Imagine there’s a button. It was invented solely to kill people– you press it, and so many strangers will die. (Not a new concept; lots of movies and books have been written with this idea.) Keep in mind that this button has no other purpose. It’s a murder button.
Knowing full well what it does, there are people who walk up and press it. They press it in anger, in vengeance, or just in some very disturbed feeling of hate. People die. The button-pressers are arrested or killed, hauled away to be analyzed– “Why would someone press this button?! What’s wrong with them that they would do such a thing?!” The news focuses on the murderers’ pasts, any slight history of mental illness, testimonies from neighbors and relatives, all the while completely overlooking the real problem: the button.
Now yes, anyone willing to press the murder button is certainly a bad person. Of course such murderers are a problem. But why continue to deal with only the button pressers and not the button? Why leave something lying on a table that was meant to kill? It doesn’t make sense to simply teach children that murder buttons shouldn’t be pressed. It doesn’t make sense to argue that possessing at least one murder button is a means of safety and protection for your family. It’s ridiculous to claim that the button isn’t the problem.
Imagine– more and more people are pressing these horrible murder buttons, and the majority reaction is to say, “Oh geez, I need to get my own murder button, just because the world is so dangerous now!” And anyone who points and suggests the buttons themselves be banned? Well, they’re out of their damn mind, obviously. The buttons aren’t dangerous so long as murderers don’t press them, right? And even if we made murder buttons illegal, wouldn’t murderers still find a way to get a button on the black market? Wouldn’t such a scenario be worse, if all of these “good” countrymen weren’t allowed to have their own murder buttons for self-defense?
“Murder Buttons don’t kill people. People who press Murder Buttons kill people!”
Imagine such a world, such a country, where tools of murder are considered in themselves innocent. Imagine how many people, how many children, would keep dying all for an age-old “right” to keep such weapons. Imagine lawmakers feigning attempts to put restrictions on a murder button, allegedly making them “harder to get,” with the idea that only “reasonable, deserving people” are allowed access to them. There shouldn’t be an argument. There shouldn’t be sides, or complications, or uncertainties, in this matter.
Something created to kill– and yes, that is the sole purpose, as stated– should not be so often defended. No one needs a tool of murder for “safety.” No country needs a National Murder Button Association feeding funds to the government. There’s a problem in all of this, certainly. A long-lived problem that somehow isn’t going away.
When the majority is in denial, how can the problem ever be solved?
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