5 ms·

Facing possible ban, more Americans are buying new–and legal–$900 flamethrowers

7 points by nkurz 11y ago

collyw 11y ago
I am sure these will make your country so much "safer".
- hga 11y ago
  The 20th Century suggested the biggest danger to people is their own governments, which killed a bare minimum of 100 million of their own (my personal estimate, for countries that are still occupied by hostile governments and therefore their killing fields are yet to be closely examined, is 250 million). The US has a strong bias towards allowing the people to be well armed, starting with our 2nd Amendment. This certainly has costs, but many of us prefer the tradeoffs.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Most of the people in the US killed by the US government or subsidiaries (like police departments) on an ongoing basis are nonwhite. The politics of armed self-defence against the government has ... not worked well for this particular problem.
    - hga 11y ago
      Most of the people in the US killed by the US government or subsidiaries (like police departments) on an ongoing basis are nonwhite. Citation please? A quick check reveals that is said to be true if adjusted for raw population numbers, but I seriously doubt it in absolute numbers, or when adjusted for criminality of the respective populations (which last time I checked extends to white sub-populations, like Scotts-Irish/Southerners). And this is happening to millions of Americans? Numbers matter, and I'd say the depredations of US police are limited in part by their knowledge that we can and will shoot back. At least I find that one of the betters explanations for their habit of "puppycide", killing dogs whenever they can, they're a target which of course cannot shoot back.
    - kls 11y ago
      The right to self defense does not confer the absolute outcome of successful self defense. Take for example the American Indians many of them where well armed and lead self defense campaigns, some successful. Though ultimately unsuccessful in the big picture, it did have a limiting factor on the atrocity of American Indian genocide. Contrast that with the German Jews who did suffer a slow roll of disarmament, and you get wholesale extermination. The Indian gun brought the US to the negotiating table where in Germany there was only a final solution. Make no mistake Sherman was just as hell bent as Hitler on total eradication (Sherman is credited with originating the term Final Solution). The difference is the gun stood in the way of Sherman's goals. If we are specifically talking about the recent issues with Black America that is a different debate all together as their are cultural implications that go along with it as well. One could blame institutional racism and I am sure it plays a factor but simple narratives are rarely the whole picture. Many of those shot have embraced a faction of US black culture that is fatalistic and backwards at best, therefore it is hard for them to gain broader sympathy beyond their own group who tend to see the world thru black perspective. That being said, they still have the right to self determination and self defense, if they truly are being oppressed then they should take up arms and fight that oppression. But they will have a hard time gaining broad support if the action carries the banner of an individual like Michael Brown, who had just robbed a store and was charging the officer. There are systemic problems in the black community such as the individuals who told the truth about Brown's shooting at the grand jury now being targeted by criminal groups that act as thugs for powers in the black community. The point being is, the dynamics of a handful of killings of blacks by the government does not constitute genocide and the circumstances of many of the cases would be hard pressed to garner broad support outside of their community. The black perspective is that this is racism and it could be, but I don't personally believe that racism paints the whole picture. Regardless of that fact, the black killings and American Indian genocide are completely different examples where one is clearly self defense while the others have questionable criminal activity and police actions associated with them and where further reviewed by independent committees such as Grand Juries. A constant is that bad men are always willing the use force and will go to any length to gain power of force. Another constant is that bad men are not going away. If this flame thrower was some how the end all be all, you can bet whether legal or not, the bad will get it, build it, do what they have to do to acquire that power. Ignoring reality by trying to ban items only furthers the problem because a man hell bent on power is going to, via whatever means possible, gain that power and the balancing factor has been removed. An example of this was the LA shoot out, where an entire force of cops what outgunned because policy up until that point prohibited regular police organizations from carrying military style weapons. Is there a practical civilian application for this device, who knows? I personally doubt it, other than a really cool camp fire lighter, but that is not the point. The point is severely punishing wrongdoers does far more to prevent evil than parenting grown ups. For some reason as a society we have trended more towards the latter and gotten far more soft on the former. Yet a guy in France where civilian guns are all but outlawed, shows up with another AK but we somehow think banning this thing will make it go away.
