Brian: It always gets my wick a bit when gun-loving Americans roll out this hoary old NRA-fed chestnut.
The key word in your phrase there is “responsible” – of course a gun isn’t responsible for its actions. If you change that to “is a major factor in..” it stays true for guns, but becomes patently ridiculous for your exam example. With fewer guns, fewer murderous people would have a tool available to them that makes their job easy.
Put another way, there would be an awful lot fewer high-rise buildings in the world if there were no industrial cranes or scaffolding. Cranes and scaffolding aren’t responsible for high-rise buildings, but without them things become a lot more difficult.
