Guns Are Only Deadly If Used For Their Intended Purpose

Old school The Onion re-posted below, from 2002:

"Guns Are Only Deadly If Used For Their Intended Purpose"

By Ted Farner
President, Brothers In Arms U.S.A.
June 12, 2002 | Issue 38â¢22

"As the president of Brothers In Arms U.S.A., the nation's third-largest gun-rights organization, I've heard all the arguments made by the anti-gun propagandists. And of the many misguided aspects of their anti-gun rhetoric, the most off-base is this bizarre notion that guns are inherently deadly. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is, guns are only deadly when used for their intended purpose."

"Time and time again, the enemies of groups like Brothers In Arms U.S.A. confuse the innocuous phenomenon of guns with the handful of irresponsible people who engage in the deadly practice of gun use. Well, there is a difference, and it's high time the namby-pamby liberals recognize this fact.

"Take the letter I got from a California woman whose 15-year-old son was "killed by a gun" while walking to his after-school job. Now, come on. No one is naïve enough to think that an innocent boy died just because a gun was designed, manufactured, and sold. Even before I looked into this woman's story, I knew there had to be more that she wasn't telling me. Sure enough, newspaper clippings and police records revealed that another youth aimed his gun at this boy and pulled the trigger. This action, gun experts will tell you, caused a precision-machined steel hammer to strike the primer of a 9mm cartridge, igniting the smokeless powder within, propelling a 138-grain bullet down the pistol's barrel and into the woman's son. The gun never even came within 10 feet of the kid. The only thing the gun was guilty of was functioning properly.

"My point? No child dies just because there is such a thing as guns. They die because one of these guns is used.

"In all my years of fighting for the cause of gun rights, not once have I ever come across a case of a gun killing a person. In every instance, the real killer has been the bullets that come out of the guns. So if you're going to insist on pointing fingers, point them at the bullet makers.

"Okay, admittedly, there is the occasional pistol-whipping victim who never regains consciousness. But that's a freakish, statistically insignificant aberration that merely proves my point: Only when guns are used as intended are they significantly dangerous to anyone.

"But try telling this to all the crybabies suing the gun companies because not everybody in their family is alive. What exactly are you suing them for--making a reliable product? That's a laugh. Somebody should be suing those shoddy import jobs: You'd be lucky to kill a baby with one of them.

"No, a gun is not deadly when it sits locked up in a collector's cabinet. Guns don't beam bad thoughts into people's heads that make them fall over dead. There is only one way guns kill, and that's if some misguided weirdo follows the rules of proper gun use and actually aims and fires the gun in accordance with the manufacturer's guidelines.

"I feel so strongly about this. As a gun activist and advocate, I feel it is my duty to speak out against this ridiculous fantasy of guns running around on tiny little legs, indiscriminately selecting pedestrians for death.

"For all the work Brothers In Arms U.S.A. has done to educate people, there remain all these misconceptions about guns being deadly. Well, so is an atom bomb... if you drop it on a city! But you've still got these hippies whining that the solution is to have no atom bombs whatsoever. Great, just punish everybody because a handful of kooks can't keep their fingers off the button.

"It's an old saying, but it's still true: 'Guns don't kill people. People kill people.' At least, if they've got a gun, they do."