  - leoedin 11y ago
    Do you seriously think that having a few guns is going to make a difference when the government come knocking at your door? The idea that the government will somehow turn suddenly into the enemy and millions of Americans will seize their arms and rise up against it, toppling it and replacing it with some new, better government is a complete fantasy. A fantasy which costs 30,000 lives a year.
    - hga 11y ago
      At bare minimum it'll make a difference when they come to my neighbor's door and I and other neighbors shoot them from the flank. The rest of what you said is part strawmen, part a testament to passivity in the face of evil and a severe lack of imagination, part a lumping of suicides with homicides, which statistics from other nations with severely anti-gun regimes suggests would only result in substitutions if guns were magically removed from American hands. And let me add this thought from a man who saw many of his fellows die in labor camps: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! That's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his GULAG Archipelago. Again, number matter. Make mass murder too expensive, and it can't even be conceived of. Sort of like how you can't conceive of it "happening here." Which neither can I, seeing how well we are armed, not to mention quite capable of offensive counter attacks. Note well how the mostly clueless nutcase Chris Dorner, in a state where I'll note most people are not allowed to bear arms, caused the police to completely lose their shit. Imagine that multiplied 10 million times over (the so called "3%").
- hga 11y ago
  collyw, I just noted that you hail from a country in which during the last century an estimated 500,000 were slaughtered in an ideological war, a stunning 2% of the 1936 population. Followed by a 36 year "fascist" regime that all right thinking people hate. Orwell has a thing or two to say about that based on his experiences: http://humanevents.com/2013/04/22/george-orwell-on-gun-control/ http://humanevents.com/2013/04/22/george-orwell-on-gun-contr...
  - collyw 11y ago
    I just live here. Come from somewhere else. (How do you get that inormtion out of interest?)
    - hga 11y ago
      You told me in your user info: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=collyw https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=collyw
- MrZongle2 11y ago
  I, for one, won't be freaking out until we start seeing an upswing of flamethrower-related crimes. And I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. This really isn't a self-defense issue, nor a 2nd Amendment issue. It's more of a boys-with-cool-toys thing. As much as I agree with some of the other posters about an armed populace as a deterrent to a hostile & unaccountable government, a flamethrower isn't going to do much. A 25-foot range isn't a threat to anybody with a rifle, or even many individuals with a pistol.
  - kls 11y ago
    It's more a public safety thing than anything else, a drunk guy is going to set his neighborhood on fire make no doubt about it, but the answer to that is the severely punish the drunk flamer not to regulate the actions of responsible people. I find it funny for a population (HN) that tends to have a anarchist/libertarian bent, that if we so much get the smell of firearms or weaponry we start heading left fast. At some point you have to accept that the world is a dangerous place and the solution to that danger is not to nanny the crap out of people but rather to punish the irresponsible as an example to the potentially irresponsible.
    - collyw 11y ago
      I don't know. I have lived in a few places. Mexico scared the shit out of me in some ways. Got robbed at gunpoint on my second night on a night bus. Bandits caused problems in teh area I was living. I feel a lot safer in Europe where guns are no where near as common or accessable.
      - kls 11y ago
        Funny part is Mexico has some of the strictest gun regulations on the books, the mere possession of a pocket knife is a major crime in Mexico. And while they claim the letter of their law confers a right, the spirit all but makes guns illegal for the common person. There the only people that have no access to guns are the people that need them the most, as such they are trapped between the cartels and the corrupt government who in turn enable the cartels and the chaos. Mexico is the poster child for an unarmed populace unable to break the yoke of oppression due to disarmament. Guns there are only prolific to certain classes of society.
andrewmcwatters 11y ago
Ignorance is the real issue. It seems every civilized nation thinks America is home to brutish neanderthals with no regard for gun control. I ask you, is it the firearm or flamethrower, or the person behind the weapon? Do you see ivy league students participating in gang crime? What about doctors or engineers, do these people on the regular have their fingers over hair triggers? Do you think weapons make nations more dangerous? No you fools, ignorant people make the world more dangerous. Everyone's so ready to debate and break out metrics and statistics about gun control whilst heart disease is a bigger issue by orders of magnitude in practically any developed country. You know what global violence is comparable to in terms of death count? Falling.

