11 ms·

I genuinely do not believe the access to the guns are the issue here. There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the

I genuinely do not believe the access to the guns are the issue here. There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method. It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.

onli 7y ago
I believe you that it's genuine. But no. Look at other countries. Look at the history of gun control laws in Germany or other countries and their effect. Shootings like this are 100% caused by the easy access to guns. If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand. HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  > HN is not the right forum to discuss this Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.
- cm2187 7y ago
  France has pretty strict gun controls laws which have not proven to be much of a protection against terrorism, who used AK47, explosives or simply trucks to cause mass casualties.
  - dgellow 7y ago
    We don’t know how different the situation would be if France didn’t have the current regulations, but I personally think the death toll would be higher. For sure you cannot completely remove the risk of mass killing, but you can make it more expensive/difficult for attackers to do a lot of victims.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Gun control is necessary to avoid a lot of the smaller scale problems - accidental gun deaths, suicide, violent revenge, robberies, etc. But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands. Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - gsich 7y ago
    >Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop. But reduce the overall deaths.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
homonculus1 7y ago
If it were a gun access problem then it would have peaked when gun access was easiest, i.e. back when machine guns were sold by mail order. Now it's happening in a time of rampant depression, polarization, social isolation, 24-hour news, and social media. That can't be a coincidence.
- tdewitt 7y ago
  You can have more than one problem. Think of it like a post mortem. Don't just look for root cause hut also think about mitigating factors. Solve for as many as possible. Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    No but you can do so very easily with fire, a car or a trivial fertilizer bomb.
    - tdewitt 7y ago
      Then why don't they? It's just as easy, right? Just as effective, if not more so? You're making a supposition that the perpetrators would switch but in order for that to be considered in our post mortem, you need to provide evidence to support the argument More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
      - vorpalhex 7y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack as an example found in seconds. > More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant. Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?
        7y ago
bart_spoon 7y ago
On the contrary, its lazy to assume that gun control won't fix the issue, because it implicitly assumes the massive difference between the US and other nations in violent murders is due to some other, vague, unexplained societal malady that somehow is only a problem in the US and not in other first world countries. Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs. Even if you were to make the argument that the underlying issues, whatever those may be, would persist, it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  A point David Frum makes in his latest column: > There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals. > You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-american-exception/595450/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a... A similar column from a few years ago: > A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain. > At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them. > After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?” * https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-real-common-sense-tactics-the-debate-is-missing/542229/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...
  - 7y ago
tdewitt 7y ago
I have guns in my home. My wife hates guns and she has a home defense weapon. That's my intro because I don't want to be mistaken for anti-gun. I like guns and I like shooting. How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim. Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life. I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.
- kls 7y ago
  The three most deadly mass killing in the US where not done by guns, two where by bombs and the other one was done by jets. One was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer and it leveled half of a 10 story building. 4 to 10 bags of fertilizer would have done some serious damage to that Walmart, as well as most likely killed and maimed a lot more people. That amount would not put him on any radar (we do monitor ammonium nitrate purchases in bulk after Oklahoma City) Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link. Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen. Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.
  - tdewitt 7y ago
    The science on the matter disagrees with your personal opinion's about the impact of video games. There have been more than a handful of studies around this. I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg. Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.
avip 7y ago
I’d strongly suggest watching John Oliver’s Aussi gun control sequel. It’s hilarious and educating (surely he’s a biased source, but at min you’ll get a good laugh)
throw0101a 7y ago
> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method. The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two: * https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-st... > It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this. While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced: * https://twitter.com/well_regulated_ https://twitter.com/well_regulated_ And it isn't even necessarily about bans, but simply a few filters and speed bumps to reduce the chances of hot heads and whack jobs packing heat: * https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-control-laws-licenses https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
- ameister14 7y ago
  just want to point out that per capita gun deaths is the wrong metric to use - the vast majority of deaths by gun are suicides
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    "If we reduced mass shootings by restricting gun access, we might accidentally reduce suicides" sounds like an upside, not a downside.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      That'd completely be an upside, if the data showed that happened. I don't know that it does. The US has a lower suicide rate than some other developed countries even with guns, and the Americas in general are significantly under Europe in crude rate per capita numbers.
      - 7y ago

onli 7y ago

I believe you that it's genuine. But no. Look at other countries. Look at the history of gun control laws in Germany or other countries and their effect. Shootings like this are 100% caused by the easy access to guns. If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand. HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.

