4 ms·

If there are no guns then outlaws wouldn't have them.

by free652 7y ago

TimTheTinker 7y ago
That's true, but it's a bit late for that, at least in the US.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Our gun industry produces more than 11 million guns a year. Sure, many of those wind up in Mexico and Central America via the drug trade, but that's still a lot of supply being sustained through the system. Guns wear out, simply cutting production would do a lot to reduce the number of guns in the system (outlaw or not).
  - XaoDaoCaoCao 7y ago
    Even with our vast gun supply, the US one of the safest nations on Earth. Half of our homicides are committed by a particular minority of the population which, when removed from the picture, makes it really stark how "well behaved" a majority of Americans are in comparison to the number of guns.
    - dang 7y ago
      Racewar comments are unacceptable here and will get you banned, so please don't. Also, accounts that use HN primarily for political or ideological battle eventually get banned here, and when people keep doing that, we eventually ban their main account as well. Why? Because HN is subject to all sorts of forces tearing it apart, and those forces win by default, so we have to protect it. If you'd review the site guidelines and take that spirit to heart and help protect it, we'd be grateful—and it's in your interests to do so, since that's the only way HN stays interesting in the long run. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - coding123 7y ago
    It will take a long time for guns to wear out such that simple and possibly deadly armed robberies, bank robberies and church and school shootings would be possible well into a few hundred years. Beyond that in this political climate, even if you pulled that off, you would literally have tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens making their own (not from 3d printing, but actual metal working). Then assuming they can reclaim half, you still have a hundred million guns in the wild. We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      China is the perfect example of where people are making their own guns, they aren’t that great and lack economy of scale. Besides, China has a death penalty in place for illegal gun production. Guns will wear out eventually, heck, they can also run out of ammunition. Industrialization is an incredible enabler for gun use (one the founding fathers obviously didn’t have to worry about), and taking that away causes the system of mass gun violence to fall over quickly. Simply taking 11 million units of production offline will make guns much more expensive worldwide, let alone in the USA. That crazy person who has an idea to go shoot up a school will have to find some money to pay up if they don’t have one already. Let’s also not ignore what happened in other countries that banned or severely cut back on gun use: none of what the pro gun crowd would predict what would happen. > We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat. Why do that when Uber/Lyft have already mostly solved the problem and self driving cars will do so even more? If gun advocates actually believed in gun control at all, we could talk about technological solutions in that space. But their position is that any gun control at all is useless, and ironically enough implies that only a ban would be worth considering. (And yes, I’m all for taking away your manually driven car when self driving car technology is ready, it just makes so much sense from a safety and traffic perspective).
coding123 7y ago
That's not what he said. If guns were OUTLAWED, not if there were no guns.

If there are no guns then outlaws wouldn't have them.

TimTheTinker 7y ago

That's true, but it's a bit late for that, at least in the US.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Our gun industry produces more than 11 million guns a year. Sure, many of those wind up in Mexico and Central America via the drug trade, but that's still a lot of supply being sustained through the system. Guns wear out, simply cutting production would do a lot to reduce the number of guns in the system (outlaw or not).
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y ago
  Even with our vast gun supply, the US one of the safest nations on Earth. Half of our homicides are committed by a particular minority of the population which, when removed from the picture, makes it really stark how "well behaved" a majority of Americans are in comparison to the number of guns.
  - dang 7y ago
    Racewar comments are unacceptable here and will get you banned, so please don't. Also, accounts that use HN primarily for political or ideological battle eventually get banned here, and when people keep doing that, we eventually ban their main account as well. Why? Because HN is subject to all sorts of forces tearing it apart, and those forces win by default, so we have to protect it. If you'd review the site guidelines and take that spirit to heart and help protect it, we'd be grateful—and it's in your interests to do so, since that's the only way HN stays interesting in the long run. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- coding123 7y ago
  It will take a long time for guns to wear out such that simple and possibly deadly armed robberies, bank robberies and church and school shootings would be possible well into a few hundred years. Beyond that in this political climate, even if you pulled that off, you would literally have tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens making their own (not from 3d printing, but actual metal working). Then assuming they can reclaim half, you still have a hundred million guns in the wild. We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    China is the perfect example of where people are making their own guns, they aren’t that great and lack economy of scale. Besides, China has a death penalty in place for illegal gun production. Guns will wear out eventually, heck, they can also run out of ammunition. Industrialization is an incredible enabler for gun use (one the founding fathers obviously didn’t have to worry about), and taking that away causes the system of mass gun violence to fall over quickly. Simply taking 11 million units of production offline will make guns much more expensive worldwide, let alone in the USA. That crazy person who has an idea to go shoot up a school will have to find some money to pay up if they don’t have one already. Let’s also not ignore what happened in other countries that banned or severely cut back on gun use: none of what the pro gun crowd would predict what would happen. > We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat. Why do that when Uber/Lyft have already mostly solved the problem and self driving cars will do so even more? If gun advocates actually believed in gun control at all, we could talk about technological solutions in that space. But their position is that any gun control at all is useless, and ironically enough implies that only a ban would be worth considering. (And yes, I’m all for taking away your manually driven car when self driving car technology is ready, it just makes so much sense from a safety and traffic perspective).

coding123 7y ago

That's not what he said. If guns were OUTLAWED, not if there were no guns.