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I understand that many politicians are woefully illiterate about what they think are "assault weapons", and I sympathize greatly with how annoying it must be to

by Archio 10y ago

I understand that many politicians are woefully illiterate about what they think are "assault weapons", and I sympathize greatly with how annoying it must be to constantly be accused of being "sexually inadequate" and other ridiculous insults that distract from the real issues. The main problem with this author's argument, as I see it, is that while the AR-15 is very convenient, making it easily accessible for any adults who wants one is not worth the price for society as a whole. That is - would it really be an infringement on the author's rights, if as the author points out, he would need to have 3 separate guns for sporting, hunting, and use of force? When discussing gun control, I often personally consider my own opinions on the proposed banning/legal control over encryption in public debate. Specifically, I wonder whether it is hypocritical to want to limit the sale and use semi-automatic weapons, while simultaneously arguing that encryption must be fully legal and "everyone shouldn't be punished for a few bad apples". My conclusion is usually that banning/compromising encryption would fundamentally destroy the security and privacy of critical software for everyone on a massive scale. However, I don't think the impact would be nearly as severe for gun owners that might need to pass a few ID checks and own several weapons if needed for different uses. So my question is, to gun owners that support existing laws regarding semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15- would limiting its sale really be really as devastatingly harmful to society at large (as to warrant those existing laws)?

