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Why can't people who also understand technology be vulnerable to emotional pleas too? Basically all of my tech friends are passionately against guns despite nev

Why can't people who also understand technology be vulnerable to emotional pleas too? Basically all of my tech friends are passionately against guns despite never having been victims of guns, knowing someone who was a victim of guns, or guns being especially problematic by the numbers in the US. And yet they're drawn to the position because of the emotional overtones that are ubiquitous in coverage of the subject. Not that the situations are perfect parallels, but I think it's worth reflecting on since this ultimately seems like consternation born from hubris. Everyone is vulnerable to emotional appeals in the same way that everyone is vulnerable to appeals to logic and authority. Highlighting the rhetorical nature of a specific appeal without making a counter appeal doesn't do anything productive to shift the dialogue. It's the same reason that the 'nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide' crowd haven't lost much ground in the mainstream despite years of the digital privacy movement trying different tactics. Most people in the mainstream, even if they accept the expanded definitions of privacy unique to the digital landscape, don't feel like they've suffered in a significant enough way to be worth resisting the emotional appeal of helping the 1% of victims who the current system fails.

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
> And yet they're drawn to the position because of the emotional overtones that are ubiquitous in coverage of the subject. or because they are tools made to kill? Let's be honest this is not a good comparison (to stay polite). Not having guns at worst would force a group of people to find a new and less dangerous hobby, while not having encryption pretty much puts people's lives at risk in many countries and make having a democracy much more difficult.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Surely you see that this is the same kind of emotional appeal the original commenter is decrying. "Tools made to kill" and "less dangerous hobby" aren't dispassionate statements of fact.
  - post_below 7y ago
    Both of those statements are factually correct.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      "Black people are more likely to score lower on IQ tests" and "illegal immigrants are more likely to be involved in drug trafficking" are also factually correct. It is possible for a statement to be factually correct and politically inflammatory at the same time.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        For purposes of this thread, "emotionally inflammatory."
      - komali2 7y ago
        The rub is in definition, though. You've assumed far too much with your "factual statements," specifically on what does "black people" mean, what even is an "iq test," or what an "illegal immigrant" or "drug trafficking" is. That's why those are not really even factual statements but are quite politically inflammatory. The people who feel they're wrong may think they're facts but can't figure out why they aren't, not realizing that they aren't actually facts at all.
        AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        The statements are true under common and reasonable definitions of those terms. And you can do the same thing for anything. I could easily contend that "less dangerous hobby" is factually incorrect because there are plenty of more dangerous hobbies not being prohibited, like drag racing or skydiving. And we had the whole discussion in the other thread about "tools made to kill."
    - Thriptic 7y ago
      I don't think they are really. Guns are tools made to inflict kinetic damage. They can inflict damage on humans, damage on animals, or damage on targets. That may seem like pedantry, but a huge number of guns aren't design to be used in anger, fired at a living thing, or will ever be purchased for the intent of firing at a living thing. I own a shotgun exclusively for shooting at clay targets for example, and I have no intention of ever pointing it at a living thing. Firearms used for sport are frequently explicitly designed for use in sport rather than being designed for combat, self defense, or hunting.
- Igelau 7y ago
  > puts people's lives at risk in many countries and make having a democracy much more difficult. Funny you should word it that way, because the Founders had a similar attitude about firearms: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    I think most people agree that a country needs a well regulated, armed militia to protect itself from nasty invading forces. But arming amateurs and everybody around is about as safe as everybody rolling out their own encryption algorithm.
    - Igelau 7y ago
      The parallelism of the language was notable. You and I do not disagree.
- eyegor 7y ago
  I don't disagree, but the irony is palpable. > this is not a good comparison > tools made to kill > pretty much puts people's lives at risk
- tal8d 7y ago
  > ... and make having a democracy much more difficult. Are you unaware of the fact that this is exact argument made by those who argue for the 2nd amendment? While you could argue that they are fear-mongers, with the tree of liberty talk, you can't then go on to talk about a threat to democracy by way of the government's constant violation of citizen's other rights (the 4th in this case). Emotional appeals are much easier for the confiscation proponents, because nobody expects internal consistency from someone waving a bloody shirt.
