Quick edit: If this is considered in violation of rule 5, then please delete. I do not wish to bait political arguments and drama.
Edit 2: I would just like to say that I would consider this question answered, or at least as answered as a hypothetical can be. My personal takeaway is that holding weapons manufacturers responsible for gun violence is unrealistic. Regardless of blame and accountability, the guns already exist and will continue to do so. We must carefully consider any and all legislation before we enact it, and especially where firearms are concerned. I hope our politicians and scholars continue working to find compromises that benefit all people. Thank you all for contributing and helping me to better understand the situation of gun violence in America. I truly hope for a better future for the United States and all of humanity. If nothing else, please always treat your fellow man, and your firearm, with the utmost respect. Your fellow man deserves it, and your firearm demands it for the safety of everyone.
First, I’d like to highlight that I understand that, legally speaking, arms manufacturers are not typically accountable for the way their products are used. My question is not “why aren’t they accountable?” but “why SHOULDN’T they be accountable?”
Also important to note that I am asking from an American perspective. Local and national gun violence is something I am constantly exposed to as an American citizen, and the lack of legislation on this violence is something I’ve always been confused by. That is, I’ve always been confused why all effort, energy, and resources seem to go into pursuing those who have used firearms to end human lives that are under the protection of the government, rather than the prevention of the use of firearms to end human lives.
All this leads to my question. If a company designs, manufactures, and distributes implements that primarily exist to end human life, why shouldn’t they be at least partially blamed for the human lives that are ended with those implements?
I can see a basic argument right away: If I purchase a vehicle, an implement designed and advertised to be used for transportation, and use it as a weapon to end human lives, it’d be absurd for the manufacturer to be held legally accountable for my improper use of their implement. However, I can’t quite extend that logic to firearms. Guns were made, by design, to be effective and efficient at the ending of human lives. Using the firearms in the way they were designed to be used is the primary difference for me. If we determine that the extra-judicial ending of human life is a crime of great magnitude, shouldn’t those who facilitate these crimes be held accountable?
TL;DR: To reiterate and rephrase my question, why should those who intentionally make and sell guns for the implied purpose of killing people not be held accountable when those guns are then used to do exactly what they were designed to do?
A firearm is a device with limited applicability. Its one purpose is to harm things.
If it was designed to unscrew things then it’d be a screwdriver. But it’s not. It’s a gun. It’s for shooting things dead. It’s one purpose is patently obvious and any attempt to say “but you don’t have to shoot things with it” should be met with the derision it deserves.
So you’d like to wholesale ban hunting? Is that your position?
I think most urban liberals would ban hunting given the opportunity, but have enough self awareness to realize that’s an untenable position.
Urban liberal hunter here!
Obviously my city has completely banned hunting and I travel 40 miles away to do my hunting…but that situation is now changing.
After years/decades of no hunting, deer over population and the problems that go with it have gotten to a point where the city is testing out a pilot program this fall/winter to allow a small group of archery hunters to hunt a limited amount of deer in the city parks on (I think) two set days where the parks will be closed to other humans through the day.
Assuming the program sees participation and effective results, the intention is to expand it slowly to both increase the number of tags issued as well as have a few more days and locations in the program.
I think a part of this is the small but growing shift among urban liberals from taking positions based on points without context to having more nuanced approaches based on overall world view.
For example: rather than just being “anti gun and anti hunting”, I think people are starting to go beyond that and think about why they’re against hunting. For a lot of people, it’s because they’re pro animal. They like seeing the deer and don’t want to see them hurt. Unfortunately, in our urban (and suburban, and in many cases even rural environments) we have already upset the natural balance, to the point that whitetail deer have no natural predators where they live. Without this pressure they become over populated, leading to increased vehicle accidents, disease, and over browsing in their habitats which leads to even more negative consequences and effects.
So if they like the deer, presumably they want a healthy, happy, balanced population. And if they want that, in an urban environment, that means management. If the population is unsustainably high, it is going to come down, one way or another. At that point, it’s a choice between "would you rather these deer die due to disease, starvation, and dangerous vehicle collisions, all the while wiping out new growth in forests, negatively impacting other species and the health of the ecosystem? Or would you prefer the relatively quick, clean, ethical harvest of hunters, and not only respect the animals in life but also remove them from the population in a way that feeds people natural food that is locally sourced, free range, not full of hormones, and whose harvest actually has a net positive impact on the environment it came from?
And I feel like as “liberals”, for whatever that term may mean to people, get more and more into things like home brewing, fishing, foraging, raising chickens, farm to table, etc., the more hope there is that hunting won’t be looked at in such a negative light.
A weapon is a tool, killing things is the job that tool was designed to do. No one is arguing different, get your strawman out of here.
Killing things isn’t always immoral or illegal, either. I can hunt wild boar or keep the prairie dog population in check with an AR-15 as long as I have the appropriate licensing and am abiding laws regarding location, etc.
Then there’s the obvious home defense scenario which is unlikely but happens more often than you’d think, the stories just don’t go past local news.
Right, but the duty of care changes based on the risks.
Yeah, last I checked harming things is not illegal in all circumstances.
Hunting, self defense, in some cases defense of property or of others.
So you are 100% correct, their purpose is to harm things. Some do so efficiently enough to kill them, too. None of this is inherently illegal, so there’s no issue with them being on sale or legal.