ppod 10y ago
>So my question is, to gun owners that support existing laws regarding semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15- would limiting its sale really be really as devastatingly harmful to society at large? The core of this issue, like so many political issues, is fear and selfishness versus hope and love. These people do not want to inconvenience their hobby to make society safer. I would feel safer if I carried a gun everywhere. I think that I am more responsible than most people, and that I would never use it in anger. But I know that most people think that they are smarter and more responsible than they really are, and that if everyone carried a gun communities would not be safer. Choosing to be unarmed for the benefit of society is true bravery.
- 8note 10y ago
  I feel safer without the gun than I would with one. If you have one, you're the first target for everybody else with a gun. Kill you before you can start shooting back.
  - DefaultUserHN 10y ago
    I on the other hand, feel safer with a gun than I would without one. So the question becomes, who is right? You? Or Me?
  - nicolashahn 10y ago
    This is why everyone who does carry a gun carries it concealed.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  > These people do not want to inconvenience their hobby to make society safer. I am one of "these people", and your perception is not true for me. Guns are not a hobby for me, nor are they for many gun owners. Rather, we view ownership and carry as civil rights.
  - drewrv 10y ago
    These things aren't mutually exclusive. Blogging is both a hobby and a civil right.
  - ppod 10y ago
    You're right that's probably most gun owners too, I don't think hunting or target shooting is the driving reason. I think that civil rights should be more general than that -- like you should have a right to a level of personal safety, and then we design laws to protect that right. I just think that gun ownership endangers rather than protects that right.
jonstokes 10y ago
Author here: I consider responses like this a win, because if we're going to talk blanket bans then the discussion should really be about whether or not anyone needs a semi-auto weapon. If we moved the gun ban debate from "AR-15" or "assault rifle" to "semi-auto weapon of any kind", that would represent a step in the direction of sanity. I personally would prefer to forget about the "what" and focus entirely on the "who", but more on that another day.
- avn2109 10y ago
  It is surprising that nobody in this thread has mentioned what I thought was the most widely-acknowledged argument in favor of firearms ownership in the United States. In my (rural, libertarian-leaning) home state, firearms owners often explicitly cite some variant of "capacity to resist totalitarianism" or "to defend the American people's liberty against the government" as reasons for having guns. If, like me, you regard the encroachment of an unconstitutional American surveillance/police state as the primary threat to the way of life and values of the American people, this is a strong argument indeed. In fact I would like to see heavier, more military-flavored weapons proliferate for just this reason, especially since there are diminishing marginal returns for some types of arms escalation. E.g. armor piercing anti-tank weapons or surface-to-air weapons designed for hunting helicopters are not any more useful for shooting up a school than light guns chambered for NATO 7.62. But they have vastly different deterrent effects for a state actor contemplating violence against the populace. You might argue that this is stupid because if the situation ever devolves to the point of violent oppression, they will just drone strike dissidents' houses invisibly from the sky. But I like to think the main effect of an armed, freedom-loving population is to deter the country's leadership from instituting that level of violent oppression in the first place.
  - erichocean 10y ago
    > In my (rural, libertarian-leaning) home state, firearms owners often explicitly cite some variant of "capacity to resist totalitarianism" or "to defend the American people's liberty against the government" as reasons for having guns. That's because the individuals who wrote the US constitution gave exactly that justification—though people (of course) argue whether or not it is still relevant. From my perspective, the 1st amendment had a similar justification, so if you really don't buy that _guns_ can keep the gov't in check in any kind of realistic way, clinging to "free speech" as something we absolutely need—for the exact same reason—rings hollow; it doesn't seem like a principled position to me to reject one and embrace the other.
DKnoll 10y ago
The argument for needing encryption is very similar to the argument for needing firearms (without getting into the veracity of that need), so you've made a great comparison here. One could argue that firearms for personal defense and encryption for personal privacy/security would be completely unnecessary if the state could prevent all crimes that necessitate their use, but they do not and never can. At the same time, the same encryption technology can be used for criminal images, terrorism and other criminal communications. The same goes for firearms being used for homicide, terrorism and other crimes. To prevent all of these, or at the very least reduce their occurrence, crippling the ability of the average citizens to protect themselves is necessary. You also cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Encryption has been made widely available, as have firearms. If we try to remove them now, they will both still be available to individuals, but only ones willing to break the law. To work with your simile(?), banning the AR-15 (and similar black rifles) would be more like banning AES than encryption at large. Other ones would take its place, and be no less lethal or capable of criminal use. For example, here in Canada, we restricted the AR-15 and variants but other just as deadly weapons simply took its prominence as a non-restricted weapon. For the uninitiated, restricted weapons may only be used at a range, require a permit to transit (down to the route you may use, these are only approved for transit to a range or when you are moving), must be entered in a registry, and require greater RCMP clearance to possess. I'm not sure what side of this debate I sit on. It's a very difficult one and I doubt we will ever come to a consensus.
woodman 10y ago
> ...would it really be an infringement on the author's rights ... he would need to have 3 separate guns for sporting, hunting, and use of force? How do you imagine that is even technically possible? A venn diagram of those gun classes would nearly fully overlap. Sure you could outlaw the bayo lug and the grenade launcher notch - and that would have prevented exactly 0 deaths.
Nadya 10y ago