  - belorn 7y ago
    Just because two people use the same argument does not mean they have both the same validity. Almost all democracies gives the government an exclusive right to violence. The government can order the army and police to shot people, while every citizen are forbidden to make a similar decision. The exception that exist are narrow defined and up to the legal system to decide per case if a decision to kill by a citizen can be forgiven based on circumstances. Almost no democracies gives the government an exclusive right to private communication and private secrets. Countries which governments does claim an exclusivity in this area are called totalitarian and is seen by many as the contradicting in terms to the definition of democracy.
    - tal8d 7y ago
      Yes, I understand that logical correctness is different from universal truth. But using the exact same formula to argue two mutually exclusive points in the same breath is a very good way of demonstrating why emotionally driven arguments yield poor results. > ...exclusive right to violence. I know that duty to retreat is much more common outside of the US, but I don't think any democracy demands that you just die in the face of a determined attacker - which would be required in your "exclusive right" characterization. While the classic way of describing it is a "monopoly on violence", the scenario you describe would be better characterized as an exclusive right to classify murder and manslaughter. > ...exclusive right to private communication and private secrets. Because that would be impossible, as they can't exclusively have a right to information that you generated - at worst it would be a shared right. The US does claim shared rights to everything that is possible though: the moment you share that information with anyone they claim that right - 3rd party doctrine. Your two points would have better symmetry if you added that bit about the definition of democracy onto the end of both. That would make it easier to spot the fact that you've just made the exact same "threat to democracy" argument I just replied to.
- tonyztan 7y ago
  > "Not having guns at worst would force a group of people to find a new and less dangerous hobby" No, not having guns at worst would deprive minorities of the ability to protect themselves. It is not only a hobby; it is also an effective means of self-defense.
  - nemothekid 7y ago
    >No, not having guns at worst would deprive minorities of the ability to protect themselves. Are we talking about America? Where those same minorities are shot for holding toy guns?
    - tonyztan 7y ago
      Well, I know many minorities who carry guns to protect themselves. Both racial minorities and sexual minorities (LGBT+). Racism and police violence are real problems that need to be addressed, but taking away guns is not the solution.
- L-four 7y ago
  Encryption was literally invented to communicate and plan killing people.
  - m463 7y ago
    The earliest known use of cryptography is found in non-standard hieroglyphs carved into the wall of a tomb from the Old Kingdom of Egypt circa 1900 BC. These are not thought to be serious attempts at secret communications, however, but rather to have been attempts at mystery, intrigue, or even amusement for literate onlookers. Some clay tablets from Mesopotamia somewhat later are clearly meant to protect information—one dated near 1500 BC was found to encrypt a craftsman's recipe for pottery glaze, presumably commercially valuable.
    - wl 7y ago
      I don't trust your source. 1900 BCE is Middle Kingdom, not Old Kingdom. Also, a lot of those older cryptic hieroglyphs turned out to be in an early Northwestern Semitic language. The idea was apparently that you're going to have spells effective against snakes coming in on ships from Byblos, the spells should invoke the deities they know in the language they know. https://semiticmuseum.fas.harvard.edu/publications/early-northwest-semitic-serpent-spells-pyramid-texts https://semiticmuseum.fas.harvard.edu/publications/early-nor...
  - humbleMouse 7y ago
    I suppose you could say the same thing about the internet, and a number of other widely used technologies to come out of ww2 era.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - komali2 7y ago
    Encryption can be used for a lot of things. Guns can be used either to kill things, or to practice at getting better at killing things.
