Firearms were NOT designed to kill

[Freedspeak]

Kill?

Maybe some of the problem with the designed to kill argument has to do with the old English.

Kill meant to murder, whereas slay meant to take life in combat, hunting or barnyard slaughter, or other honorable functions. You slew the enemy, dragon, game, etc., but a highwayman would kill!

So, would a proper response maybe be: A firearm is designed to slay, not kill! Then let them think about that for a bit, they use semantics and we turn it around!

Just my fractional dollar!

 

[trapperjohn]

I am an engineer. I design things. Firearms are designed to kill.
The firearm is a weapon, a lethal weapon. men ditched clubs for swords because they kill better, men ditched arrows for bullets because they kill better.
forget about guns for war or self defense thinnk about hunting, what is the goal? one shot KILL, not one shot STOP, we dont want to stop the game we pursue, we want to KILL it.
Saying Guns arent designed to kill is pure semantics

 

[Plinkerton]

Completely ridiculous argument, for all the reasons stated. I can't believe you would even make an attempt to argue that point. You are like an anti anti. No offense, but you are using arguments, as ridiculous as the ones used by antis, to argue for guns, instead of against. Just because you don't use your gun to kill, does mean they weren't designed to kill. A hammer was designed to hammer in nails. If I use it to break a car window, or kill someone, it doesn't detract from the fact that it was designed to hammer nails.

 

[Nick1911]

so does that mean we have bad counter-counter-counter logic going on?


Nick

 

[BamBam-31]

I dunno. People are designed to kill, as per your statement. People design tools to help them kill. Guns are designed to help people kill. Doesn't this follow?

Anti's argue from the viewpoint that no one is ever personally accountable. Blame inanimate objects, blame the environment, blame whatever else you can. Just don't blame yourself. It's backwards and illogical, and if you play that game, don't expect to reason your way through it. It's liberal misdirection, plain and simple. Someone killed somebody? Blame the tool, spare the man. He was a victim of his environment.

Guns were designed to kill, or at least inflict a whole lotta nastiness. That was the intent of the design. That we use it mainly for plinking does not change that original fact. Using a sword as a plowshare does not change the sword's original design.

You have to realize that there's a HUGE (and illogical) leap taken when people go from saying "Guns are designed to kill people" to "Guns kill people." It's like going from "Hammers are designed to hit nails" to "Hammers hit nails." Labor Unions would be up in arms. They are, of course, not the same--accepting the former does not mean accepting the latter.

Good discussion, tho'.

 

[cooch]

There's a lot of very sloppy thinking flying around loose here.

OK, OK, that wasn't very polite, but think about it.

Design philosophy is completely bloody irrelevant..... and next time some anti throws that at you, you need to tell him so.

Penecillin in drug form is designed to kill.
Heroin is not.
Does that mean we should control penecillin but not heroin?

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite for peaceful purposes .... does this mean it and it's derivatives should be sold across the counter to kiddies?
Show me the "kill" button on cars.... or show me the documentation which reveals the evil intent of the engineers who design them. Funny thing, but we regulate who can drive and how they're driven.

We need to get very clear that regulation is only justified by the results of that regulation.

Regulation of vehicle design, ownership and operating speeds has a long history of saving lives
Regulation of certain drugs probably saves more lives than it costs.
But strict regulation of firearms has a consistent (300+ year) history of failing to produce a nett saving of life and failing to increase quality of life.

If "designed to kill" was a valid criteria, then we'd be banning flyswats.

By arguing about the design philosophy of firearms you're accepting the validity of an argument which isn't even logical in the first place.
I would strongly suggest you tell anyone who argues that design philosophy is more important than the results .... that they don't care if people are killed! People who REALLY want to save lives are passionate about the RESULTS out in the real world, not the motivation of the manufacturer.
No victim is less "dead" because they were killed by a car instead of a carbine!
Try telling a victim's family that they should feel better that their loved-one was only stabbed instead of shot!

