11 ms·

Good article, glad to see some knowledgable firearms writing in the general press. This is how I've felt as a gun owner over the last two decades, translated i

• cvwright 11y ago
  Unfortunately that's not too far from what they've been trying to do with the Wassenaar Arrangement lately, with export restrictions on "intrusion software". http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/us-to-renegotiate-rules-on-exporting-intrusion-software-under-wassenaar-arrangement/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/us-to-renegotiate...
• Vexs 11y ago
  What's kinda funny is that's very similar to what's actually going in computing, especially with encryption most recently.
  • incongruity 11y ago
    Absolutely - because the fundamentals are all the same - highly technical specifics being mandated by people who have no clue about the technology nor the impact of their proposed mandates. As systems get more complex and integrated, we're going to see more of this, not less, I fear. Also, note - this happens in the courts as well.
    • at-fates-hands 11y ago
      So why doesn't the industry have lobbyists of their own, pushing the proper narrative then? If politicians on either side want to get it right, then why aren't industry leaders going to Washington, testifying in front of committees and telling these people how this should be handled? I haven't seen ANY politician coming out and saying they support encryption. As soon as the Apple and FBI case came out, you saw both republicans and democrats divided even on this fairly simple case: Democratic congressman Mike Honda of California has come down firmly on the side of the tech company, saying that the DoJ sought to increase its authority “with the tyrannical impulses that were the very reason our country was created”. By contrast, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called on Apple to cooperate immediately following the “terrorist attack in my state” and threatened legislation, though she said she “hope[d] it would not be necessary”. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/29/apple-fbi-encryption-battle-supporters-technology-politics https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/29/apple-fbi... If the tech industry wants to push the needle forward, then they have to get in the game. As of 2016. I haven't seen many people in the industry rushing to try and educate the politicians in Washington. Sure, they like to write articles and stand on the side of Apple and other companies, but that doesn't count for much in my book.
      • incongruity 11y ago
        Why do you presume that they are not lobbying? This recent articles would suggest that tech firms are spending a lot of money on lobbyists: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying/ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying... http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/09/which-tech-companies-spend-the-most-on-lobbying.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/09/which-tech-... And this database would suggest some tech companies fall into the 5th highest spending industry: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&indexType=i https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2015&inde... So, a better question is, why, despite these efforts are we still seeing this? A few reasons, I'd guess... 1) Lobbying efforts by other industries and groups (law enforcement has a vested interest here, for example) 2) A tendency to wanting to look tough on crime and terrorism, especially going into an election year. Moderation and wise restraint are always a tough sell in politics 3) The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit - politics edition. http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/ http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-... 4) A propensity on the part of many in government to want to hold more power (closely related to point 2, but more self-serving).
• muglug 11y ago
  Except that metaphor falls flat because Linux has many uses beyond hacking businesses and utilities (or rehearsing such activities).
  • fiatmoney 11y ago
    Guns have many uses besides killing people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathlon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biathlon
    • bobochan 11y ago
      Everyone in my family nordic skis from the first snowflake in winter to the last slushy ribbon of snow melts in the spring. We would love to get into biathlon, but the rifles (which are amazing pieces of craftsmanship, to be sure) start at around $3,500, and used ones are hard to find. This is a tough barrier to entry for people new to the sport.
      • hga 11y ago
        Are you really telling me you couldn't restock a Ruger 10/22 and get started??? E.g. https://www.google.com/#q=ruger+10%2F22+biathlon https://www.google.com/#q=ruger+10%2F22+biathlon
        • bobochan 11y ago
          Wow, thanks! My kids had been researching biathlon rifles and the only ones that they found were from either Germany or Russia, and the Russian ones were no longer being imported. We talked with biathletes training at Craftsbury this season (they were National Guard members), and they were all using imported rifles, but I'm glad to see there are other options.
          • hga 11y ago
            You're very welcome. The Ruger 10/22, which lists at $260 to $400 from what I just found on Google from Ruger, has an awesome ecosystem and is relatively easily worked on. Heck, everything can be bought from someone else (all patents expired by now), and I'm sure there are many alternatives that could get you started. Also see http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=biathlon http://www.gunbroker.com/All/BI.aspx?Keywords=biathlon e.g. there's a Russian rifle which often goes for less than a thousand there. As well as an Anschutz with "Walnut German Stock" for the usual $$$$$$.
