Gun rights supporters in the US defend their views by saying that people, rather than guns, are those who kill people – and therefore, that calls to outlaw weapons would not solve the problem of crime, including mass shootings that have plagued their country of late.
Now a Twitter user who goes by the name The Ur-Kantbot [@KANTBOT20K] has had his account on the Medium blogging platform suspended – apparently for his take on the issue – namely, an article he published under the headline, “Guns Don’t Kill People, School Psychologists Do.” (Archived version)
However, the message Kantbot received from Medium said that the account, created in 2017 and populated since with a number of articles that have not proved problematic, had been suspended for “hateful text, images, or other content in username, profile, or bio.”
The author believes the real reason behind the ban is political censorship.
The Medium post that seems to have led the platform to suspend the account argues in favor of delving deeper into the backgrounds and motivations of those who commit mass shootings, instead of scrubbing their existence from the internet and media, and focusing on the gun debate instead.
The author also questions the role and effectiveness of psychological treatments dispensed in schools, considering that those have been on the rise alongside mass-murder incidents committed by perpetrators who had been receiving them.
Another point Kantbot makes is that efforts to socialize these individuals are tantamount to “bullying” arguing that “maybe the real cause of such cases is not guns, or a failure to identify and treat students, maybe the cause is these same students, following a protracted process of isolation and attempted psychological modification, learning to play the part the system has assigned to them, that of the security threat.”
Kantbot addressed the Medium ban to say that the real reason was refusal to discuss the possibility of “public school culture” being the root cause behind large-scale violent incidents perpetrated by troubled individuals – a problem, he argues, that may not be possible to fix merely by more stringent gun control, without addressing the core issues.
Meanwhile, Kantbot’s email to Medium sent in the hope of reversing the ban remains unanswered.
