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Originally Posted by Rochard
Of course it does. It empowers them.
If you give someone a knife or a baseball bat or a crowbar, they might feel slightly empowered to hurt one person. You give that same person an AR15 they KNOW they can kill multiple people AND cause mass damage.
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Let me say it another way. The fact that someone has a knife, a gun, a bat, a tank or a pipe bomb does not make them capable of planning out and then carrying out the murder of innocent people.
"Empowerment" does not play into it where a normal human being is concerned. Feeling empowered in itself does not allow a sane person to cross the line to murdering innocent people psychologically.
Sane people in every single culture on the planet draw a very firm line between hurting others (even to an extreme degree) and killing them. Killing is a completely different category of "wrong" in everyone's mind. And that is a universal fact among our species, in every corner of the world.
Killing innocent and unarmed people is an act which in itself, is the single best indication that the individual has come completely unhinged psychologically.
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The people who do pick up a firearm and shoot people do not have the courage to do the same with a knife or a baseball bat or a crowbar.
At the same time, it gives the killer "distance" from the act of killing. Shooting someone with a firearm is quick, easy, painless, effortless, and has a small amount of risk. Killing someone with a baseball bat or a crowbar is messy, requires strength, and has a lot of risk - And you are not going to be attacking 25 people in five minutes.
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You are correct in that they act differently, but it has nothing to do with courage. "Killing at a distance" is not the same psychologically as murdering people up close and personal. Killing from a distance usually does not engage the emotional reasoning of the individual and the resulting strong emotions, as opposed to just rational reasoning. This phenomena is well documented and well studied in psychology and first surfaced in what is commonly known as "
The Trolly Dilemma". Brain scans and monitoring neurological activity during testing showed clearly that both the idea of killing someone up close and personal and killing someone from a distance, are treated very differently in the brain. People can do horrid things from a distance such as a drone strike on a wedding party in Pakistan and feel little to no personal responsibility for what is really the murder of innocent people. It's not about courage, or the lack of courage, its just how the human brain is wired. Doing it up close and personal, is exactly that... its personal.
My point again is that simply having a gun, does not create a murderer of innocent people. Psychological/neurological problems do. There are 300,000,000+ guns in the USA. The gun is just a tool... its not a cause.