AdminiScott mixes up his categories:
The problem isn't the guns, the knives, the baseball bats, or the bare knuckles.
Whether "the guns" are "the problem", is precisely what we were debating! Are you trying to close the discussion by fiat?

Naah; much more probably, it seems to me, is that you are using the word "problem" in the colloquial sense of "the real underlying root problem, that caused the immmediate and apparent problem -- as opposed to the immmediate and apparent problem itself".

Sure, in that sense, the Evil Of Man Towards His Brother that you probably meant (or your "flawed characters", as Skip put it) is probably the "root cause" of "the problem" of excessive gun killings.

But, sorry to be a nit-picker, but that's not "the problem" that I was talking about -- I was talking about the immmediate and apparent problem of excessive gun killings in general(*).

And in *that* context, "the guns, the knives, the baseball bats, or the bare knuckles" are just as much "the problem" as anything else.



(*): Or, if you will, you can look on it as me using *another* colloquial sense of the word "problem", namely "the piece of the larger original problem that one should go for in trying to find a fix". Doesn't matter which, comes to the same.