"You sound like the kind of person who believe that guns should be restricted because they kill people,"
No, I sound like a person who thinks you can call a book 'bad' if the ideas it espouses were used to kill millions of people.
" Blame the horrors you speak of, not on books or ideas,"
Why not? Bad ideas are bad ideas. Bad moral codes are bad moral codes. To think otherwise is to engage in the flaw of 'moral relativism'. I speak not of 'books' as a sheaf of paper, but as a carrier of ideas and ideologies ... and, yes, there are EVIL ideologies. Communism and Nazism are two.
"but on people who read books and have taken from those books whatever they felt was necessary to justify their actions."
Your error is in thinking that people are just using the ideas as excuses. They are not. They actually *believed* the nonsense about dictatorships or proletariates, or the slogans Mao told them, or that deficit spending would incrase effective demand, etc. Those who spread those ideas share some responsibility.
A better analogy is when Al Sharpton incited a riot that burned down a Jewish man's store in Harlem. Sharpton's words and ideas had some consequence, but by your lights, the Jewish store could only sue the actual arsonist, who bears 100% of the blame. Not so. Sharpton bears the blame too, and perhaps the greater part, for inciting the violence in others. Some lead, others follow.
"Karl Marx is no more responsible for the killing committed by Stalin than are the authors of the Bible responsible for the killing during the Crusades."
Hogwash. Read "Gulag Archipelago" and understand that the whole edifice of the Communist repression was built into the ideology from day one. That is why it is not just Stalin, but Lenin, Castro, Mao, the Khmer, Ho Chi Minh, the eastern european communist leaders, etc. who *all* created police states that killed dissidents. The seed was Marx's theories that denied real economic or even political freedom, insisted on historical determinism (a crock that fed ideology of dictatorship), etc.
Besides, this is not a critique of Marx the *person* but of his work - his work was and is dangerous and caused great harm to the human race. To deny this is to deny 20th century history.
" People harm, books do not, and it is an abdication of personal responsibility to think otherwise."
Neitzche himself spoke of the power of the Tablet writers. Keynes himself once opined that we were all living in thrall to the theories of some long dead economist.
They understood the power of ideas and those who create them. We speak of the power of ideas because we ALL act under the influence of the ideas that we are taught and that we believe. Even the suicide bombers today are doing it because they were told a pack of lies, based on some crooked ideas in some warped books, that will make them do evil things. To ignore responsibility of the idea-spinners and the idea sellers, and the fomenters and spreaders of these noxious ideologies is to - truly - abdicate responsibility and consequences for actions.