7 points by nkurz 11y ago

collyw 11y ago

I am sure these will make your country so much "safer".

hga 11y ago
The 20th Century suggested the biggest danger to people is their own governments, which killed a bare minimum of 100 million of their own (my personal estimate, for countries that are still occupied by hostile governments and therefore their killing fields are yet to be closely examined, is 250 million). The US has a strong bias towards allowing the people to be well armed, starting with our 2nd Amendment. This certainly has costs, but many of us prefer the tradeoffs.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Most of the people in the US killed by the US government or subsidiaries (like police departments) on an ongoing basis are nonwhite. The politics of armed self-defence against the government has ... not worked well for this particular problem.
  - hga 11y ago
    Most of the people in the US killed by the US government or subsidiaries (like police departments) on an ongoing basis are nonwhite. Citation please? A quick check reveals that is said to be true if adjusted for raw population numbers, but I seriously doubt it in absolute numbers, or when adjusted for criminality of the respective populations (which last time I checked extends to white sub-populations, like Scotts-Irish/Southerners). And this is happening to millions of Americans? Numbers matter, and I'd say the depredations of US police are limited in part by their knowledge that we can and will shoot back. At least I find that one of the betters explanations for their habit of "puppycide", killing dogs whenever they can, they're a target which of course cannot shoot back.
  - kls 11y ago
    The right to self defense does not confer the absolute outcome of successful self defense. Take for example the American Indians many of them where well armed and lead self defense campaigns, some successful. Though ultimately unsuccessful in the big picture, it did have a limiting factor on the atrocity of American Indian genocide. Contrast that with the German Jews who did suffer a slow roll of disarmament, and you get wholesale extermination. The Indian gun brought the US to the negotiating table where in Germany there was only a final solution. Make no mistake Sherman was just as hell bent as Hitler on total eradication (Sherman is credited with originating the term Final Solution). The difference is the gun stood in the way of Sherman's goals. If we are specifically talking about the recent issues with Black America that is a different debate all together as their are cultural implications that go along with it as well. One could blame institutional racism and I am sure it plays a factor but simple narratives are rarely the whole picture. Many of those shot have embraced a faction of US black culture that is fatalistic and backwards at best, therefore it is hard for them to gain broader sympathy beyond their own group who tend to see the world thru black perspective. That being said, they still have the right to self determination and self defense, if they truly are being oppressed then they should take up arms and fight that oppression. But they will have a hard time gaining broad support if the action carries the banner of an individual like Michael Brown, who had just robbed a store and was charging the officer. There are systemic problems in the black community such as the individuals who told the truth about Brown's shooting at the grand jury now being targeted by criminal groups that act as thugs for powers in the black community. The point being is, the dynamics of a handful of killings of blacks by the government does not constitute genocide and the circumstances of many of the cases would be hard pressed to garner broad support outside of their community. The black perspective is that this is racism and it could be, but I don't personally believe that racism paints the whole picture. Regardless of that fact, the black killings and American Indian genocide are completely different examples where one is clearly self defense while the others have questionable criminal activity and police actions associated with them and where further reviewed by independent committees such as Grand Juries. A constant is that bad men are always willing the use force and will go to any length to gain power of force. Another constant is that bad men are not going away. If this flame thrower was some how the end all be all, you can bet whether legal or not, the bad will get it, build it, do what they have to do to acquire that power. Ignoring reality by trying to ban items only furthers the problem because a man hell bent on power is going to, via whatever means possible, gain that power and the balancing factor has been removed. An example of this was the LA shoot out, where an entire force of cops what outgunned because policy up until that point prohibited regular police organizations from carrying military style weapons. Is there a practical civilian application for this device, who knows? I personally doubt it, other than a really cool camp fire lighter, but that is not the point. The point is severely punishing wrongdoers does far more to prevent evil than parenting grown ups. For some reason as a society we have trended more towards the latter and gotten far more soft on the former. Yet a guy in France where civilian guns are all but outlawed, shows up with another AK but we somehow think banning this thing will make it go away.
