Responsibility in the world of actions

I guess I'll finally start this blog off with a thread I posted in a forum I'm trying to frequent. I use to be a forum-whore during my high school years and ever since I moved to Miami I fell out of my original home-forum. I missed posting so I'm trying to get back into the swing of things at another forum.

The thread was about the NIU Shooting, and it was kind of side tracked with talk about gun control and etc. I wasn't sure whether to make this 'blog' on that specifically or just responsibility on an individual basis. Obviously though I settled with responsibility, hence the title.

The reason I decided to be general in my opinion over this was because guns aren't the only thing that get whacked around because of individualistic actions. There's other things that get blamed for human actions such music, games, books, and etc. Of course I could be more specific in defending Guns; which I might since I'm establishing my general view of what "responsibility" is here. (Plus the fact that I need need to catch up on my journals. Damn a mixture of life and being lazy. I'm going to strive to do a journal a day until I'm caught up.)

For me, when you speak of responsibility for one persons action, the responsibility should lie within that person. Likewise, if you speak of responsibility of a group of persons, then the responsibility should like withing that group. Essentially responsibility should be taken by those involved, and no one/thing else. I could see this being counter if say, the action of one person was the fault of another. But even in this case, if they are both considered "responsible" adults and knowingly did the actions (where aware of their consequence), then the action was part of a 'group' and hence, the group (the two in this example) should be held accountable; unless the person who did the action was forced to do the action or did it unknowingly. Even then, there's other counter points you could take in a situation like this, and these debates are ones that I'd gladly partake in.

The debates that I find appalling is when responsibility somehow falls out of human hands and into objects or 'things'. A gun, for example, sitting on table is inertly harmless; this is why, after all, there are still gun stores. You require a human action to do anything with a gun. The same can be said with a book or a game. A human created said book or game, such as a human can create a gun. All three things are essentially harmless by themselves without human action. (You can't read a book or play a game without playing or reading it, just like you can't shoot a gun without shooting it.) So when such 'tools' are used, they can only be used by a human, therefore it becomes the humans responsibility on how it is used. (Hopefully this semantic isn't too far-fetched for some.) After all, just like a gun can be used to hunt for game and feed a family or be used to murder another human, a book or game can be used to improve the quality of life or embetter the thinking of someone or it can corrupt them or scar them mentally.

However though, some 'tools' affect people more than other tools. Using my examples, a misuse of a gun can harm others, while a misuse of books or games can just harm that one person (unless of course the person is unstable enough initially to propagate what they've read/played and harm others.) But even then, it should be realized that these tools are still inert by themselves, and that the human pulling the trigger is the action that's involved, and hence where the accountability should lie.