Very nice story, and I think it gets the point across. My dad always told it to me this way: If you left a gun on a chair, at no point will it ever decide to just shoot. Someone has to pull the trigger.
I enjoy the simplicity of that statement, if only things were that simple. Guns are awesome things, they really are. They're fun to shoot, no doubt about it. Also, when you hold one, you get a sense of the power in your grasp. Consider it, this mechanism in the palm of your hand can almost immediately end lives. That's a really, really powerful thing. In the right hands, it's a tool to protect in the wrong hands it's a tool to destroy. I would wager that So people do kill people, but they do it with guns. It's a tandem thing.If you left a gun on a chair, at no point will it ever decide to just shoot. Someone has to pull the trigger.
My guess is that if there was no gun on that chair, there are many people that have killed that wouldn't have. What I mean is that the gun itself is the impetus for destruction. The argument from the NRA types is always, well cars kill too or people can use a knife.. but that sense of absolute power doesn't come with a car or a knife. Guns though, they make you feel like a little god. Most of us humans come equipped with a governor that moderates our faux-god- tendencies, but some of us don't and it takes certain devices to set them off. Chairs don't set people off... guns do.
Pardon the late reply, but I would say the major thing here is that the gun requires minimal mental control over your body to execute a murder successfully. There's no time to hesitate once the decision to kill (=pull the trigger) has been made. All it takes is for the gun to be pointed in the right direction and a quick twitch of finger. With a machete, knife or an axe, one has to execute full physical assault. That takes concentration and effort and there are many more variables that can go wrong. Dynamite? Kind of, but still requires dedication to carry out the murder as long as the fuse is burning. So that's the thing with guns in my opinion. All it takes is one signal from the brain, a twitch of finger and the target has a bullet in them. The murderer might regret the decision immediately afterwards, but with guns the result is already final.