Who do you Hold Responsible?

When an act is committed, who should we hold responsible? Should we blame the person who commits the action? Or the ideology/belief that leads him to do it? Or the tools/environment that made the action possible?

Can you honestly say you’ve never pointed at different sources, based on the situation or your moral/political orientation? Let’s check it out.

Take the periodic gun killings that happen in America. Is the problem the killer, who post facto is almost always found to be a guy with a mental problem? Or is it the ease of procuring guns in “the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years”, as the Onion describes it?

So why is it so easy to procure guns in the US? Because (brace yourself) it’s there in the constitution! Then again, as Scott Adams says:

“The Founders wisely made it hard to change the Constitution, but they did give us the tools to do it. And we have changed it in the past, e.g. slavery.”

As Adams says:

“Common sense tells us that society ALWAYS changes over time. The Founders knew situations change (they were revolutionaries after all) and sometimes people get better ideas. Why would Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson want to prevent any new and better ideas from becoming part of the Constitution? They weren’t gods. They were smart people trying to invent a good system that could become greater over time.”

And yet even when the constitution is amended, there will be those who will refuse to obey the (new) law because it violates their religious belief. This was evident when a clerk refused to issue a same sex marriage certificate even after it was legalized. To which Barrack Obama responded:

“We also have to say clearly that our religious freedom doesn’t grant us the freedom to deny our fellow Americans their constitutional rights.”

And since we are on religion, I’ll quote Steven Weinberg on the topic:

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Now let’s link all of this to the blog: on the issue of gun killings, who do you hold most responsible? The individual or the system that allows him to get guns so easily? Or both? Is your answer the same when you hear about the religious suicide bomber? Do you hold both the bomber and the religion responsible?