>However, I don't think the impact would be nearly as severe for gun owners that might need to pass a few ID checks and own several weapons if needed for different uses. Or how about mass genocide that has occurred in the past in several countries shortly after disarming the population in relatively recent history? The argument against that is always "Not in modern (post-Y2K) times/first world countries, just look at Australia and/or U.K!" and I don't find that argument very convincing. I'm not scared of the U.S government going tyrannical/genocidal. But what about people who are refugees of countries where that happened? What would they think? I see no reason to disarm a population other than the ruling class fearing an armed population or a paranoid/ignorant population thinking "guns" are the problem. (Hint: People are the problem, not guns.) Bad guys don't need laws to buy guns and murderers have no problem selecting other weapons when there is a lack of guns. Homicide rates per capita are very similar before and after the gun buyback in Australia. "Murders with firearms" decreased though, so I guess they can pat themselves on the back for being just as murderous but with different weapons? Same trend with the U.K. Banning guns gave an "ease of mind" but didn't actually do anything. Similar to the TSA: security theater. I do not find gun control arguments to be compelling and firmly believe in the right for every individual to protect themselves. FWIW I do not own and likely will never own a gun.
Koshkin 10y ago
You have to realize that banning AR-15 will be just a beginning. Next, they will ban all semi-automatic rifles that are capable of using high-capacity magazines. Then, they will ban all semi-automatic firearms, including pistols (which, incidentally, are easier to conceal), as well as any firearms with magazine capacity over 2 rounds. It is not hard to imagine where this will end. At the same time, in some European countries, where gun laws are rather liberal, the rate of crimes with the use of firearms is low.
- erichocean 10y ago
  > At the same time, in some European countries, where gun laws are rather liberal, the rate of crimes with the use of firearms is low. Violent crime in the US among the sub-population with a culture comparable to The Netherlands supposedly occurs at the same (very low) rate as The Netherlands, despite massively more guns per capita in the US for that same sub-population. It's almost as if the availability of guns doesn't cause violent crime, people do.
  - drewrv 10y ago
    > the sub-population with a culture comparable to The Netherlands You mean secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents? What makes you think this sub-population owns massively more guns in the US? Or do you mean white people and you're just trying to spread racist garbage?
    - erichocean 10y ago
      > What makes you think this sub-population owns massively more guns in the US? Research. For instance, Holland has the lowest gun ownership in Western Europe (1.9%).[0] In the US overall according to Pew, "blacks are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home (41% vs. 19%)".[1] Among "secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents" in the US—let's call them "liberals"—23% of homes have at least one gun. According to the [Pew 2014] survey, "southerners are just about as likely as those living in the Midwest or the West to have a gun at home (38% vs. 35% and 34%, respectively)"[1], (with the exception of the NE, which is about 1/3 lower), so I think it's reasonable to assume that "coastal" liberals in, say, CA (where I live) are around that 20% mark. There's absolutely no way they are at 1.9% like Holland. Even if CA liberals owned guns just at 3.8%, that would still be twice what Holland has. However, it's most likely that Holland-like people, culturally-speaking (liberal, pot/gay friendly, coastal, like bikes) in the US own guns at approx. a 7-10x greater rate than do people in Holland proper. There's also no dispute that the rate of violent crime is similar among these two populations. (As it turns out, Holland has a higher violent crime rate than other European countries with substantially higher gun ownership, suggesting that higher gun ownership in Europe might contribute to a reduction in violent crime.) Regarding your suggestion that I'm a racist, I don't think violent crime is a white-black thing in the US (as you suggest), I think it's a cultural thing. Why? Well, if you treat blacks as one "race" from a stats perspective (i.e. if you're a racist), you get rather useless statistics. If instead you divide blacks up culturally—say, into "inner-city African Americans" and "recent immigrants from Africa" among others—you see very different crime statistics as well, i.e. it's not race—being black—that seems to be the controlling factor for violent crime, it's culture. That's why racism is so stupid: the stats just don't indicate that there even is such a thing as "the black race" that you can make meaningful aggregate statements like "violent crime" about. So. If you treat the US with a broad brush when it comes to violent crime, it's very easy to come to the mistaken belief that "guns" are the problem, or even "a" problem—the stats indicate STRONGLY that guns are not a problem. Instead, cultural (not racial!) propensity towards violent crime is the problem. That means that if we want to reduce violent crime, reducing gun ownership among "secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents" by 10x isn't going to make a difference—they're basically non-violent already. [0] http://www.calgunlaws.com/myths-of-european-gun-laws/ http://www.calgunlaws.com/myths-of-european-gun-laws/ [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demographics-and-politics-of-gun-owning-households/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demograp...
tracker1 10y ago
The problem is that the AR-15 isn't practically different from a smaller hunting rifle, too small for larger game like deer or elk... more useful for the likes of coyote or mountain lion threats. In the end, the background checks people are asking for wouldn't have stopped the Orlando shooting, and short of a total ban including the police, government, govt security contractors, and even off-base military with tight armory controls would have likely stopped this, even then it would have probably been a bomb instead. There is no reason that a cop needs a gun that doesn't apply to someone in their own home. Guns are lethal force. The end, we can go on about specifics but murder is already illegal, so are a lot of other things that people do. Maybe we should also ban all criminals (not just felons) from voting? Would that be sane? Not really. In the end, you can't have any hope of stopping crazy short of China-like lock down, spying and personal invasion of privacy. Not to mention deleting the past from society. I'd much rather have the personal freedom and liberties that the constitution ensures. It isn't about what I need... in the end, I'm against most gov't restrictions. Banning guns makes about as much sense as banning marijuana... It takes away personal freedom and choice for the illusion of safety. BTW, I don't own a gun... my father worked for the police for about two decades, and my mother still does. I have friends and relatives that have guns, hunt, etc. The AR-15 isn't an assault rifle... it's just scary looking.