BubRoss 7y ago
> HN is not the right forum to discuss this Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.
cm2187 7y ago
France has pretty strict gun controls laws which have not proven to be much of a protection against terrorism, who used AK47, explosives or simply trucks to cause mass casualties.
- dgellow 7y ago
  We don’t know how different the situation would be if France didn’t have the current regulations, but I personally think the death toll would be higher. For sure you cannot completely remove the risk of mass killing, but you can make it more expensive/difficult for attackers to do a lot of victims.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
Gun control is necessary to avoid a lot of the smaller scale problems - accidental gun deaths, suicide, violent revenge, robberies, etc. But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands. Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gsich 7y ago
  >Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop. But reduce the overall deaths.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

homonculus1 7y ago

If it were a gun access problem then it would have peaked when gun access was easiest, i.e. back when machine guns were sold by mail order. Now it's happening in a time of rampant depression, polarization, social isolation, 24-hour news, and social media. That can't be a coincidence.

tdewitt 7y ago
You can have more than one problem. Think of it like a post mortem. Don't just look for root cause hut also think about mitigating factors. Solve for as many as possible. Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  No but you can do so very easily with fire, a car or a trivial fertilizer bomb.
  - tdewitt 7y ago
    Then why don't they? It's just as easy, right? Just as effective, if not more so? You're making a supposition that the perpetrators would switch but in order for that to be considered in our post mortem, you need to provide evidence to support the argument More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack as an example found in seconds. > More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant. Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?
      - 7y ago

bart_spoon 7y ago

On the contrary, its lazy to assume that gun control won't fix the issue, because it implicitly assumes the massive difference between the US and other nations in violent murders is due to some other, vague, unexplained societal malady that somehow is only a problem in the US and not in other first world countries. Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs. Even if you were to make the argument that the underlying issues, whatever those may be, would persist, it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.

throw0101a 7y ago
A point David Frum makes in his latest column: > There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals. > You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-american-exception/595450/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a... A similar column from a few years ago: > A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain. > At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them. > After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?” * https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-real-common-sense-tactics-the-debate-is-missing/542229/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...
- 7y ago

tdewitt 7y ago

I have guns in my home. My wife hates guns and she has a home defense weapon. That's my intro because I don't want to be mistaken for anti-gun. I like guns and I like shooting. How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim. Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life. I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.

kls 7y ago
The three most deadly mass killing in the US where not done by guns, two where by bombs and the other one was done by jets. One was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer and it leveled half of a 10 story building. 4 to 10 bags of fertilizer would have done some serious damage to that Walmart, as well as most likely killed and maimed a lot more people. That amount would not put him on any radar (we do monitor ammonium nitrate purchases in bulk after Oklahoma City) Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link. Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen. Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.
- tdewitt 7y ago
  The science on the matter disagrees with your personal opinion's about the impact of video games. There have been more than a handful of studies around this. I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg. Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.

avip 7y ago

I’d strongly suggest watching John Oliver’s Aussi gun control sequel. It’s hilarious and educating (surely he’s a biased source, but at min you’ll get a good laugh)

throw0101a 7y ago

> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method. The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two: * https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-st... > It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this. While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced: * https://twitter.com/well_regulated_ https://twitter.com/well_regulated_ And it isn't even necessarily about bans, but simply a few filters and speed bumps to reduce the chances of hot heads and whack jobs packing heat: * https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-control-laws-licenses https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

ameister14 7y ago
just want to point out that per capita gun deaths is the wrong metric to use - the vast majority of deaths by gun are suicides
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  "If we reduced mass shootings by restricting gun access, we might accidentally reduce suicides" sounds like an upside, not a downside.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    That'd completely be an upside, if the data showed that happened. I don't know that it does. The US has a lower suicide rate than some other developed countries even with guns, and the Americas in general are significantly under Europe in crude rate per capita numbers.
    - 7y ago