Guns kill people!

"This debate is supposed to be about weather or not Guns kill people. I did bring up gun control however because I feel as though it is very relevant…" Excuse me, but your entire opening statement is about gun control, and I'm going to try to slog through the stupidity of whether or not guns kill people and treat it as such. But I'll address your point anyway. Many gun deaths were crimes of passion between people who knew each other. If neither party had a gun, no one would be killed, because the only reason it escalated was because both parties were angry, and in the impulsivity brought on by anger, one shot the other. Guns are incredibly dangerous for exactly this reason. Not nearly as many people are going to kill someone in a fight with other weapons because fights are far more personal. There's no way to keep your distance with a anything else and it forces you to fully comprehend what you're doing, in a way that guns don't. So if nothing else, by dehumanizing victims, guns allow the kind of escalation that ends in murder. To continue, you've argued that guns don't kill people, bullets do. But there's no way a bullet can kill without a gun. If you shoot a bullet with a slingshot, you're not going to do any harm. If you throw a bullet off a building, it will quickly reach its terminal velocity, which will be just about enough to give your victim a nasty bruise. The only way to kill someone with a bullet, save through lead poisoning, is to accelerate it to a speed much faster than its terminal velocity by somehow propelling it through a barrel. And if you do such a thing, you've built a gun. Even if bullets do kill people, they can't without guns, and therefore guns kill people. And there have been many cases where guns have exploded and victims have been killed by shrapnel, so guns can kill people without bullets. You can also beat someone with a gun. And if you're going to argue anything heavy can be used to beat people to death, I'm going to point out that brass knuckles are designed for this reason and are illegal in most states as a result. As I think I've pointed out, guns are insanely dangerous in plenty of other ways as well. " ‘nobody wants to completely ban guns' WRONG! There are many people who want all guns banned all handguns, shot guns, etc. Mainly the PETA animal rights groupies. But there are other extremists too." Ahem. Let me quote my passage in its entirety, shall I? "So, to start, nobody wants to completely ban guns. There may be a few wing nuts out there that want to make it illegal to own any sort of gun..." PETA funds FBI-certified domestic terrorist groups. I think they fall squarely under the category of ‘wing nuts'. You used the word extremists yourself to describe people that want to totally ban guns. There is no way this will happen, because extremists, by definition, are minorities and therefore have little control over the vote. This argument is about the banning of handguns and automatic/semiautomatic weapons. Hunting with a handgun is toted as being extremely difficult, mainly because handguns are meant for shooting people at short range, not hunting. But if you can find a single case where a one-armed person has still been able to hunt because he used a handgun, by all means, show me. Automatic and semi-automatic guns aren't exactly designed to kill bear either. Ultimately, even if they were adapted to something like hunting, they were originally built for war. And nearly any gun can stop an animal that "can and will fight back", You don't need to pepper the entire landscape with an AK-47 in order to get your bear. And I'm sure that many people want to collect other instruments of war, say, live grenades, as well but that's illegal. If there's a law saying that people can't own some instruments of war, what makes equally dangerous guns any different? Again, I think I mentioned that criminals can't be expected to turn in their guns. But if there are no guns in the country to buy or steal, they will run out after a year or two. In the US, there are 14.24 gun deaths per 100,000 people. Canada has much stricter gun laws. While hunting firearms are not restricted (although you do need to own a gun permit, obviously) handguns are. And automatic guns are completely prohibited. How many gun deaths are there in Canada? 4.31 per 100,000. Can you imagine? Very few civilians in Canada own the handguns they need to defend themselves from those horrible criminals. By your logic, their gun death rates should be much higher. Canada also has much lower crime rates than us, so not nearly as many people are getting robbed with guns. Why is this happening? Because there are a lot less guns in Canada. http://www.guncite.com... As for illegally importing guns, I would like to point out Canada again. They have good border security. And whaddyaknow, they don't have many guns illegally imported into the country! Guns are made of metal. So just put airport luggage through a metal detector and people are going to find and confiscate them. We'd also have to beef up border security but there are plenty of other good reasons (drug trafficking, illegal immigration) to do that without bringing gun control into it. "Nothing will stop them because at the end of the day they are going to do what they want to regardless of weather it is illegal or not!" "Thus leaving all of us, law abiding innocent people unarmed when a criminal attacks us." "Believe me criminals are not all stupid many can make handguns for themselves." Paranoid, much? The world is not full of scary criminals out to get you. That's just fear mongering. Let's look at things separately, shall we? If nothing will ever stop criminals, why stop at gun control? Why not stop enforcing all laws? After all, nothing will stop them from killing our families and using our children to traffic drugs, right? And when was the last time you were attacked by someone with a gun? The chances of encountering that situation are next to zero, and they'll be even less with proper gun control. And here's the clincher. If criminals can make their own handguns, why don't they? There have been literally thousands of criminal cases where guns have been traced to their owners through serial codes. Wouldn't it make more sense to make your own, totally unregistered, gun? Most people and nearly all criminals don't have access to the materials and machinery they'd need to make a handgun. I work with metals in robotics and I can tell you a handgun would be incredibly difficult to make, even with access to an entire machine shop. I have a lot of respect for your friend. "It will not make it any harder for a criminal to commit murder." Again, no guns, harder to commit murder. See above. I'm very sorry to hear about the shooting in your school, but I'm going to have to disagree about parents locking away their guns. Simple enough. Kids get into things. Hiding guns away is fine and good, but it's ideal if their parents don't own them. I don't see why you think that keeping guns around is somehow safer. Yeah, I'm going to ignore the Rosie O'Donnell thing because it's pointless and I don't have space. I already proved that guns kill people, although I'm sure the occasional spoon does too. And we successively ban things here all the time. It's just a matter of good border control, which I daresay we didn't have in the 20's. And we already ‘ban' crime. That's why you go to prison for it. And that's just the point, "if they really want to kill someone" most people don't. Again, it's easy to kill someone with a gun, much harder with something else. Not just physically so. Emotionally, it's much more difficult to kill someone any other way. Criminals are people, too. Most are just desperate. Guns just plain help you distance yourself from a victim.