Can you think of a promotional slogan that exceeds this one in persuasive power, especially for people who are already inclined to accept its implications: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”?
The slogan’s effectiveness resides in its second clause. Of course people kill people. But that obvious fact beguiles us to accept the sketchy logic of the first clause and misleads us in two ways:
First, we discount the killing power of modern weapons, which have a deadly potency that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined when they wrote the Second Amendment.
