6 ms·

We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added. People wouldn't like it of

We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.

bjt2n3904 11y ago
Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? "We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."
- bdhe 11y ago
  > Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Tight regulation of legal gun ownership and possession does not appear to lead to reduced gun-related deaths, (based on a comparison between state Brady Campaign score and gun deaths,) except perhaps suicide, though this is debated .[1] What you worry about is of little import to anyone but yourself (,for example, I am scared of getting hit in the head by coconuts, which are 10 times more deadly than sharks!), if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
    - bdhe 11y ago
      > if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it. I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun control discussion. It's barely even the beginning. First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation. Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people. Second, from the article you cited: > Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything else, is devilishly difficult. is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern (viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related deaths are not correlated to gun control.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  Lets continue your hyperbolic argument. Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ? The difference is two fold. 1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns. 2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people. Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone. TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid
  - bjt2n3904 11y ago
    That's not necessarily the aspect I was thinking of when I wrote my post. Surely, guns and encryption are different in their function... but who gets to use them is the more interesting point. Try this on for size. In a post talking about our inability to analyze the potential abuse of deadly force by police, we're talking about surrendering the use of deadly force... ...to the police.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Guns and encryption aren't fungible in that sentence. No one's ever been injured or killed by accidental application of encryption, but thousands of people are injured or killed by accidental gunfire every year.
  - nickff 11y ago
    Swimming pools are much more dangerous (100 times more deadly) than guns when it comes to accidental deaths; should swimming pools not be banned before guns?[1] [1] http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-5/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
    - superuser2 11y ago
      >when it comes to accidental deaths Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.
      - nickff 11y ago
        >Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide. I was responding to a comment regarding accidental deaths and injuries, not suicide or murder. If this is insufficiently interesting to you, I suggest you read another comment.
- debacle 11y ago
  I have never heard that analogy but it is a very strong and succinct argument. Thanks.
Shivetya 11y ago
ban guns? really, tell me how making drugs illegal has stopped their procurement. tell me how making guns illegal will stop the violence? Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide. as for the statement people won't rise up against government, where have you been? They did after the shootings in LA, Oakland, and recently St. Louis. Frankly the idea of a society where only law enforcement has guns with their track record isn't a society anyone should want to live in.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Drugs, not so much. Your analogy completely fails.
  - hga 11y ago
    Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid. I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 ... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?
      - hga 11y ago
        Yes, yes I did, in part. For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.
oldmanjay 11y ago
I have a question for you - if the people of the United States are disarmed, by what right does the government remain armed?
- Frondo 11y ago
  Because we entrust certain actors to be the enforcers of laws in society. This is the way societies have worked since the dawn of time; we aren't all charged with upholding laws, we give that task out to people to have that be their job.
  - nickff 11y ago
    This is in fact not how "societies have worked since the dawn of time".[1] The innovation of the monopoly of use of violence by the state is a relatively recent one, and not demonstrably necessary or sufficient to maintain an orderly and just society.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    The 2nd amendment was added based on how societies have worked since the dawn of time. Keep in mind that even in our "modern" era ~100,000,000 people were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century.
merpnderp 11y ago
Making guns highly restricted/illegal doesn't make them hard to get. Did making meth completely illegal make it hard to get? To make this even remotely feasible imagine the New Orleans 2005 door to door SWAT raids coupled with the worst part of New York's stop and frisk. In France, where guns are highly regulated, full automatic military AK's can be had for a few thousand dollars. A bargain by US standards. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09/france-has-strict-gun-laws-why-didnt-that-save-charlie-hebdo-victims/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09...
GVIrish 11y ago
> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was. Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war. If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms. > You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.

bjt2n3904 11y ago

Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? "We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors. People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one. The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."

bdhe 11y ago
> Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/? This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.
- nickff 11y ago
  Tight regulation of legal gun ownership and possession does not appear to lead to reduced gun-related deaths, (based on a comparison between state Brady Campaign score and gun deaths,) except perhaps suicide, though this is debated .[1] What you worry about is of little import to anyone but yourself (,for example, I am scared of getting hit in the head by coconuts, which are 10 times more deadly than sharks!), if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
  - bdhe 11y ago
    > if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it. I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun control discussion. It's barely even the beginning. First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation. Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people. Second, from the article you cited: > Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything else, is devilishly difficult. is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern (viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related deaths are not correlated to gun control.
1971genocide 11y ago
Lets continue your hyperbolic argument. Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ? The difference is two fold. 1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns. 2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people. Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone. TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid
- bjt2n3904 11y ago
  That's not necessarily the aspect I was thinking of when I wrote my post. Surely, guns and encryption are different in their function... but who gets to use them is the more interesting point. Try this on for size. In a post talking about our inability to analyze the potential abuse of deadly force by police, we're talking about surrendering the use of deadly force... ...to the police.
Frondo 11y ago
Guns and encryption aren't fungible in that sentence. No one's ever been injured or killed by accidental application of encryption, but thousands of people are injured or killed by accidental gunfire every year.
- nickff 11y ago
  Swimming pools are much more dangerous (100 times more deadly) than guns when it comes to accidental deaths; should swimming pools not be banned before guns?[1] [1] http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-5/ http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...
  - superuser2 11y ago
    >when it comes to accidental deaths Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.
    - nickff 11y ago
      >Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide. I was responding to a comment regarding accidental deaths and injuries, not suicide or murder. If this is insufficiently interesting to you, I suggest you read another comment.
debacle 11y ago
I have never heard that analogy but it is a very strong and succinct argument. Thanks.

Shivetya 11y ago

ban guns? really, tell me how making drugs illegal has stopped their procurement. tell me how making guns illegal will stop the violence? Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide. as for the statement people won't rise up against government, where have you been? They did after the shootings in LA, Oakland, and recently St. Louis. Frankly the idea of a society where only law enforcement has guns with their track record isn't a society anyone should want to live in.

epistasis 11y ago
Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Drugs, not so much. Your analogy completely fails.
- hga 11y ago
  Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid. I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 ... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?
    - hga 11y ago
      Yes, yes I did, in part. For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.

oldmanjay 11y ago

I have a question for you - if the people of the United States are disarmed, by what right does the government remain armed?

Frondo 11y ago
Because we entrust certain actors to be the enforcers of laws in society. This is the way societies have worked since the dawn of time; we aren't all charged with upholding laws, we give that task out to people to have that be their job.
- nickff 11y ago
  This is in fact not how "societies have worked since the dawn of time".[1] The innovation of the monopoly of use of violence by the state is a relatively recent one, and not demonstrably necessary or sufficient to maintain an orderly and just society.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
- merpnderp 11y ago
  The 2nd amendment was added based on how societies have worked since the dawn of time. Keep in mind that even in our "modern" era ~100,000,000 people were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century.

merpnderp 11y ago

Making guns highly restricted/illegal doesn't make them hard to get. Did making meth completely illegal make it hard to get? To make this even remotely feasible imagine the New Orleans 2005 door to door SWAT raids coupled with the worst part of New York's stop and frisk. In France, where guns are highly regulated, full automatic military AK's can be had for a few thousand dollars. A bargain by US standards. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09/france-has-strict-gun-laws-why-didnt-that-save-charlie-hebdo-victims/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09...

GVIrish 11y ago

> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was. Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war. If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms. > You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.