Until you can show me a gun that can magically load itself up, and fire without a person holding it, it's the person not the gun.
Ridiculous. If the person only had a breadknife as a weapon, there wouldn't be the problem of death due to having six bullets rip your innards to shreds along with collateral damage to eight people standing close by. If the person only had a fist, then we are talking bruises, maybe a fractured bone.
And yes, the person who chose to use a weapon knowing how dangerous it was and knowing that use of it could cause death is who is tried in court and the degree of responsibility is decided according to circumstances - premeditated, reckless, etc., and the nature of the weapon and what it is capable of is one of the factors used in deciding the degree of murder a suspect is charged with.
The black markets in guns and drugs alike only exist because not enough resources have been made available to destroy them, and also because not enough resources have been made available to tackle the issue of demand. Demand for guns is just as much a sickness as demand for drugs. I am not suggesting a total police state or searches of homes. I am suggesting a serious effort to treat the sick, paranoid mindset that informs the zealots who wrap themselves in the second amendment. I am also suggesting a serious effort to refine the national assessment of the value of each individual life. Because right now, it seems to me that the cost to the inner city poor, men, women and children alike, is considered by good ole boys and their kinfolk a reasonable one to make them pay. Why should the poor and black and hispanic pay the price so that ignorant, under-educated racist bigots can indulge their paranoid fantasies?
I don't think you understand at all what I meant by 'fallout from gun availability and frequent gun use'. I don't think you understand at all how different society can be without the wallpaper of widespread gun ownership. I grew up in a society where even the police were not armed. My children are living in one where you can openly carry a gun to the supermarket.
More guns does not mean less violence, More guns means more danger of stupid, prejudiced fools like George Zimmerman using them to shoot other people dead.
Even one death as a result of gun violence should be completely unacceptable, but you state again and again that 'most people' wouldn't pull a gun on a person they suspected had a gun, as if somehow the exceptions are something we can do nothing about, and you say that living by the sword makes it more likely that you will die by the sword apparently without really extrapolating that to a national level and acknowledging the scope of the national disease.
You shrug when you see gang members die violent deaths at the hands of other gang members, and you seem to think that is one small isolated issue separate from the wider picture. It is in fact the whole problem - guns are available and guns cause immense escalations in violence (they are the ultimate instant gratification weapon) and they are available because life in America is cheap and machismo (which has as one of its major elements reliance on the gun as a prop) is a huge part of culture.
Machismo being of course one of the foundations of DV...
What a gun offers is instant power, whether to the fundamentalist patriarch determined to fight off the gummint or the thug in the hood. The easy availability of guns to people who want that power is the heart and soul of the problem.