There is not really all that much difference. Weapons are used to terrorise and murder people. What this person wrote will give some humans stress but it will never cause physical harm.
That you think one is justified and the other is not has very little to do with their relative harm, which is by no means a solved problem or a given. It has to do with your view of it, and those views will differ between different people.
It’s obvious they are different. It’s not obvious what differences would render guns useless, which appears to be your position.
I’m not asking you to arbitrarily explain how they are different. I’m asking you to explain how and why the differences you are thinking of make guns useless for civilians to own.
Since about March or April we've had a not insignificant number of people armed with Molotov cocktails, what difference is there when they are armed with factory made weapons?
Those people with molotov cocktails have been almost exclusively targeting property rather than people, and specifically corporate rather than personal property. I'm not suggesting you should approve that, but it is categorically different.
As for your question, it makes a huge difference. While any weapon can be used to inflict harm (by definition), some make that significantly easier than others. It's facile to ignore this and pretend all harms are equivalent.
>not a fair comparison. One item cannot be used to harm others
Going looking for expensive power tools in unattended work vehicles to pawn because you're desperate for your next fix or driving drunk sure sounds like "harming others" to me.
I am well aware that that is the exception and not the rule. The same is true for guns and explosives. Most guns will never be fired at anyone, they will go home, trunk, range, trunk, home, repeat or they will sit in a closet collecting dust. Pretty much all non-commercial explosive use in non-warring nations is for entertainment (anvil tossing and the like).
The difference, if I could put it in as mild a way as possible, is that it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated that safe, reliable access to weapons of known quality is a net positive to public health and safety.
- Drugs: Not designed to be harmful. Can be dangerous.
- Guns: Designed to be harmful. Can be safe.
I'm not saying that you can't argue that drugs are so dangerous that they should be prohibited or that guns can be safely used and should be allowed. The topic is the same but the starting point is not.
Your examples are of things that are dangerous, not of things that are designed to be harmful.
You could think of a gun as just a malicious piece of mechanical engineering. You could think of the software in the article as a malicious piece of software engineering.
I see these comparisons made so, so frequently and it bothers me. Guns are not the same as encryption or cars. Yet they're so often made in apples to apples comparisons that it's mind boggling to me.
Weapons are uniquely special in that they are specifically designed to maim and kill. Via defense or justified actions is irrelevant; it's a tool of war. Arguably, if there was E2E software that was specifically designed to maim and kill it might be received in a similar manner as guns.
I'm not saying guns don't have legitimate uses or the right to ownership in the hands of legal, sane owners.
You don't think if people started using impaling spike strips for the front of cars that there might be similar discussions about banning said strips?
Many who advocate for tighter gun control make exceptions to hunting rifles. Those very clearly have a use other than the death of humans. Could they be abused? Certainly. But tools can be abused all over the place.
However when someone takes a weapon, designed for slaughtering, and slaughters with it.. well, can you blame people for questioning the validity of owning these items?
None of those were designed to efficiently kill people like me. The OP's point is that I should be worrying more about handguns, and he's right - but that doesn't mean I can't worry about other things designed to pose a threat to my person too.
The original sentence contained more examples than just guns and bombs obviously making the comparison not serious.
Guns and bombs have been with us for centuries. The effect of them is known and it always same - it kills. We are already good at killing, invented the deadliest weapons and we don't really need to go "deadlier".
However, mental health issues, attention span, distractions, Dopamine feedback loop, etc. are also issues and they are something new for humanity. These things might kill slowly, and not exactly in a physical sense. The effect of them isn't visible yet but I believe we will see it in a few generations.
* a box of matches
* a handgun
* an assault rifle
* a 50 cal BMG
* an ICBM with nuclear MIRV
Saying that X has a property similar to the one Y has while ignoring the magnitude of the difference is silly.
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