Except of course that has absolutely nothing at all to do with what she was writing about in that particular passage.
Let me put the quote from the OP into some context so we can at least have a tiny smidgen of a clue of what Sontag is actually saying here.
It is completely 100% clear that Sontag is literally saying here that the camera is a socially acceptable substitute for a gun. That people are redirecting their violent urges to photography - or at the very least cameras are marketed to appeal to those urges.
Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. It's as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger.
Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravagances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. In the hyperbole that markets cars like guns, there is at least this much truth: except in wartime, cars kill more people than guns do. The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs. Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.
Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari... Guns have metamorphosed into cameras...
Using the larger Sontag quote as context, I still say she's wrong. She is assuming nefarious, predatory motive, and gendering the act of buying a camera as well as using it, that she ought to know better than to assume. Granted she wrote this before she became partners with Annie Liebovitz, but the very existence of women photographers and their use of the camera means either that all women photographers are suffering from penis envy (silly) or that cameras are in fact neutral tools and only take on a particular meaning in the hands of someone who intends to give it that meaning.
The point of the rock analogy was to show how her argument about subliminal murder is largely invalid, unless you accept the construct of murder not as an act of deliberate violence but rather an act of transfiguration. I don't know that I want to make that metaphysical leap.
I think this is a very interesting passage:
Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world.
In some ways she was absolutely prescient about today's instagram/pinterest/facebook/twitter world where phone-cams and security cams and cameras at the ATM are constantly recording us, with such banal frequency that we have to ignore and accept it in order to get on with our lives. That omnipresence of the photographic moment is the true murder by camera, because it is in fact something we are powerless to stop, object to, or control.
But getting back to murder by camera, I disagree that being seen by someone else as you have never seen yourself is not murder; it is a fact of life. EVERYONE who sees you, even without a camera in hand, sees you as you have never seen yourself.
To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.
Again this assumes a constant, one-directional relationship between photographer and photographand in which the power of control is absolutely, uniquely and always in the hands of the photographer. It assumes the subject is never willing or complicit in the act of photographing, which we all know is not true.
What I'm saying is not that Sontag is absolutely wrong, but that she's not always wrong. Yes, photography of the trophy-hunting nature certainly occurs, and it occurs whether it is of the human, animal, vegetable or mineral. But to blanket ascribe that motive to all photographs, or even all photographs of animate objects, is flawed (see my earlier comments about self-portraits. Are those then ritualized suicides?).