by Archio 10y ago

ppod 10y ago

>So my question is, to gun owners that support existing laws regarding semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15- would limiting its sale really be really as devastatingly harmful to society at large? The core of this issue, like so many political issues, is fear and selfishness versus hope and love. These people do not want to inconvenience their hobby to make society safer. I would feel safer if I carried a gun everywhere. I think that I am more responsible than most people, and that I would never use it in anger. But I know that most people think that they are smarter and more responsible than they really are, and that if everyone carried a gun communities would not be safer. Choosing to be unarmed for the benefit of society is true bravery.

8note 10y ago
I feel safer without the gun than I would with one. If you have one, you're the first target for everybody else with a gun. Kill you before you can start shooting back.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago
  I on the other hand, feel safer with a gun than I would without one. So the question becomes, who is right? You? Or Me?
- nicolashahn 10y ago
  This is why everyone who does carry a gun carries it concealed.
LyndsySimon 10y ago
> These people do not want to inconvenience their hobby to make society safer. I am one of "these people", and your perception is not true for me. Guns are not a hobby for me, nor are they for many gun owners. Rather, we view ownership and carry as civil rights.
- drewrv 10y ago
  These things aren't mutually exclusive. Blogging is both a hobby and a civil right.
- ppod 10y ago
  You're right that's probably most gun owners too, I don't think hunting or target shooting is the driving reason. I think that civil rights should be more general than that -- like you should have a right to a level of personal safety, and then we design laws to protect that right. I just think that gun ownership endangers rather than protects that right.

jonstokes 10y ago

Author here: I consider responses like this a win, because if we're going to talk blanket bans then the discussion should really be about whether or not anyone needs a semi-auto weapon. If we moved the gun ban debate from "AR-15" or "assault rifle" to "semi-auto weapon of any kind", that would represent a step in the direction of sanity. I personally would prefer to forget about the "what" and focus entirely on the "who", but more on that another day.

avn2109 10y ago
It is surprising that nobody in this thread has mentioned what I thought was the most widely-acknowledged argument in favor of firearms ownership in the United States. In my (rural, libertarian-leaning) home state, firearms owners often explicitly cite some variant of "capacity to resist totalitarianism" or "to defend the American people's liberty against the government" as reasons for having guns. If, like me, you regard the encroachment of an unconstitutional American surveillance/police state as the primary threat to the way of life and values of the American people, this is a strong argument indeed. In fact I would like to see heavier, more military-flavored weapons proliferate for just this reason, especially since there are diminishing marginal returns for some types of arms escalation. E.g. armor piercing anti-tank weapons or surface-to-air weapons designed for hunting helicopters are not any more useful for shooting up a school than light guns chambered for NATO 7.62. But they have vastly different deterrent effects for a state actor contemplating violence against the populace. You might argue that this is stupid because if the situation ever devolves to the point of violent oppression, they will just drone strike dissidents' houses invisibly from the sky. But I like to think the main effect of an armed, freedom-loving population is to deter the country's leadership from instituting that level of violent oppression in the first place.
- erichocean 10y ago
  > In my (rural, libertarian-leaning) home state, firearms owners often explicitly cite some variant of "capacity to resist totalitarianism" or "to defend the American people's liberty against the government" as reasons for having guns. That's because the individuals who wrote the US constitution gave exactly that justification—though people (of course) argue whether or not it is still relevant. From my perspective, the 1st amendment had a similar justification, so if you really don't buy that _guns_ can keep the gov't in check in any kind of realistic way, clinging to "free speech" as something we absolutely need—for the exact same reason—rings hollow; it doesn't seem like a principled position to me to reject one and embrace the other.