• sgnelson 11y ago
  You forgot one of the key reasons that specific computer is banned. It's Black and looks evil, just like the computers that hackers in the movies use.
• superuser2 11y ago
  Computers have uses beyond hacking. Guns are for killing. Killing in self-defense, honing your killing skills as a sport/recreation activity, deterring bad behavior by threat of killing, killing things that are socially acceptable to kill (i.e. game animals), sure, but the theme is killing. Lockpicks might be a better example. Many similar arguments apply: their use is to open doors without the correct keys, which only a few specialized professions should have a legitimate need to do. Yet on the other hand we ought to be able to tinker with our private property, evaluate its security (bad guys will get lockpicks anyway), let ourselves in if we get locked out, publish security research on "unpickable" locks and participate in locksport. Or for a more direct computing analogy, Metasploit. It is unambiguously a hacking tool, but it remains legal because bad guys will always get hacking tools, and the good guys need to be able to evaluate their defenses.
  • tbirdz 11y ago
    Don't forget about starter pistols for telling runners when a race starts. Also flare guns for signalling, although that might not count as a "real gun"?
    • schismsubv 11y ago
      Flare guns fall under the same air transport rules that full-blown firearms do. They must be transported in a case without ammunition that is locked and openable only by the owner.
  • wyager 11y ago
    Target shooting isn't just practice for killing things. That's as absurd as claiming "racing is just practice for running people over". Target shooting is a sport all on its own, and is probably the single most prevalent application of firearms in the US.
    • rimantas 11y ago
      Your analogy is really really bad.
    • 11y ago
• vacri 11y ago
  Ironically, you've just described the concealed-carry laws that are proliferating through the states right now, which are all based on hunches and gut feeling. As a gun owner over the last two decades, do you feel as uneasy about that proliferation?
  • hga 11y ago
    hunches and gut feeling How about decades of experience. Vermont never banned carry in any form, and now has been joined by 9 other states in "Constitutional Carry", many for some years. Washington state went shall issue in the early '60s. Florida started the modern wave in 1987. "Normal" states like Colorado have allowed concealed carry on the grounds of public colleges for years. Experience, especially in the "50 Petri dishes" of the states, is one of the ways we figure out such things, and this "proliferation" has been a wild success.
    • vacri 11y ago
      Yes, Washington state went concealed carry in 1961. Its crime rate rose and fell in step with the other states over the years - concealed carry did not suppress that rate after it was introduced. If you want to argue that concealed carry directly reduces crime rate, Washington state is something you should remain quiet on. I've read a lot of stuff around concealed carry over the past decade for internet debates, and interestingly, concealed carry debaters will claim absolutely any reduction in crime rate as being due to concealed carry (despite no clear link), which started proliferating rapidly in the '90s... and totally ignore things like the incarceration rate, which rose rapidly in the '90s as well.
      • hga 11y ago
        If you want to argue that concealed carry directly reduces crime rate You're fighting someone else, I make no such claims, I'm pretty sure simple demographics, particularly the wave of young men in the Baby Boom, is the biggest factor, and swamps all others to the point it's hard to discern any other cause. Although perhaps if we'd locked up those criminals at the rate we'd locked up previous generations it would have gone differently. All I claim is that at worst it's Mostly Harmless.
• partiallypro 11y ago
  If the government really wanted to push "smart guns," they could do it easily. How? Well, the U.S government is the single biggest purchaser of guns & ammo in the world. If they required all of their guns to be smart guns, manufacturers would suddenly shift production to make smart guns and it would raise the cost of production (and thus the price) for traditional weapons. But as you and others in this thread have stated, this has a number of problems not only for the government but for users and their legal rights.
