As a technologist, I see guns as a technology, that is, an invented extension of Man. Guns are weapons and weapons are a subset of technology created and used by humans to inflict damage upon others. Notice I did not say that weapons were designed to “defend” oneself. While self-defense may or may not be the purpose of the person using a weapon, it certainly is not the function of the technology. The function of weapons as a technology is to inflict damage upon another being, whether that being is a bear, a deer, a man, a woman, a child.
Some man-made objects can serve dual purposes as a utilitarian tool or as a weapon. A baseball bat or an axe or a kitchen knife are good examples. I won’t go into graphic detail about how these three tools can also be used as weapons. I’m sure you can imagine these things for yourself to whatever degree of CSI-inspired gruesomeness and horror your stomach can bear.
Guns are different from other weapons though. Guns have only one function and one purpose: to fire bullets that penetrate the bodies of other beings, causing organ damage, internal bleeding, and death. As a technology, guns serve no other purpose. I suppose you could use a pistol as a hammer but it wouldn’t be a very effective hammer and potentially quite dangerous if it were loaded.
“The uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself—that is, that its functions follow from its forms,” wrote the late author Neil Postman in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
As a technology, the function of guns is to inflict bodily damage. This is the only function of guns because their form is to harness and apply explosive pressure to a projectile, sending it down and out a barrel toward a target.
The earliest iteration of the gun as a technology was the cannon. Gunpowder was packed along with a cannonball into the breech of the cannon. A fuse then ran down into the gunpowder. A lit fuse brought fire down into the flammable gunpowder causing it to explode. The energy caused by the explosion propelled the cannonball down the barrel of the cannon and out toward its intended target.
Like any technology, cannons harness the power of natural processes to do what they do. Guns are just tiny cannons with the gunpowder and projectile compacted into tiny portable objects we call “bullets” that, when fired from a gun, can cause massive bodily damage and death.
When people argue that “guns don’t kill people,'' they're either conveniently missing this point entirely or they are purposefully trying to mislead you into thinking that guns, as a technology, are somehow neutral. No technology is neutral. Inherent in every technology is a bias toward shaping the world to be one way or another.
Now, I’m not saying that guns make the decision to pull their own triggers. That would be silly. What I’m saying is that the “guns don’t kill people” line is just semantic folly. People can play whatever word games they want, but in the end, guns do kill people because, as a technology, that is exactly what they were designed to do. The inherent bias of the technology of guns shapes a world in which people die from gunshot wounds.
Postman argues, and I think quite correctly, that once a technology has been created and introduced into culture, there is no going back. “Once a technology is admitted [to culture], it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do,” he writes. “Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”
As we move deeper into the unexplored territory of the technological revolution, I fear that we are not doing so with our eyes wide open. This is particularly the case with artificial intelligence. As we put greater trust into our technologies and cede power to the technocrats who control that technology, we become increasingly myopic and less able to see how things might play out in the future.
“Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us,” says Postman. “A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything."
