3 ms·

Would people be even remotely okay with this if mass shootings weren't becoming a daily occurrence? It seems like the 2nd and 4th Amendments may end up mutually

Would people be even remotely okay with this if mass shootings weren't becoming a daily occurrence? It seems like the 2nd and 4th Amendments may end up mutually exclusive.

furi 7y ago
Mass shootings contribute fewer than 1% of US gun homicides as far as I know so any policy based around them should raise serious question marks on that basis alone. Otherwise not to be pedantic but that doesn't lead to mutual exclusivity. If there was another amendment saying "the state must take every measure to prevent mass shootings" then you would end up in a "choose two out of three" scenario but as far as I'm aware there isn't one. Satisfying both the 2nd and 4th amendments at the same time is easy to do, you simply accept a certain level of carnage at the intersection of the two. It might be unpalatable for many but it's hardly impossible.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  I’d be interested in what percentage of gun homicides they are where the victim had no other contact with guns. That said, it doesn’t matter if the link is zero - anything that the majority of the population feels strongly about can become politically impossible to compromise on, so the relevant factor here is whether mass shootings make people more willing to accept these privacy intrusions.
citilife 7y ago
> It seems like the 2nd and 4th Amendments may end up mutually exclusive Whole point was neither should be impeded... Living in a society has risks. Overall it looks worse recently, but deaths from mass shooting are still well below just Chicago's murder rate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america/?utm_term=.a7cc4c4e818c https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-s... https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/31/us/chicago-murders-drop-2018/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/31/us/chicago-murders-drop-2018/... Personally, I'm not at all afraid of gun violence (perhaps because I've used a gun). Bombs, poisons, etc. and the like are way scarier, as they can kill way more people. Honestly if the occasional mass shooting happens every few weeks, it's a pretty low price to pay (as callous as that sounds). With scanners and what not there's such a high potential risk of abuse that it's not worth it. If someone randomly elected can decide to imprison million of people they don't like. We probably don't want them to have said technology already in place (and probably want guns).
- jetpks 7y ago
  > Your kids will pay for my freedom in blood, but it's worth it because they're statistically insignificant anyway.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    And at least they'll be free. After all, your kids will pay for our gun registry with confiscation, and the religious census with death camps. No one ever said that the tree of liberty could survive on water.
    - jetpks 7y ago
      They're certainly not free from dying at school.
      - citilife 7y ago
        As I have several children I feel the concern. I feel the same concern when they ride in a car with friends... which they are way way more likely to die from. Do I stop them from riding with friends? No, because it's in their best interest. Freedom and growth comes with a necessary risk. Instead of worrying about the weapon of choice, I'm more concerned about why people want to murder. Let's try to fix that.
        dao- 7y ago
        So just because riding in a car with friends is a fine tradeoff to make, gun violence must be too? How exactly is it a necessary risk? Most other civilized countries seem to do fine without it.
        _red 7y ago
        Would you support a targeted form of gun control? For instance, if statistically it could be shown that 13% of the population were responsible for >50% of all gun crimes, wouldn't it make sense to focus on removing access to guns on that group first?
maxheadroom 7y ago
>Would people be even remotely okay with this if mass shootings weren't becoming a daily occurrence? ...but isn't this addressing a symptom, as it were, and not the problem? I know I'll probably get down-voted to hell, because this is primarily an American board, but if the issue is systemic to society, shouldn't society redress the cause[s]? Inb4 the "homogenous" argument: Yes, American society is homogenous but so are other societies. Wouldn't something like, say, affordable (or free), easily accessible and not ostracised mental health tools be equally or even more effective? I get that people are scared of mass shootings and that drives the reactionary responses we are seeing, such as this, but wouldn't be better to find ways to reprieve the causes? After all, it wasn't that long ago that "going postal" was a common parlance in American English for such events but those particular events (postal workers "going postal") have diminished - considerably. Edit: So, clearly, if the rates for postal workers "going postal" have considerably declined, then something can be done to prevent these events - but this would have to be on a societal scale; which is a daunting task, I'm fully aware.
- dang 7y ago
  > I know I'll probably get down-voted to hell, because this is primarily an American board Please don't include this sort of off-topic provocation in your comments. It's against the site guidelines to downvote-bait, and nationalistic assumptions in internet comments never help. As it happens, the HN audience is about 50% in the US. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - airnomad 7y ago
    ...which means this is primarily US board.
    - dang 7y ago
      Define primarily how you like, but it's a lot less that way than most people assume it is.
- icelancer 7y ago
oil25 7y ago
Armed individuals, enabled by the Second Amendment, is largely the reason mass shootings are not a daily occurrence. There's no mutual exclusivity between privacy and a natural right to defend oneself.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Armed individuals, enabled by the Second Amendment, is largely the reason mass shootings are not a daily occurrence. No, it's not. Evidence: the parts of the world with no parallel to the Second Amendment, where mass shootings are far rarer than in the US; in the US, they are nearly a daily occurrence, depending on the precise threshold you set. The safety, such as it was, provided by the Second Amendment was the disincentive the availability of a militia drawn from the armed populace placed on the reliance on large professional armed police and military forces, which reliance was the threat it was designed as a bulwark against. This completely fell apart a little bit into the 20th Century.
  - oil25 7y ago
    Certainly countries with lower populations and fewer guns experience less shootings, but USA is not such a country and guns are ubiquitous, which is also precisely what guarantees law-abiding citizens the means to thwart assaults and attacks on them. Conservative estimates of defense gun uses are on the order of hundreds of thousands per year, while unlawful homicides in the mere thousands, and most of these are gang-related. That's solid evidence the Second Amendment is working as intended - to guarantee the natural right to self-preservation for each individual. It has nothing to do with any organized militia now.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Certainly countries with [...] fewer guns experience less shootings Yes, which is the opposite of your claim that an armed population prevents mass shootings. An armed population enables mass shootings, which is why, in total, per capita, and heck, probably even per gun, the US has the most mass shootings outside of actual organized armed conflicts anywhere in the world.

