worship with your neighbors in the complete and confident belief your church is a sanctuary from the violence outside.
And they make it impossible to attend a parade — to celebrate a great triumph with thousands of people in your community — without worrying that some nut will choose a mass gathering as a time to enact their most sociopathic tendencies.
God help us.
Please read the whole thing.
The piece produced a remarkable amount of “guns are inanimate objects — they don’t kill people, people do!”
And this strikes me as a frankly dumb objection.
Yes, people kill people.
But people with guns kill and maim an awful lot more than people without guns.1
Why? Because the whole purpose of guns — the entire reason they exist, their sole function — is to be uniquely efficient killing machines.
You don’t use guns to peel potatoes. You don’t use guns to build houses. You do use guns to kill and injure people. It’s the reason they exist.
Would we still have a murder problem if guns weren’t so widely available? Maybe, but not nearly to the extent we do now. That’s why America’s murder problem is a gun problem. And it’s why I’ll keep saying guns ruin everything.
Pew: “About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.”
The people who fired the shots were responsible for what they did. But yes, guns made it easier for them to make whatever horrific point it was they intended.
Fine guns don’t kill people. Bullets kill people. You can keep your guns. Throw your bullets in the trash. Grow up. People are dying and you want to play word games.