DKnoll 10y ago

The argument for needing encryption is very similar to the argument for needing firearms (without getting into the veracity of that need), so you've made a great comparison here. One could argue that firearms for personal defense and encryption for personal privacy/security would be completely unnecessary if the state could prevent all crimes that necessitate their use, but they do not and never can. At the same time, the same encryption technology can be used for criminal images, terrorism and other criminal communications. The same goes for firearms being used for homicide, terrorism and other crimes. To prevent all of these, or at the very least reduce their occurrence, crippling the ability of the average citizens to protect themselves is necessary. You also cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Encryption has been made widely available, as have firearms. If we try to remove them now, they will both still be available to individuals, but only ones willing to break the law. To work with your simile(?), banning the AR-15 (and similar black rifles) would be more like banning AES than encryption at large. Other ones would take its place, and be no less lethal or capable of criminal use. For example, here in Canada, we restricted the AR-15 and variants but other just as deadly weapons simply took its prominence as a non-restricted weapon. For the uninitiated, restricted weapons may only be used at a range, require a permit to transit (down to the route you may use, these are only approved for transit to a range or when you are moving), must be entered in a registry, and require greater RCMP clearance to possess. I'm not sure what side of this debate I sit on. It's a very difficult one and I doubt we will ever come to a consensus.

woodman 10y ago

> ...would it really be an infringement on the author's rights ... he would need to have 3 separate guns for sporting, hunting, and use of force? How do you imagine that is even technically possible? A venn diagram of those gun classes would nearly fully overlap. Sure you could outlaw the bayo lug and the grenade launcher notch - and that would have prevented exactly 0 deaths.

Nadya 10y ago

>However, I don't think the impact would be nearly as severe for gun owners that might need to pass a few ID checks and own several weapons if needed for different uses. Or how about mass genocide that has occurred in the past in several countries shortly after disarming the population in relatively recent history? The argument against that is always "Not in modern (post-Y2K) times/first world countries, just look at Australia and/or U.K!" and I don't find that argument very convincing. I'm not scared of the U.S government going tyrannical/genocidal. But what about people who are refugees of countries where that happened? What would they think? I see no reason to disarm a population other than the ruling class fearing an armed population or a paranoid/ignorant population thinking "guns" are the problem. (Hint: People are the problem, not guns.) Bad guys don't need laws to buy guns and murderers have no problem selecting other weapons when there is a lack of guns. Homicide rates per capita are very similar before and after the gun buyback in Australia. "Murders with firearms" decreased though, so I guess they can pat themselves on the back for being just as murderous but with different weapons? Same trend with the U.K. Banning guns gave an "ease of mind" but didn't actually do anything. Similar to the TSA: security theater. I do not find gun control arguments to be compelling and firmly believe in the right for every individual to protect themselves. FWIW I do not own and likely will never own a gun.

Koshkin 10y ago

You have to realize that banning AR-15 will be just a beginning. Next, they will ban all semi-automatic rifles that are capable of using high-capacity magazines. Then, they will ban all semi-automatic firearms, including pistols (which, incidentally, are easier to conceal), as well as any firearms with magazine capacity over 2 rounds. It is not hard to imagine where this will end. At the same time, in some European countries, where gun laws are rather liberal, the rate of crimes with the use of firearms is low.

