A widely misconstrued
slogan which did more harm than good to the
Second Amendment advocates (aka "
gun nuts") that widely declared it for a number of years. Over a short period of time, it came to be widely misunderstood and misconstrued both by its political opponents and laymen advocates, leading to such
anti-gun arguments as "
But it's much easier for the person to kill someone with a gun" and
pro-gun arguments as "
If you put a man in a room with a gun, the gun will not leap off a table and kill him". Neither of these arguments address the intended meaning of this poorly worded and woefully inadequate
slogan.
The original intent of the slogan was to get the point across that a
gun is no different from a
kitchen knife that can used to cut a
steak or cut open a
human being, or a
crowbar that can be used to open a
shipping crate or break into someone else's house. It is a
tool, and just like any other
tool, it has both legitimate and criminal uses. Thus, the idea behind the slogan is that the fault for a crime lies in the person committing it, not in the tool that he or she used to commit it, and that guns should be just as legal as any other tool because of their legitimate uses, such as enabling innocent people to defend themselves and their families from criminals. This idea, unfortunately, is obviously not conveyed very explicitly in the slogan "Guns don't kill people. People kill people".
In fact, this slogan was such a disaster for the
pro-gun/pro-
Second Admendment side of the
gun control debate that it effectively removed the entire "
tool" argument from the debate while giving the
gun control advocates tons of
ammunition (
pun intended) to use against their opponents.