Edit: let’s not get into ideological arguments about gun control, automobiles, etc here; I meant that you can’t blame an object when a human has to take an action, not get into a political battle.
This is famously the slogan of the pro-gun lobby (funded by gun manufacturers and merchants), who want the society to be awash with guns because they're profiting from it but don't want to be blamed for the consequences.
The counterpoint is that when we get rid of most of the guns we also end up substantially eliminating the killings.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_don't_kill_people%2C_peop...
It's also the view of anyone who hasn't been driven mad by propaganda. Regardless of your political views a tool is a tool at the end of the day. Attempting to anthropomorphize a category of objects in order to shift blame all for the sake of furthering an agenda is plainly bad faith behavior.
I'm not a fan of bike lanes with zero separation from automobiles but that doesn't mean it's appropriate or even remotely plausible to blame cars for killing cyclists. Inattentive drivers and poor road design are what kill them.
As tempted as I am to cast about for a third highly divisive subject to bait people with, perhaps we could avoid blatantly dragging the conversation towards off topic tired political talking points?
Anyway my above reply was hardly the appropriate venue to engage in a genuine manner on that topic. The parent was blatantly derailing things by inserting his pet political issue. That sort of behavior undermines the community and so (IMO) should not be indulged.
Car design has significant influence on pedestrian survivability of accidents. This is why hood ornaments were largely abolished, and also why casualties have gone up as SUVs with poor lower forwards visibility have become popular.
If we really want to go off topic, we should drag in the use of technological protection methods: what is the equivalent of ADAS for guns? Maybe as a baseline the US government should mandate geofencing for guns as it has for drones. Put a phone level computer with GPS in the lower receiver with a trigger interlock. It would then disable when within 100m of a school, or during periods of rioting. That could also provide a live feed to the government of every round fired.
Guns are literally made for killing people. That's their only reason for existence. They are a weapon. This makes them qualitatively different from cars, which only incidentally kill people (and the vast majority of time, not on purpose).
To me, trying to equate deaths caused by purpose-made killing tools with those caused by generic tools is arguing in bad faith.
However that phrasing is also commonly used when a person or group wreaks havoc in a seemingly unpredictable manner. So I think the appropriateness comes down to how much chaos it has created and the level of apparent confusion on the ground.
Let's reserve "car hits the crowd" for situations where no driver was involved like a break failure on a car parked on a slope or a self-driving car bug.
If the automobile was "self driving" I would.
>Also, you don’t blame a gun for killing, but the person who pulled the trigger.
Nah, I also blame guns and appreciate gun control laws.
thats the point...
>Car plows into Christmas market in Germany, killing at least 5 and injuring 200
Compare bombs. Very typical for a bomb attack to be "bomb goes off in crowd" or similar, rare for headlines to contort themselves with "terrorist plants bomb near crowd and triggers it to explode". But nobody worries about how such a construction assigns undue agency to the bomb and acquits the bomber; it's just linguistically awkward to mention him within the confines of a newspaper headline.