Who's to blame: the gun or the gunman?

We have already discussed in class the theory of Technological Determinism. However, it was interesting to see the opposite stance in the "Determinism" section of the reading--Cultural Determinism. Each approach assumes a causal relationship between technology and culture. Technological Determinism is the idea that technology is the cause and it has cultural effects. Oppositely, Cultural Determinism says that cultural wants and needs cause technology.

The great example used in this section to illustrate how these theories work is the debate of gun control--should we impose restrictions on who can obtain a gun because the gun causes human death? Or is this unnecessary because the gun cannot work without a human to pull the trigger? Initially, before reading this piece, I would have taken a Technological Determinism stance and argued that guns kill people and should be restricted because of this. However, totally against my primary intuition, I would have to side with Cultural Determinism once learning the distinction between the two theories--and instead, I argue people kill people. The author writes how "an effect of thinking as a cultural determinist is the displacement of responsibility totally away from the technology." The technology of the gun was created for a cultural purpose--the desire to kill effectively and efficiently. Somebody thought up the idea of a gun and created it for human usage. The gun "does not care about intention," the intention is at the hand of the shooter. Inversely, the view from a Technological Determinism standpoint would be that "the gun introduced revolutionary new ways to kill...this changed the way that differences are settled..." And thus, since the gun birthed a "new" way of thinking, gun's are to blame rather than the person who's thoughts are now at the merciless hand of gun culture. This must be true because there weren't wars before guns, there weren't spears, swords, knives, bow-and-arrow, hand-to-hand combat--nope, before the gun, human's never had the (barbaric) idea that murder was an option to deal with an opposing force... Right. Genghis Khan begs to differ.

Technological Determinism argues that "people have no power to change or control things; only technology changes and controls things."  But that's not true. Here's a great example: we have discussed in class how access to the internet provides a lot of us with distractions against the tasks we need to complete everyday. This was surely not the intended usage of the internet. The internet was born to link the world together and provide a forum where people could communicate, learn, and even teach one another. The element of mindless internet usage is a side effect of the intended use of the internet. But why should we believe that this isn't something we can overcome as a technological determinist might argue? Dr. Woodstock's program "Anti-Social" is a prime example of Cultural Determinism, culture changing technology, at it's finest. The creator of the program had an intention in mind when he created it--to provide a way to use the internet in a more efficient and focused way, with zero distractions. (S)he had an optimistic stance that technology can be changed, and it does not have to dictate the way our culture progresses. Technology is irreversible, and stoppable, and all the other opposites of the dramatic fatalist description that the author provides for the impending doom of human culture at the hand of technology.

The author argues against Cultural Determinism by saying that the "problem with cultural determinism is that it discourages any response except optimism regarding technological change." And I say, what is wrong with that? Does Technological Determinism not assume a pessimistic outlook? I refuse to subscribe to a school of thought which displaces the notion of choice for fate, which trumps human willpower with technological momentum. Sure, Cultural Determinism depends on optimism--and that is not it's downfall but rather it's superior quality. The internet does not cause distractions, a person seeks out their own distractions! We choose to be distracted by the internet, much like a person with a gun chooses to pull the trigger. Cultural Determinism.