- leoedin 11y ago
  Do you seriously think that having a few guns is going to make a difference when the government come knocking at your door? The idea that the government will somehow turn suddenly into the enemy and millions of Americans will seize their arms and rise up against it, toppling it and replacing it with some new, better government is a complete fantasy. A fantasy which costs 30,000 lives a year.
  - hga 11y ago
    At bare minimum it'll make a difference when they come to my neighbor's door and I and other neighbors shoot them from the flank. The rest of what you said is part strawmen, part a testament to passivity in the face of evil and a severe lack of imagination, part a lumping of suicides with homicides, which statistics from other nations with severely anti-gun regimes suggests would only result in substitutions if guns were magically removed from American hands. And let me add this thought from a man who saw many of his fellows die in labor camps: And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! That's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his GULAG Archipelago. Again, number matter. Make mass murder too expensive, and it can't even be conceived of. Sort of like how you can't conceive of it "happening here." Which neither can I, seeing how well we are armed, not to mention quite capable of offensive counter attacks. Note well how the mostly clueless nutcase Chris Dorner, in a state where I'll note most people are not allowed to bear arms, caused the police to completely lose their shit. Imagine that multiplied 10 million times over (the so called "3%").
hga 11y ago
collyw, I just noted that you hail from a country in which during the last century an estimated 500,000 were slaughtered in an ideological war, a stunning 2% of the 1936 population. Followed by a 36 year "fascist" regime that all right thinking people hate. Orwell has a thing or two to say about that based on his experiences: http://humanevents.com/2013/04/22/george-orwell-on-gun-control/ http://humanevents.com/2013/04/22/george-orwell-on-gun-contr...
- collyw 11y ago
  I just live here. Come from somewhere else. (How do you get that inormtion out of interest?)
  - hga 11y ago
    You told me in your user info: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=collyw https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=collyw
MrZongle2 11y ago
I, for one, won't be freaking out until we start seeing an upswing of flamethrower-related crimes. And I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. This really isn't a self-defense issue, nor a 2nd Amendment issue. It's more of a boys-with-cool-toys thing. As much as I agree with some of the other posters about an armed populace as a deterrent to a hostile & unaccountable government, a flamethrower isn't going to do much. A 25-foot range isn't a threat to anybody with a rifle, or even many individuals with a pistol.
- kls 11y ago
  It's more a public safety thing than anything else, a drunk guy is going to set his neighborhood on fire make no doubt about it, but the answer to that is the severely punish the drunk flamer not to regulate the actions of responsible people. I find it funny for a population (HN) that tends to have a anarchist/libertarian bent, that if we so much get the smell of firearms or weaponry we start heading left fast. At some point you have to accept that the world is a dangerous place and the solution to that danger is not to nanny the crap out of people but rather to punish the irresponsible as an example to the potentially irresponsible.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I don't know. I have lived in a few places. Mexico scared the shit out of me in some ways. Got robbed at gunpoint on my second night on a night bus. Bandits caused problems in teh area I was living. I feel a lot safer in Europe where guns are no where near as common or accessable.
    - kls 11y ago
      Funny part is Mexico has some of the strictest gun regulations on the books, the mere possession of a pocket knife is a major crime in Mexico. And while they claim the letter of their law confers a right, the spirit all but makes guns illegal for the common person. There the only people that have no access to guns are the people that need them the most, as such they are trapped between the cartels and the corrupt government who in turn enable the cartels and the chaos. Mexico is the poster child for an unarmed populace unable to break the yoke of oppression due to disarmament. Guns there are only prolific to certain classes of society.

andrewmcwatters 11y ago

Ignorance is the real issue. It seems every civilized nation thinks America is home to brutish neanderthals with no regard for gun control. I ask you, is it the firearm or flamethrower, or the person behind the weapon? Do you see ivy league students participating in gang crime? What about doctors or engineers, do these people on the regular have their fingers over hair triggers? Do you think weapons make nations more dangerous? No you fools, ignorant people make the world more dangerous. Everyone's so ready to debate and break out metrics and statistics about gun control whilst heart disease is a bigger issue by orders of magnitude in practically any developed country. You know what global violence is comparable to in terms of death count? Falling.