Guns do not kill people. How can you argue?

Richard Chaney's real problem is that he went hunting with a shotgun in the first place. There is a common thread among responsible people and it can be summed up pretty well like this: "Do not put yourself in bad situations." It's not that big of a deal someone was shot with stray pellets from a shotgun. Most people have no idea what happened and just think being shot is a big deal. They don't know the difference between a shotgun and a rifle or a pistol, or a machine gun or an automatic weapon, semi-automatic, side-by-sides verse over and under weapons...therefore they should have no opinion of this matter at all. People do not go to an engineer when they need surgery on their foot. People shouldn't look to non-informed people for opinions either. The big deal is that the Vice President of the United States was the person who shot someone with the stray pellets from a shotgun. That sucks. Anyone else that isn't in your immediate family and who cares. No one cares when someone falls off a bicycle either. When George Bush and John Kerry fall off during their campaigns for president...people care. That's just funny.

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If you are asking "wasn't it Dick Chaney who shot someone"...I rest my case.

I have three friends who have been shot accidentally. One was shot with a rifle when he was hunting (survived...he was shot in the butt) by a hunter (this is a funny story actually...my friend was relieving himself, the guy thought he was a deer, shot, the bullet hit my friend's buck knife and when through both of his butt cheeks -- not funny he was shot but funny after the fact). One friend was shot in the leg by my best friend with a .22 rifle when he was disassembling it. The craziest accident was my friend who was hunting elk in Idaho (where he lived) and was shot in the chest with an arrow by a California hunter. No one I know was killed.

I have friends who claim that they have friends "who's horses were shot out from under them" during hunting season.

How frightening. How extremely dangerous and outrageous. We must do something about these degenerate country people who insist on killing things for "sport." Who insist on using guns that kill people. Those possessed, uncaring, very witty and sly guns that just jump into people's hands and shoot people because guns kill people.

Wait...did someone mention killing things for sport? Is that the real reason people do not like guns?

Let's look at this argument that guns kill people. People are going to argue about this all day long but they are wrong if they think guns kill people and that really is the end of the story. Leave a gun sitting by itself and it doesn't kill anyone. What else kills people. Cigarettes kill people, right? Wrong. Cigarettes do not kill people. Knives? Cars? When a person is killed in a car accident is the car cited? Does the car go to jail, get sued; is the person driving responsible for the car like a parent is for a child? The car is usually totaled when someone is killed so maybe you can argue the car is dead and has no rights. The bottom line is that people who say guns kill people are not holding people responsible for their actions. Why is it that spoons can kill people but they aren't blamed for "killing people?"

People who argue that guns kill people can't see a reason as to why people need guns in the first place. Let's take a look at a couple of things people do not need in the first place.

Cigarettes. People do not need cigarettes. There is not a single reason that cigarettes should exist. But, unfortunately, they do and people buy them by the trillions and they smoke them by the trillions and they die by the tens of thousands (and I have seen figures much larger though I doubt their source) because they do smoke them. What are cigarettes purpose exactly? To clog your lungs and give you a buzz or alter your reality in such a way that you can escape your natural reality. What a reason for cigarettes to exist.

Alcohol. Not the medical alcohol, but beer, wine, and so on. There is no reason to have alcohol. But, unfortunately, alcohol exists and people buy alcohol by the gallons. Drunk people kill or mangle innocent people by the tens of thousands by getting into cars and running into people. Most domestic violence involves alcohol. Homelessness involves alcohol.

What are the chances? I always ask this, its the geeky nerd in me I guess. According to MSN (liberal here so liberals who want liberal facts can use them...so stop emailing me about not giving liberal statistics -- though no one has called me conservative either --) there are 850 hunting accidents in the US a year. There are roughly 300 million people in the US (if I remember right this number should be reached in October of 2006 or so). There are roughly 20.6 million hunters in the United states. The chances of being in a hunting accident are 1 in 24,235. Your chances of being struck by lightning is 1 in 3,000 (according to Fox news). Does that mean there are 1000 people a year struck by lightning?

I think I'd rather go hunting when there isn't a lightning storm.

Although "Take guns away from citizens and only criminals will have guns" is a bumper sticker and some-type of NRA, guns-rights slogan it does make sense. The founding fathers of the United States felt so strongly about guns that they wrote the right to bear arms in the the founding documents of the United States. I've heard the argument that "things have changed, we don't need guns anymore, we have grown as a society..." I think that these arguments are short sited and kind-of egotistical. Don't you think that other societies grew as well? Our forefathers' fathers (maybe one more generation back) owned guns. Eventually, guns were taken away and nothing good happened from it. Their society grew and matured as well and they too thought times have changed and it would be a great idea to take away people's guns. We talk about learning from the past and doing what's right but society is one great big cycle of hypocrisy and stupidity. Take away guns and society will restart itself again with guns or weapons like them...maybe under a new nation, maybe as a civil war, maybe not. It may take 10 years, maybe 100, maybe 1,000. The USA is not that old in the grand scheme of societies.

Give the right person a spoon and he'll kill someone (look at our prisons). This fact doesn't mean we have to ban all spoons. Right? They ban them in prisons where there aren't guns. The criminals do not have guns so they kill with spoons...so we ban spoons and they kill with plastic, so we ban plastic so they kill with...OK you get it. My keyboard could understand by now.

Take away guns and guns will still be used in crimes...only the sane and law abiding people will not have guns. You can not take the invention of something so simplistic as a gun and remove it from history by removing the product of the invention. Nuclear weapons are an example of the other side of the coin...they were invented but, at the moment, are hard to produce. The fact they were invented means eventually they will be easy to produce. Where there is a will, there is a way.

The bottom line of the owning guns question is related to all aspects of life. People are greedy, they are self-serving and power hungry. Those in power in society will always benefit themselves first. No where in the world is there an example of country that is not power hungry. Until this basic principle is bred out of humans in our evolution, violence and all problems we see today will continue and a whole new set of problems will set in.