Dear Editor,

A letter by Andre O Sheppy appearing in the Jamaica Observer titled ‘Guns are not the problem’ cited a relative and interesting truth that guns don’t kill people, people do.

Although an indifferent connection between a gun and the commission of a crime may be true, could it be the same kind of relationship as saying that fingers don’t choke people, people do?

The existence of a gun seems to carry with it an inseparable link to crime, which may not be true of a knife, and may be the reason a police can charge you for gun possession, even without you having used it.

It is absurd to see a gun in a vacuum or merely as a neutral product of a concept materialised.

Why was the gun created?

It appears that if people kill people, guns become a convenient avenue or an external extension to their prior motive to kill — an effective instrument expressly to facilitate a means to an end.

A purely detached relationship between a weapon and a killer is difficult to visualise when someone could probably say people don’t kill people, it is social injustice that does, or a man could seek aquital for manslaughter or murder by claiming that his car committed the killing and not himself.

Ridiculous?

Thus the ‘seperatistic’ rational in the deciding of innocence or guilt is fairly hocus-pocus. So it has to be true then that people kill people.

Yet the instruments of death, such as guns, would become totally irrelevant or extinct if people simply love people. The fruits that we would create would be products of the heart if the goods of our social interactions were the products of love.

Homer Sylvester

Mount Vernon, New York

h2sylvester@gmail.com