The people-kill-people slogan functions as a moral-evasion device to deflect industry accountability

Evidence

The causal cliché is widely used for deflecting accountability. William Ruger, a gun manufacturer, argued, “Guns are a matter of individual responsibility. You keep coming back to the fact that people kill people, not guns” (Ayres, 1994). Professed helplessness to do anything about mass killings is another form of moral evasion for opposing any constraints on the gun industry. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1138

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the causal cliché as a moral-disengagement tactic — an agent dissolving into a simplistic, impersonal truism.
• CANDY: The irony of a firearms manufacturer using the cliché could be a tweetable one-liner about deflection.
• XREF: connects to: Working in advertising was argued to degrade the worker’s own humanity through constant deception — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 263