I love my shooting, but if banning guns resulted in fewer lives lost and greater personal and political freedom ..... then I guess I'd have to accept it.
But it NEVER has, and we're far better off rubbing the anti's noses in this fact than arguing irrelevancies such as the inventor's motivation.


Best regards......... Peter

 

[outofbattery]

I have to weigh in on the side of this being a rediculous arguement . Sure , my Ruger Mk II might have been designed to put holes in paper and tin cans but the pistol it's modeled after visually was designed to put holes in French , Russians et al . If the history of firearms that I was taught is correct , and I'm sure it's full of holes , is that Europeans borrowed the Chinese use of blackpowder and used it to kill each other in increasingly more efficient ways . By your questionable reasoning , ICBM's are just an advanced form of party favors and therefore not really designed to kill people ?

 

[Baba Louie]

The Human Being was designed to survive. Anything and Everything (tools) that man designed from that time on was designed to that effect.

If I must kill to survive, that's the price of admission into the game of life.

 

[Heraclitus]

"Guns were not designed to kill."

And cars were not designed to be driven. They were designed to burn gas.

And analcompulsive doesn't mean hanging on to some stupid argument for the sake of beating words to a pulp. It means analyzing the dialectical engagement of antithetic hypotheses whereby the manifold of a-priori, semi-categorical data strategically maneuvers to dissemble, transmogrify and defibrulate the pragmatic manifestations of truth.

 

[Heraclitus]

Oh, and by the way... Can someone please define the word "kill"?

 

[hso]

purpose = kill

design = fire projectile

 

[Cosmoline]

Cooch has it. If you look at the intent of the designers to determine the function of their creation, you will be lost. Nobody has yet told me how the intent of a designer to make a "target rifle" somehow keeps his rifle from being able to kill, or indeed makes it functionally much different from a "killing rifle" designed for the military.

Hear this. FIREARMS ARE TOOLS. They do what we want them to. They do nothing by themselves. By themselves they are merely devices for holding and firing cartridges. That's it. EVERYTHING ELSE, from shooting trees to shooting bears, is a HUMAN element. Firearms HAVE NO PURPOSE, because purpose requires a mind, and I've never had a rifle with a mind. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Firearms are not killing machines. We are killing machines, but only when we choose to be.

I have a feeling most of us in this debate are just missing each other.

 

[Cosmoline]

Yes, HSO has it.

 

[Archangel]

I think cooch has made the best point in this argument so far.

And since we're arguing semantics anyway, let me delve a little deeper... (and apologize in advance, as this could get long...)

There are three basic arguments going on here:
1. Are guns designed to kill?
2. Is killing necessarily a bad thing?
3. Is RKBA about weapons or sporting tools, and does either argument jeopardize our RKBA?

All three can be answered if we break the tool and its designed purpose argument down futher. Instead of looking only at

the tool, and
its designed purpose

Let's look at

The user's intent / purpose / goal in using the tool
the tool itself
the tool's design, and
the mechanism by which the the tool helps the user achieve their intent / purpose / goal

I think we can all agree that the intent of the user can be either good or evil. The tool itself being inanimate is only a tool, and is therefore neither good nor evil. Likewise, the mechanism is neither good nor evil, because the same mechanism can be used to achieve both the good or the evil intent of the user. The design of the tool is totally irrelevant, as the actual use may or may not corespond to the designers intended putpose for the tool.

Note that when they designed it, the designer of the tool also had an intent / purpose / goal in mind, which could be good or evil, but the design itself is merely the mechanical means by which a tool is capable of executing a mechanism.

Example: A CCW holder using a gun in self defense. The intent is to stop their attacker. The tool is, obvioiusly, the gun. The mechanism can be killing, wounding, intimidating, or deterring the attacker to the point that he stops.

The design of the gun is simply to propel a bullet out of the barrel to a point aligned with the sights (as well as various safety features to prevent it from doing so before the user intends to).

