Gun advocates after any of the numerous shootings that happen everyday in the United States are usually quick to defend their right to bare arms. In the wake of the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history in Orlando, gun advocates once again are quick to defend their firearms.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That is one of the most common calls from gun enthusiasts. Yes, one person killed another, but they killed them with a gun. That is the guns sole purpose. To kill. The killer in the Sandy Hook massacre didn’t run down 20 children and 6 adults with his car. He shot and killed them with an assault rifle. The Orlando killer didn’t murder 49 people and injure 56 others with a knife. He gunned them down with an assault rifle.

It is a simple fact that the guns sole purpose is to kill. They are tools of destruction. They serve no other purpose. Cars are designed to drive you from point A to point B. Yes, you can kill someone with a car and there are thousands of deaths every year in the US from car accidents. Those are accidents though. A knife is a tool that can be used for an abundance of things. Yes, you can kill someone with a knife, and some are designed for that. You can’t kill anywhere near the amount of people with a knife as you can with a gun, though.

The bottom line is these mentally ill people and criminals use guns because they kill. They are the best, most efficient way of killing. No other developed nation in the world has mass shootings at the rate that the U.S. does. No other developed country in the world even come close to the number of people killed in the US every year due to guns.

Just this year, the US has seen 24,014 killed by guns according to gunviolencearchive.org., and 141 of those deaths are the results of mass shootings with countless others being injured.

The poison culture this country has developed guarantees that the bloodshed will continue. Every time that there is a shooting that the news deems worthy of reporting, gun sales sky rocket because people are afraid that the government is “coming to take their guns.” Their logic is that they might as well stock up on them while they can. In reality, the government has done next to nothing to “take your guns.” Still, people buy more and more guns and more people die.

If the U.S. didn’t have the gun culture that it does, if the U.S. made it more difficult to acquire a gun, or banned certain types of guns, or did anything to enforce any type of gun safety, many of the 24,014 people who have died this year might very well still be with us. But they’re not. They were killed by guns.