erichocean 10y ago
> At the same time, in some European countries, where gun laws are rather liberal, the rate of crimes with the use of firearms is low. Violent crime in the US among the sub-population with a culture comparable to The Netherlands supposedly occurs at the same (very low) rate as The Netherlands, despite massively more guns per capita in the US for that same sub-population. It's almost as if the availability of guns doesn't cause violent crime, people do.
- drewrv 10y ago
  > the sub-population with a culture comparable to The Netherlands You mean secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents? What makes you think this sub-population owns massively more guns in the US? Or do you mean white people and you're just trying to spread racist garbage?
  - erichocean 10y ago
    > What makes you think this sub-population owns massively more guns in the US? Research. For instance, Holland has the lowest gun ownership in Western Europe (1.9%).[0] In the US overall according to Pew, "blacks are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home (41% vs. 19%)".[1] Among "secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents" in the US—let's call them "liberals"—23% of homes have at least one gun. According to the [Pew 2014] survey, "southerners are just about as likely as those living in the Midwest or the West to have a gun at home (38% vs. 35% and 34%, respectively)"[1], (with the exception of the NE, which is about 1/3 lower), so I think it's reasonable to assume that "coastal" liberals in, say, CA (where I live) are around that 20% mark. There's absolutely no way they are at 1.9% like Holland. Even if CA liberals owned guns just at 3.8%, that would still be twice what Holland has. However, it's most likely that Holland-like people, culturally-speaking (liberal, pot/gay friendly, coastal, like bikes) in the US own guns at approx. a 7-10x greater rate than do people in Holland proper. There's also no dispute that the rate of violent crime is similar among these two populations. (As it turns out, Holland has a higher violent crime rate than other European countries with substantially higher gun ownership, suggesting that higher gun ownership in Europe might contribute to a reduction in violent crime.) Regarding your suggestion that I'm a racist, I don't think violent crime is a white-black thing in the US (as you suggest), I think it's a cultural thing. Why? Well, if you treat blacks as one "race" from a stats perspective (i.e. if you're a racist), you get rather useless statistics. If instead you divide blacks up culturally—say, into "inner-city African Americans" and "recent immigrants from Africa" among others—you see very different crime statistics as well, i.e. it's not race—being black—that seems to be the controlling factor for violent crime, it's culture. That's why racism is so stupid: the stats just don't indicate that there even is such a thing as "the black race" that you can make meaningful aggregate statements like "violent crime" about. So. If you treat the US with a broad brush when it comes to violent crime, it's very easy to come to the mistaken belief that "guns" are the problem, or even "a" problem—the stats indicate STRONGLY that guns are not a problem. Instead, cultural (not racial!) propensity towards violent crime is the problem. That means that if we want to reduce violent crime, reducing gun ownership among "secular urban bike riding pot tolerant gay tolerant coastal residents" by 10x isn't going to make a difference—they're basically non-violent already. [0] http://www.calgunlaws.com/myths-of-european-gun-laws/ http://www.calgunlaws.com/myths-of-european-gun-laws/ [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demographics-and-politics-of-gun-owning-households/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/the-demograp...

tracker1 10y ago

The problem is that the AR-15 isn't practically different from a smaller hunting rifle, too small for larger game like deer or elk... more useful for the likes of coyote or mountain lion threats. In the end, the background checks people are asking for wouldn't have stopped the Orlando shooting, and short of a total ban including the police, government, govt security contractors, and even off-base military with tight armory controls would have likely stopped this, even then it would have probably been a bomb instead. There is no reason that a cop needs a gun that doesn't apply to someone in their own home. Guns are lethal force. The end, we can go on about specifics but murder is already illegal, so are a lot of other things that people do. Maybe we should also ban all criminals (not just felons) from voting? Would that be sane? Not really. In the end, you can't have any hope of stopping crazy short of China-like lock down, spying and personal invasion of privacy. Not to mention deleting the past from society. I'd much rather have the personal freedom and liberties that the constitution ensures. It isn't about what I need... in the end, I'm against most gov't restrictions. Banning guns makes about as much sense as banning marijuana... It takes away personal freedom and choice for the illusion of safety. BTW, I don't own a gun... my father worked for the police for about two decades, and my mother still does. I have friends and relatives that have guns, hunt, etc. The AR-15 isn't an assault rifle... it's just scary looking.