The Silliness of Blaming Inanimate Objects

I’ve often said that the news media has fostered false, illogical premises that have gone on for decades.  One of these false premises is gun violence. 

I know.  A lot of people will say that the media just uses it as a term to describe all the crime that people commit with guns.  However, the term itself is inherently false, and shouldn't accuracy be the news media’s number one priority?

The truth is that there is no such thing as gun violence.  Guns are inanimate objects that have no emotions.  They cannot, by themselves, kill or hurt anyone or cause any destruction.  Someone must cause the gun to purposely or accidentally discharge itself for anyone to get hurt.  Nevertheless, the news media continues with this illogical and absurd premise of blaming an inanimate object for what people do with it.

I don’t own a gun.  I may never own a gun, but I am totally opposed to government denying citizens the right to own any object just because other citizens abuse that object to cause to harm to other people.  Think about it logically. People have used baseball bats and tire irons to hurt and kill other people, but we never hear the media talk about baseball bat violence.  Just recently in Arizona, a Muslim man was convicted of running over his own daughter with his truck because he was angered by her becoming too Americanized.  I don’t recall the media lamenting truck violence.

The state where I live, Arizona, has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country.  Yet I haven’t noticed any major shooting wars going on in the streets of Arizona like there are in some south side communities of Chicago where I grew up.  In fact, it is now legal to carry a concealed firearm without a permit, and the crime rate has decreased.

Nevertheless, the news media is more concerned about promoting gun control advocacy groups.  In today’s issue of The Arizona Republic, there is a front-page story about a gun control group ripping Arizona for its lack of restrictions on guns.  Nowhere in that story are facts about the crime rates of states with less restrictive gun laws.  The truth is that the nine states with the lowest crime rates in the United States all provide their citizens the right to carry guns.  Where is the journalism, Arizona Republic?

Guns by themselves do not kill people anymore than cars drive drunk. To the gun control advocates in this country and their supporters in the main stream media, those facts mean very little.  In their world, advocacy trumps reality every time.