People in the gun culture often talk about guns as tools, and those outside gun culture reject the idea that guns are just another tool. As is often the case with guns, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
In Episode 9 of “Light Over Heat,” I argue that guns are indeed tools, but they are not just tools. They are tools that are by design dangerous.
As the smart guys at Open Source Defense say, this is a feature, not a bug. And as gun training old head Tom Givens puts it, “if they weren’t they wouldn’t be useful to us at all.”
Also mentioned in this week’s video, gun trainer Gabe Suarez and a reporter from Forbes Magazine who spent a year on the gun beat.
Please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.
Gun Culture 2.0 
Reminds me of that car back window sticker I occasionally see of a guy with a chain saw chasing one of those stick figure families.
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Haven’t seen that so I can only imagine.
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Good podcast. I agree with you. Even if I didn’t, good podcast!
That was the best Liz McBride could do? And they pay her? I wonder if she has more than one pair of shoes.
I have to confess, I have two sets of metric wrenches and 3 sets of English ones, box end and open end sets. And multiple sets of metric and English socket wrenches, having had cars and motorcycles with both English and metric hardware. Not all bolts are the same. Five torque wrenches, each different. I had two chainsaws, a big one and a small one, to help fuel our cast iron stove up in Los Alamos. We moved to the city and I gave them away (sniffle…cry). And don’t get me started on counting hex wrenches.
What’s the point? People collect stuff, sometimes for utility and sometimes for purely goofy reasons. Do I need eight bicycles? Well, I think so…and probably would buy another if I had room. Each has a niche, as do each of my firearms.
And after all, the correct number of guns or bicycles to own is always n + 1, where n is the number you have now…
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Of course guns are tools. Their salient purpose is to cause sufficient tissue and body damage to bring down game or stop a threat, civilian or military. There are stylized uses, such as target shooting (formal or just tin cans in the back 4) just as archery has become mostly stylized shooting rather than warfare, albeit a friend of mine hauled home an elk via compound bow and my brother snagged a deer with a crossbow.
Cars are tools too. But via negligent use or bad urban design stressing maximal vehicle throughput at speed, they become a very significant and lethal risk factor. Whether speeding, inattention, impairment, or 40 mph urban speed limits on multilane urban roadways (thank you, NM Dept. of Transportation), they are pretty good tools for unintentionally killing someone. Of course most gun deaths are deliberate, either homicide or suicide.
Seems we go in circles with these things.
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I think the “guns as tools” is the easy part for gun people to see. But there is often a reluctance to admit — in part for good political reasons — the “guns are not just another tool” parts. But it is nothing to shy away from. Of course anything can be used as a weapon to inflict harm, but guns do this a lot better than many things.
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As a colleague puts it, “Of course guns are dangerous. That’s why we own them.”
In fact, nearly all tools are dangerous, usually in direct proportion to their power. I have power tools in my home workshop that can maim or even kill with a moment’s inattention. I wear safety glasses when using them to protect from flying debris because they’re dangerous at a distance, too. Guns are no different in this respect.
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yes, cars are tools also, but when a drunk gets behind the wheel, he/she can be as lethal as someone with a gun. If we took drunk driving as seriously as irresponsible gun activities, we could cut down a lot of senless deaths.
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[…] owners. As I have argued on this blog and on my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel, guns are tools that are by design dangerous, so gun owners assume a certain amount of risk for themselves and their loved ones when they bring […]
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