Would people be even remotely okay with this if mass shootings weren't becoming a daily occurrence? It seems like the 2nd and 4th Amendments may end up mutually exclusive.

furi 7y ago

Mass shootings contribute fewer than 1% of US gun homicides as far as I know so any policy based around them should raise serious question marks on that basis alone. Otherwise not to be pedantic but that doesn't lead to mutual exclusivity. If there was another amendment saying "the state must take every measure to prevent mass shootings" then you would end up in a "choose two out of three" scenario but as far as I'm aware there isn't one. Satisfying both the 2nd and 4th amendments at the same time is easy to do, you simply accept a certain level of carnage at the intersection of the two. It might be unpalatable for many but it's hardly impossible.

lazyasciiart 7y ago
I’d be interested in what percentage of gun homicides they are where the victim had no other contact with guns. That said, it doesn’t matter if the link is zero - anything that the majority of the population feels strongly about can become politically impossible to compromise on, so the relevant factor here is whether mass shootings make people more willing to accept these privacy intrusions.

citilife 7y ago

> It seems like the 2nd and 4th Amendments may end up mutually exclusive Whole point was neither should be impeded... Living in a society has risks. Overall it looks worse recently, but deaths from mass shooting are still well below just Chicago's murder rate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america/?utm_term=.a7cc4c4e818c https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-s... https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/31/us/chicago-murders-drop-2018/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/31/us/chicago-murders-drop-2018/... Personally, I'm not at all afraid of gun violence (perhaps because I've used a gun). Bombs, poisons, etc. and the like are way scarier, as they can kill way more people. Honestly if the occasional mass shooting happens every few weeks, it's a pretty low price to pay (as callous as that sounds). With scanners and what not there's such a high potential risk of abuse that it's not worth it. If someone randomly elected can decide to imprison million of people they don't like. We probably don't want them to have said technology already in place (and probably want guns).

