The Purpose of Guns is Not to Kill People

An interesting truth that is often ignored even by those that are gun advocates, is that guns are designed to stop people from whatever they are doing, not kill them. Granted, in the process of stopping them you will likely kill them and the very act of firing a weapon is an act where the use of deadly force needs to be justified,  but killing the suspect is rarely the intended purpose. Now I'm not saying this because I think one should shoot to wound, I am saying this because if the average citizen or even police officer shoots and wounds a suspect, and the suspect is then no longer a threat, practically none will walk up on the wounded suspect and finish them off; is killing the suspect was the purpose they would! The police are taught to shoot at the center of mass at a human silhouette target. This is not because shooting a person center of mass has a greater probability of killing a human target, but because shooting center of mass increases the probability of hitting a human target, thus increasing the probability of stopping a suspect. The left has based all it's anti-gun rhetoric that all guns have one purpose; to kill. That even target shooters are only honing their skills for hunting and/or killing; never mind that of the 100 million gun owners in the US, only 37.7 million have participated in hunting of some kind. Therefore the idea that gun is actually a tool to stop someone from doing harm usually results in extreme responses. This Thursday I called KSCO and talked with Mark Silverman who had as a guest West Holts, from California Gun Talk. My call was in response of an incredibly stupid remark by Silverman. Silverman was discussing an incident where a female shot a male intruder 5 times with a handgun and the intruder survived. Silverman then said since the female didn't kill the suspect with 5 rounds there would be no reason for her to have a large capacity magazine, the impetus being since the only purpose of a gun is to kill people, the victim had somehow failed to protect herself because she didn't kill the intruder and would not need more ammunition if there were more intruders because she had already shown she wouldn't be able to kill them. When I said that she had accomplished her goal by stopping the intruder from doing her harm, which is the same reason a police officer uses deadly force, to stop someone from committing a violent act. At this Silverman cut me off, stated off the cuff that the police are not taught to shoot at knees and hung up on me; expect this result from the left because it is poison to their script..

When deadly force is justified, to sole purpose is to stop the perpetrator; whether it results in the perpetrator's death or not is really inconsequential.