Even the original design intent of guns was not to kill. It was to defeat opposing armies. Whether that was acheived via the mechanism of killing, maiming, wounding them to the point that they could no longer fight, or simply scaring them off, the desgn was not to kill.

Modern military weapons are desgned likewise - with the intent of defeating the enemy.

But even if a tool is designed to kill, both the tool and the killing are independent of the user's (or the designer's) intent. Only the intent can be good or evil.

So, when an anti says that guns should be banned because they are "designed to kill," we can respond by saying something like this:

Anti - "But guns are designed to kill!"

GunGuy - "Yes, guns are capable of killing, and any life taken needlessly is a tragedy. However, both guns and the act of killing can be used toward either good or evil ends. <insert example of killing being a good thing, if you like>"

Anti - "But look at how many people are killed with guns"

GunGuy - "So, your goal is fewer lives lost?"

Anti - "Yes."

GunGuy - "Well, gun control has repeatedly and reliable been shown to raise the crime rate, and increase the number of lives lost. So isn't gun control counter to your goal?"



Oh, and I almost forgot. Guns, and our RKBA are the tool by which we maintain our goal of liberty, through the mechanism of deterring a government from becoming tyrannical, or defeating it if it does.



Thanks for your patience while I waxed philosophical...

 

[roscoe]

It seems to me we are drawing a distinction between proximate and ultimate purpose. To my mind, for most firearms, the ultimate purpose of a firearm is to kill and the proximate purpose (through which that is achieved) is to eject projectiles via combustion of powder. In other words, the second purpose would not have existed without the first purpose.

Can the tool be used for something other than its ultimate purpose? Sure, just like a hammer can close a paint can rather than pound nails. But, to be sure, the ultimate purpose of a hammer is to pound nails.

To me, any attempt to argue that the ultimate purpose of guns is not killing is sophistry in the face of what may seem like an unpleasant fact: our hobby and fascination is for something that exists to kill. We just need to acknowledge that fact and move on to other arguments.

 

[Cosmoline]

Archangel--excellent post. That sums up what I was trying to get at very nicely.

 

[trapperjohn]

Cooch has it. If you look at the intent of the designers to determine the function of their creation, you will be lost.

Your orignal post was that guns are not designed to kill. Who better knows what something is designed for than the designer?
If i were to design a water powered bottle rocket and I were to Say I designed it so that It would launch, you would be ludicrous to say "no this isnt designed to launch, this is designed to push water out the nozzle, launching is only a by product"

that is what you are trying to do with your word games. Yes a gun fires a projectile, that is an intermediate step in the process, the final step is Killing. Period. Yes sometimes Guns are used for other things, but firarms were developed for one purpose KILLING.
IT would be idiotic to say that a car is not designed for transportation, it is designed to turn tires.

I teach engineering and design. You can not break out an intermediate step n a function (like firing a projectile) and say that is the design purpose. Why was the firearm designed to fire a projectile?? to make pretty flames shoot out of the barrel symbolizing peace?? NO! it fires a projectile so that it can project lethal (that means killing) force at a distance.
To be quite honest your play on words reminds me of the liberal faculty on campus who debate whether there is a law of gravity.

 

[Archangel]

Cos- thanks.

Roscoe - what you are calling proximate and ultimate purpose are similar to what I was calling intent and mechanism.

The proximate purpose of propelling a projectile downrange can acheive the ultimate purpose of killing, but that killing may itslef be a proximate purpose to stopping an attacker or saving an innocent life.

The distinction between the killing itself being a proximate or ultimate purpose is made by the user. If the killing itself is the ultimate purpose, the user would be ranked among the highest order of evildoers.