- wyager 7y ago
  Are you willing to take a bet on what fraction of guns sold to civilians have been used in a homicide? If you’re going to insist on a teleological argument, you might as well use the same standard we use for other tools: how people actually end up using them. No rational person describes knives as “tools to stab people” even though this is part of the historical basis for their development. Instead, the vast majority of knives are used to cut food or spread butter or open boxes. Indeed, these are all more plausible descriptions of what a knife is “for”, just like target shooting or hunting food is a much more plausible description of what guns are for.
  - throwaway17_17 7y ago
    Just to put some rough numbers on it: - 393,000,000 firearms owned by US citizens - 39,773 firearm related deaths (including suicide) as a decent base yearly rate [this is the actual 2017 number] 14,542 firearm homicides as a decent base yearly rate [again, actual 2017 number]
- gonational 7y ago
  Not having a gun puts your life at risk, if you encounter a deadly threat beyond your ability to defend against. For 110 pound woman this might be a large man who wants to rape her, or for a 200 pound man capable of reasonable self-defense this might mean somebody attempting to rob him at knife point.
  - girvo 7y ago
    And yet so many other developed countries are significantly less violent than the US, despite having far fewer guns in the hands of civilians
    - gonational 7y ago
      I wonder what things they have in common, if guns don’t seem to be a factor. Maybe we could figure out whatever that is and work on that, instead of focusing on gun ownership, which demonstrably does not lead to more violence, and in most cases, leads to less violence.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      Those countries tend to already have better economic safety nets / welfare systems and mental health systems, thus mitigating the reasons why someone might be driven to engage in violent crime (let alone use a gun in said engagement) in the first place. That is: you're arguing that wet streets cause rain.
- shard972 7y ago
  > or because they are tools made to kill? Which makes it more important if anything. If its important not to give the government a foothold into knowing all information then how is it irrelevant to then give the government all power of force? Seems like the power to kill is the ultimate power in any society whether we like it or not.
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  The number of injuries per year due to firearms (including homicides and suicides) in America is 106,000 approx. The percentage of firearm deaths including suicides is slightly less than 2% of total deaths. Those are barely significant figures. Less than .03% of Americans are effected by those 106,000 firearm incidents. There were 39,773 firearm deaths total in 2017 while there were 47,600 opioid causes deaths in the same year. And that is with an estimated 393 million small arms in the country. I’m not claiming that these deaths do not matter, I’m just saying that the impact of firearms is much more prominently discussed than other causes of death. I find it very much in line with the emotional pleas against encryption.
- pyuser583 7y ago
  If end to end encryption became the norm, people would die as a result. Children would be raped, radical groups would spread, etc. It’s still a good thing. But let’s not pretend there’s no cost. Freedoms have a price, and that price is often the inability of the state to protect us from malevolent members of society. That true for guns, and it’s true for encryption. There’s shared ground between the NRA and EFF. I just wish more conservative, law-and-order types would realize that.
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Owning guns means not giving the gov 100% monopoly on violence. There is a fundamental right somewhere in there and you are glossing over it like it's an afterthought. That's what the poster meant.
jdietrich 7y ago
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527 https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
- heartbeats 7y ago
  It's true that the US has more gun violence than other first world countries, but we also has more violence and crime in general. Within the US, there is no statistically significant correlation (r = -0.02) on the state level between firearm ownership and firearm homicide. (There is a statistically significant correlation between firearm ownership and firearm deaths, but this is due to suicides.) Make of this what you will, but it's not substantiated by the facts the claim that restricting gun ownership would have a strong impact on homicides. You can look at this list and sort by gun murder rate and see what kind of states come out on top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... Here is a strongly political Medium article about the matter: https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide-1108ed400be5 https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-a...
  - stephenr 7y ago
    So what you’re saying is, the real problem is that Americans are just a violent bloodthirsty lot. Maybe the rest of the world should stop telling Americans to control gun ownership (ie ”ban guns”, despite nobody ever suggesting a total ban) and instead we should be promoting control of Americans (ie. “ban Americans”, although nobody would suggest a total ban. I’m sure zoos would want some).