  • hga 11y ago
    Well, the U.S government is the single biggest purchaser of guns & ammo in the world. Not even close. E.g. they annually procure by an order of magnitude less small arms ammo than the 12+ billion produced in the US alone for civilians every year (and that doesn't count the seconds that ATK sells to us from Lake City). Similarly, by now we civilians are every year or two buying as many new guns as all the governments in the US have in their active inventories (not going to count old stuff in Cosmoline, which they should sell more of to us, next up are 10,000 M1911s, maybe). Nope, any existing companies that manufactured so much as one smart gun would be boycotted by us civilians and go out of business, as Colt is close to doing for various reasons including depending too much on the DoD, and, yeah, that smart gun flirtation and general cooperation with the gun-grabbers.
    • partiallypro 11y ago
      I said single biggest, as in a single entity. On an aggregate, if you combine everyone else, of course they aren't the biggest. They are also the single biggest consumer of oil products. In any case, if you combine federal, state and local government arm sales it is enough to have a massive market weight to shift production lines. The federal government could have stipulations of state governments with their federal funding that all cops must do x, y & z. (I personally do not support this, I'm merely saying it's a proposal I have seen put forth.)
• Frompo 11y ago
  So, is it the Stockton schoolyard or 101 California Street shooting that you liken to a blackout? I guess its a pretty dramatic blackout since at least 5 people dies... You also neglect the detail that the police response was of little consequence as the hacker had committed suicide before they police was at the scene. I'm unsure what the web panel remark can mean concretely, exactly what did the children at Sandy Hook Elementary do to cause a "blackout"?
  • cloakandswagger 11y ago
    While we're on this wild and irrelevant tangent, people frequently die from blackouts. See the Northeast blackout in 2003 where a dozen people died.
    • Frompo 11y ago
      Look, all I want is that you clearly state if you think the sandy hook school shooting is kind of like the Northeast blackout of 2003. Also, of the 12 deaths wikipedia reports as "contributed to" by the blackout, one is someone falling off a roof while trying to break into a store, and another is some guy taking the stairs and dying of a hearth attack. No other US blackout listed on wikipedia mentions any deaths, including the article about the 1977 blackout with widespread looting, but I'm sure you have a good reason to say deaths are frequent.
  • khedoros 11y ago
    Why not all of them as a category, or shootings in general? They all fit the concept of "negatives that legislation would attempt to prevent" in the analogy. That's the great thing about analogies: They compare concepts, but the scale of the concepts doesn't necessarily have to match. But I'm sure that you understand that already.
    • Frompo 11y ago
      The point of an analogy is to illuminate some point of an issue by drawing parallels with an aspect of a more easily understood, unrelated issue. For an analogy to be helpful it crucial that the two aspects being related share characteristics, and school shootings don't share many aspects with blackouts. A school shooting is highly localised, even if the location my vary; blackouts need to happen over a very wide area over an extended period of time to be of importance. A school shooting is an active act of killing, a blackout only increases the lethality of already present dangers. Also, the concept of "negatives that legislation would attempt to prevent" describes things like racial discrimination, poor quality control of seatbelt manufacturers, improper handling of meat and chemical weapon sales to dictatorships as per your "the scale of the concepts doesn't necessarily have to match". Good luck getting much out of the analogy between the Northeast blackout of 2003 and selling weapons to Saddam Hussein.
• popmystack 11y ago
  This reminds me of the "cars can use kill people too!" disingenuous line of thought. Cars can kill people, but they are primarily used for transportation. Guns have no other purpose but to kill. You may use it for other stuff (sport, in general). But it was created to kill something. Any analogy where you take some other object that has the potential to be purposefully misused is pretty much invalid when you're talking about the other object's primary purpose.
• lousyanalogy 11y ago
  The NRA works to ensure that smart guns are not sold by anybody, anywhere. They address slippery slope concerns by vigorously fighting against the very existence of alternate technology. If we wanted to use your analogy, the NRA would be something akin to Richard Stallman, if RMS had the financial backing of every major technology company and a bevy of lobbyists and marketers. In your analogy, the NRA is fighting against any platform, anywhere developing, for example, code signing. Or secure forms of networking. Or any other improvement to computers. Not just fighting against the technology being mandated; fighting against it's existence. I will not accuse you of being dishonest, as most pro-gun folks don't realize that the NRA takes stances that are far from what most gun owners actually want. That is likely the case here, that you are making assumptions about what the NRA does, and your ignorant guesses are wrong.