 

[Cosmoline]

I have no idea what motivated Mr. Schmidt or Mr. Rubin. Was it profit?Desire to protect the homeland? Fascination with rotating bolts? It's interesting to explore such issues, but their answer has NO relevance to the rifle sitting in my car. All it does is fire 7.5x55 cartridges, and it does that very very well. That's all I expect it to do, and that's all it was designed to do.

 

[trapperjohn]

motivation and design intent are 2 very different things. Was John browning motivated by greed or love of guns when he designed the 1911? Doesn't matter. Whydid he decide on the 45 rather than the 9mm? (yes I know army wanted it) it was because The army beleived the 45 more capable of killing than the 9mm from their experiances in the Philipines.
If the design intent of the 1911 had not been killing(someone is going to jump on the Stop v Kill point) , but had been merely launching a projectile, they would not have cared what caliber was used.

When a designer sits down and begins to design somethign he has to consider the Design PURPOSE. I again refer you to your first post stating Guns are not designed to kill. Who knows better what something was designed for than the designer? When I teach my engineering students about dEsign, i teach them the first thing to consider is what is the purpose of the design, in other words "what is this designed for?"

If the purpose of firearms were only to fire a projectile then why try to develop porjectiles that are more efficient at killing? why do we have hollowpoints? Is the porpose of a hollowpoint to expand so that we can admire the beautiful mushroom shape? No it expands to increase the lethal ability of the projectile.

again the pupose of a firearm is to project lethal force at a distance. That is one of the keys to warfare, to be able to porject lethal force at a distance, if one side can project more force over a greater distance, generaly that side wins.

why did early Japan outlaw firarms? because peasants could kill samari (lethal force projection at a distance)

Why did armies ditch blades for guns? more lethal force projection at a greater distance.

 

[Archangel]

Trapperjohn - You said earlier that you can't take out an intermediate step in a process and call it the design purpose. So, is killing really the design purpose, or just another intermediate step in a larger process?

When weapons devlopers such as browning design new weapons for the military, do they do it to kill as many people as possible, or to unbalance the killing potential of of the two warring sides in the hopes that one side will surrender (or not start the war in the first place), thus saving lives?

 

[srschick]

Wow, this is a revelation....

I thought that the STI Grandmaster race gun I would like to get was made to put small groups of holes in paper at a fast pace......

 

[trapperjohn]

do they do it to kill as many people as possible, or to unbalance the killing potential of of the two warring sides

isnt an unbalanced killing potential the same thing as one side being better able to kill than the other?

Who knows the purpose of War? is the purpose of war to kill or to liberate or to save lives??? That is irrelevant.


We are talking about the reason Guns are designed. The Gun is a tool, that tool is designed to project lethal force at a distance.

please please please, don't try to tell some Anti that Guns are not designed to kill. That just makes us look bad and that we are unwilling to deal honestly with facts.

 

[Plinkerton]

I'm sorry. I completely agree with TrapperJohn. You have to consider original intentions. Just because you need the free will of us humans to make the gun kill, does not mean it wasn't designed to kill. The semantics are useless, and there is no reason to argue them. Plain and simple, a long time ago, guns were designed with a purpose. People understood this, and used them for their purpose. They then realized that they could be used for other purposes also. It doesn't change the original intended purpose of the gun.

When weapons devlopers such as browning design new weapons for the military, do they do it to kill as many people as possible, or to unbalance the killing potential of of the two warring sides in the hopes that one side will surrender (or not start the war in the first place), thus saving lives?

Explain to me why this matters? "Unbalance the killing potential"??? Please. How does he unbalance the killing potential? BY KILLING THE ENEMY!

It doesn't matter if its good or bad, that's not what we're discussing. He designed it to shoot people, with flying projectiles, blah blah, to HURT OR KILL the other side, so they could UNBALANCE THE KILLING POTENTIAL...

sheeesh...

 

[R.H. Lee]

The Human Being was designed to survive. Anything and Everything (tools) that man designed from that time on was designed to that effect.

Exactly. Firearms are designed to protect the life of the user. Period. End of argument.