Weapons shape a person’s sense of agency by transforming their perceived power

Evidence

A gun is inanimate, but through its intended firepower it also influences a person’s sense of agency (Selinger, 2012). … It was often called the great equalizer that made the little man as big as the largest man in the West. The amount of carnage in a shooting spree is determined by the complex interplay of the psychological makeup of the shooter, the social conditions that drove the shooter to commit mass murder, the nature of the setting, and the lethality of the gun. From a moral standpoint, in addition to the shooter, the gun industry bears some responsibility for developing and marketing guns of ever-greater lethality in the competition for market share. The gun lobby is also a contributor to the causal mix by blocking any gun reforms regarding the lethality of the firearms and bullets being marketed and by staunchly defending easy access to them. Lawmakers beholden to the gun lobby are facilitators as well. In short, mass killing is determined by a complex array of facilitators, rather than solely by the psychological makeup of the assailant. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1137

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s project of showing that harmful-policy defenders (here the gun lobby) use causal simplification to push blame onto a single actor while industry and lawmakers escape accountability.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1137