jetpks 7y ago
> Your kids will pay for my freedom in blood, but it's worth it because they're statistically insignificant anyway.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  And at least they'll be free. After all, your kids will pay for our gun registry with confiscation, and the religious census with death camps. No one ever said that the tree of liberty could survive on water.
  - jetpks 7y ago
    They're certainly not free from dying at school.
    - citilife 7y ago
      As I have several children I feel the concern. I feel the same concern when they ride in a car with friends... which they are way way more likely to die from. Do I stop them from riding with friends? No, because it's in their best interest. Freedom and growth comes with a necessary risk. Instead of worrying about the weapon of choice, I'm more concerned about why people want to murder. Let's try to fix that.
      - dao- 7y ago
        So just because riding in a car with friends is a fine tradeoff to make, gun violence must be too? How exactly is it a necessary risk? Most other civilized countries seem to do fine without it.
        _red 7y ago
        Would you support a targeted form of gun control? For instance, if statistically it could be shown that 13% of the population were responsible for >50% of all gun crimes, wouldn't it make sense to focus on removing access to guns on that group first?

maxheadroom 7y ago

>Would people be even remotely okay with this if mass shootings weren't becoming a daily occurrence? ...but isn't this addressing a symptom, as it were, and not the problem? I know I'll probably get down-voted to hell, because this is primarily an American board, but if the issue is systemic to society, shouldn't society redress the cause[s]? Inb4 the "homogenous" argument: Yes, American society is homogenous but so are other societies. Wouldn't something like, say, affordable (or free), easily accessible and not ostracised mental health tools be equally or even more effective? I get that people are scared of mass shootings and that drives the reactionary responses we are seeing, such as this, but wouldn't be better to find ways to reprieve the causes? After all, it wasn't that long ago that "going postal" was a common parlance in American English for such events but those particular events (postal workers "going postal") have diminished - considerably. Edit: So, clearly, if the rates for postal workers "going postal" have considerably declined, then something can be done to prevent these events - but this would have to be on a societal scale; which is a daunting task, I'm fully aware.

dang 7y ago
> I know I'll probably get down-voted to hell, because this is primarily an American board Please don't include this sort of off-topic provocation in your comments. It's against the site guidelines to downvote-bait, and nationalistic assumptions in internet comments never help. As it happens, the HN audience is about 50% in the US. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- airnomad 7y ago
  ...which means this is primarily US board.
  - dang 7y ago
    Define primarily how you like, but it's a lot less that way than most people assume it is.
icelancer 7y ago

oil25 7y ago

Armed individuals, enabled by the Second Amendment, is largely the reason mass shootings are not a daily occurrence. There's no mutual exclusivity between privacy and a natural right to defend oneself.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Armed individuals, enabled by the Second Amendment, is largely the reason mass shootings are not a daily occurrence. No, it's not. Evidence: the parts of the world with no parallel to the Second Amendment, where mass shootings are far rarer than in the US; in the US, they are nearly a daily occurrence, depending on the precise threshold you set. The safety, such as it was, provided by the Second Amendment was the disincentive the availability of a militia drawn from the armed populace placed on the reliance on large professional armed police and military forces, which reliance was the threat it was designed as a bulwark against. This completely fell apart a little bit into the 20th Century.
- oil25 7y ago
  Certainly countries with lower populations and fewer guns experience less shootings, but USA is not such a country and guns are ubiquitous, which is also precisely what guarantees law-abiding citizens the means to thwart assaults and attacks on them. Conservative estimates of defense gun uses are on the order of hundreds of thousands per year, while unlawful homicides in the mere thousands, and most of these are gang-related. That's solid evidence the Second Amendment is working as intended - to guarantee the natural right to self-preservation for each individual. It has nothing to do with any organized militia now.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Certainly countries with [...] fewer guns experience less shootings Yes, which is the opposite of your claim that an armed population prevents mass shootings. An armed population enables mass shootings, which is why, in total, per capita, and heck, probably even per gun, the US has the most mass shootings outside of actual organized armed conflicts anywhere in the world.