    - heartbeats 7y ago
      That's incredibly racist.
      - stephenr 7y ago
        I know they/you may think otherwise, but "American" isn't a race, mate.
hdjejdjd 7y ago
Your analogy to guns would make sense if other developed nations didnt have civilized gun policies. Seeing as they overwhelmingly do, its nonsense. Stop using a legitimate issue to pry nonsense about guns into it.
- gonational 7y ago
  I think what you mean is that the rest of the world has domesticated and pacified its populous. Things were so bad in the United States, why would everybody want to come here?
  - hdjejdjd 7y ago
    You're right, also the criminal justice system must be good by your logic too then. Pretty insipid answer don't you think?
    - gonational 7y ago
      I guess I really don’t need an opinion on the matter, since the rest of the world has already voted with their money and migration preference, no? Don’t be so salty ;)
  - rfrey 7y ago
    You're almost certainly trolling, but rest assured everybody does not want to go to the US, especially those from other prosperous nations. There are plenty of places just as bad as the US in terms of violence and public disenfranchisement, for whom America is a trade up.
bsder 7y ago
> Basically all of my tech friends are passionately against guns despite never having been victims of guns Because the statistics are against you for the vast majority of people who don't live in crime prone areas. For people in relatively low crime areas, the mere presence of a handgun has increased their extremely low probability of death by an inordinate amount because of gun accidents. The probability is still low, but is vastly higher than if a gun wasn't present at all. You can argue that this is due to stupid gun owners. Perhaps, but as technology folks, we also understand that you set up systems so incidents don't occur in the first place. Every single person I know who has a handgun has at least one "accident" over 20-30 years. I know of zero who actually used a handgun against a criminal. I will also point out, that I know a lot of people with rifles and shotguns, and those almost never have "accidents". I think I know of one over the last 30 years. Draw your own conclusions. Obviously, if I lived in a high crime area or in a profession where it mattered, that's different.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- heartbeats 7y ago
  But I can do all sorts of dangerous stuff already and it isn't illegal. Guns are like vaccines, I think. If only some people own guns for self-defense, as you say, they will not have too much use for them. But if some double-digit fraction of the population are packing heat at any given time, there is a sort of "herd immunity" effect. While the individual chance any single individual will get to use them is still low, it will put powerful incentives against robbery and free up our prisons.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > You can argue that this is due to stupid gun owners. Perhaps, but as technology folks, we also understand that you set up systems so incidents don't occur in the first place. You set up technologies for this, yes. In this particular case, you design handguns that are much harder to have accidents with. You do not set up legal systems to restrict everyone's liberty because some people have accidents.
meowface 7y ago
Guns are an offensive implement, while encryption is a defensive one. A better parallel would be arguments in favor of banning bulletproof vests for civilians, because a criminal might use them during an attack.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  This is already done in many countries.
  - meowface 7y ago
    So are mandatory encryption backdoors, unfortunately.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
You may be onto something. It took my wife years to accept my gun ownership. In her case it was very emotional response based mostly on never having seen one ( and I guess seeing all sorts of movies and breaking news on a regular basis ). She recently started talking of getting her own. I may have said before on this site, but we, as a group, suck at framing issues. We try to appeal to logic and reason, while other groups play full-blown manipulation campaigns. It also does not help that as a group we are not that cohesive.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
You are right saying geeks are emotional like everybody else. The answers you receive to your comment are a proof of this, and I, for one, felt a strong emotional urge to respond :) Yet I don't know anybody personnally who has been killed by a crane or a forklift and still want those to only be in the hands of trained professionals. Some tools demultiply the potential for a single human to do damage so much that I don't want any individual to casually be able to yield them. You cannot have an encryption accident in the same way you can have a car accident. It's ok to use signal drunk, it's not more dangerous than drunk irc. It's ok tu use https if you are uneducated or in rage, it's not more dangerous than http. You have a can fully encrypted veracrypt file in the hand of children. Nobody is going to kill you with a pgp key. