The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun

[There Is No Spoon]

July 23 2012, 4:40 PM ET

Does the old rallying cry "Guns don't kill people. People kill people" hold up to philosophical scrutiny?

The tragic Colorado Batman shooting has prompted a wave of soul-searching. How do things like this happen? Over at Wired,David Dobbs gave a provocative answer in "Batman Movies Don't Kill. But They're Friendly to the Concept." I suspect Dobbs's nuanced analysis about causality and responsibility won't sit well with everyone.

Dobbs questions the role of gun culture in steering "certain unhinged or deeply a-moral people toward the sort of violence that has now become so routine that the entire thing seems scripted." But what about "normal" people? Yes, plenty of people carry guns without incident. Yes, proper gun training can go a long way. And, yes, there are significant cultural differences about how guns are used. But, perhaps overly simplistic assumptions about what technology is and who we are when we use it get in the way of us seeing how, to use Dobbs's theatrical metaphor, guns can give "stage directions."

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Instrumentalist Conception of Technology

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."

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Beyond Instrumentalism: Gun Use

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What the NRA position fails to convey, therefore, are the perceptual affordances offered by gun possession and the transformative consequences of yielding to these affordances. To someone with a gun, the world readily takes on a distinct shape. It not only offers people, animals, and things to interact with, but also potential targets. Furthermore, gun possession makes it easy to be bold, even hotheaded. Physically weak, emotionally passive, and psychologically introverted people will all be inclined to experience shifts in demeanor. Like many other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which aspects of experience are both "amplified" and "reduced". In this case, there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence.

... http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...un/260220/

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This is a really good article that compares the NRA's "instumentalist" view of guns to the reality that gun + human = a different person. This is the philosophical part of the argument that is missing from the NRA's simplistic "guns don't kill people" argument. Yes, people kill people, but guns turn passive people into potential killers - this is where the USA is missing the boat in the continued lack of action over gun legislation. Fairly long article, worth the read IMO.

[jaxx]

One of these days people will figure out why the old west was saved by not letting guns into town for shoot-em-ups.