Summary Of Technology Of The Gun By Evan Selinger

In his essay, The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun, Evan Selinger argues that the common anti-gun control slogan ‘Guns don't kill people. People kill people’ misconstrues the nature of technology and the impact that certain pieces of technology hold, psychologically, on their users and those around them. He offers critiques on gun culture, the National Rifle Association’s maxim, and Instrumentalism. Selinger begins his argument by explaining how the general modern-day view of technology, one of Instrumentalism, assigns technology as being “value-neutral”. Meaning that regardless of intended use, or potential morally positive or negative application, technology is independent of “beliefs and desires”, and cannot be assigned any moral

Gary Kleck, Criminologist at Florida State University, in a sample size of 1,874 imprisoned felons across 10 states, 81% said a “smart criminal will try to determine if a potential victim is armed”, 74% agreed that burglars avoided occupied dwellings in “fear of being shot”, and 40% said they had been deterred from committing a crime because “they fear that the potential victim was armed” (LEG). In each of these situations, behaviors were altered because of the presence or potential presence of a firearm; the situation had changed due to the felon's knowledge of the intended design of a gun. Additionally, if a user's mindset or way of thinking is altered when holding a weapon, their mindset switches from that of one who is on equal grounds with their peers and the world around them, to one that holds a much higher degree of power over all non-gun-brandishing individuals. They go from the status of a person incapable of quickly firing bullets that can reliably pierce targets to the status of a potential shooter, both to themselves and all that perceives them. This power or status has impactful psychological effects. In an experiment conducted on 100 male university students, the mere presence of a gun in the room led to far more aggressive behavior from the participants (Berkowitz and