Young Writers Society

Weapons do not kill people. Shoot me with a gun, and I will not die because of the gun, or even the bullet. I will die because there is a cavity in my body where there is not supposed to be; layers of flesh pierced, sometimes bone, and, if I’m lucky, a major artery (it always speeds up the process considerably). I will bleed out. (Of course, there are variations to this scenario; the bullet could pierce my brain, my heart, somewhere where immediate shutdown will commence and finish before I have the chance to realize oh, god, I’m dying.) If you stab me, it is not the knife that kills me. If I fall from a building, it is not the fall that kills me, it is my body hitting the ground and being crushed from below into a mass that could not possibly function or sustain life. If you drive a car into my body, you have not killed me. The car has not killed me. The mutilation and destruction of my body is what killed me. We are weak and fragile beings; the sentient equivalent of eggshells. Our bodies kill themselves. Someone comes up to you and draws a knife from your collarbone to opposite hip, and your body responds with oh, shit and sends blood pumping through the opening, almost as if trying to escape the inevitable fact of your death. It does not want to be inside of you when that phase of your existence commences.

Weapons are merely the trigger, the product of a series of events that will trigger another series of events that will result in your death. And so the wheel turns.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying that murderers and the like are no less culpable for their acts. They, did, after all, trigger the death of a living, breathing human being. Nobody deserves to die like that. Murder is the epitome of wrongness, if we pitiful beings are intent on splitting our world into wrong and right, simply.

But, I am saying that we need to redefine our view of killing. To kill someone is not a single act; it is a series of them, and I think people have forgotten that. If a murderer is standing above your prostrate form, and your body has ceased to function because there is a gaping hole slightly to the left of the centre of your chest, and red where there is not supposed to be, you are dead, and they are the perpetrator, in a sense. But, say this murderer was abused by their father, and watched him kill their mother the same way they just did you. And, say you are the father. If one takes a step back, and tries to unravel that complicated tangle of events into a single skein, would they not find that you were the true perpetrator of the event, and, in essence, killed yourself? What if they stepped back even further, and found out that your own father abused you as a child, and that your wife was cheating on you, and contracted HIV through her adultery, and passed it on to you, and now you had a limited lifespan and you never asked for any of it and you were so angry because it just wasn’t fair and you didn’t do anything to warrant it. And, what if one took another step back, and discovered that your wife didn’t actually cheat on you, she was raped by her boss, who was chronically depressed and off his medication, and had flown into a fit of rage and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And your father was an alcoholic trying to drown the pain of the death of his firstborn son and first wife in a terrible house fire that could have easily been prevented. What then?

Our world is not so black and white.

I’m not asking for your forgiveness, just understanding.

Please.