Firearms are designed to kill or disable another party. Software has no use case besides what a developer gives it. That's a pretty significant difference in design!
I think parent means that not all guns were designed explicitly for killing. Target shooting is popular enough that there are guns designed explicitly for it.
Assuming center of mass you've really gotta pepper someone with .22lr before they're as good as dead. .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) is still .22 but a lot more effective at putting holes in people.
At sufficient range a blast of 12ga birdshot won't even kill an old lawyer. At short range the question would be what lawyer?
You are making a huge confusion if you thing .223 is still .22; the mass of the bullet is bigger, the energy is way bigger (disclosure: I am a shooting range instructor when I am not an IT guy)
22LR is deadly to small rodents or a cat, not allowed for hunting of anything larger (and I am not suggesting anyone hunts cats, it is just to give an example of size).
This a fruit-to-oranges comparison. You can't compare "Software" to "Guns" they're not that same level. You could maybe compare software to metallurgy.
You can make specific programs that have evil intent (virus, worms, ransomware) or are dangerous but have positive reasons to exist. You can also form metal into guns and knives too.
You could think of a gun as just a malicious piece of mechanical engineering. You could think of the software in the article as a malicious piece of software engineering.
OMG I can't believe you're downvoted for saying that, more than the person you were responding to! Americans you are nuts. Last political-related comment I ever make on here, if I can help it. Sick of seeing and getting downvotes for stating the bleeding obvious.
You can generalize from firearms and target shooting up to something that applies to software and surveillance dragnets. Sure, you might just want to target your ads more accurately but the same software can be turned right around and (ab)used as a surveillance dragnet.
Selling better ads and tracking consumers is just target shooting with some abstraction. You can still ruin lives with the technology if it's used irresponsibly. Any similarity or comparison with the firearms industry is not popular in the software industry for reasons having to do with the beliefs most people in the software industry subscribe to.
The parent comment was denying that software can be used for nefarious purposes because software only does what the developer builds it to do. That is probably why he was down-voted.
Resorting to calling an entire country names, because their beliefs differ from yours in a way you don't understand is "nuts". Not commenting, in that case, may indeed be prudent.
