A gun is an item or device though, it is strictly something wielded and operated by man.
Religion is a system that has been known to taken advantage of people when young and indoctrinate or alter their values or beliefs before they're old enough to actually think about it. If a child was a raised around religion, and has chosen to listen to it as a result that's only a natural result of the human mind. We tend to listen to and believe what we're told when young, knowing this it makes little sense to blame the individual often times when we know there was a system behind the scenes that caused this.

And note this mainly falls back to practices such as believing things without evidence, or rejecting evidence to defend their faith. Things like rape, murder I will admit is usually the individual looking for an excuse.

Lots would of been accomplished in history if we didn't need evidence, we don't exactly need faith to be motivated to do things. If we wanted to do or know something we test it, we do research, or explore it and learn from it. We don't simply make up an answer and pretend that it's true. Most of human history was done because of peoples growing curiosity and desire to matter in some way, not from operating without evidence.

Science would never of progressed if your claim was true, the entire point of it is that faith does not work. You need evidence and proof for everything you try to treat as fact, if we simply accepted "I have faith" we would never of had the desire or urge to go out, experiment and actually learn the truth of the matter for ourselves. If there is no proof for something existing like a God, then there is no reason to treat it as a fact. 

It makes as much sense as saying 'those who believe in a teapot orbiting the earth should not be discouraged because there is no evidence for it. 
That's not close mindedness, that's actually understanding the situation, the facts and working with it. 

You wouldn't expect to pass a test on faith, you'd want to learn the content.
You wouldn't want a doctor who worked on faith, you want one who did the research.
You wouldn't want a science teacher who simply had faith on his theories, you'd want researched, repeatable and observable studies backing it up.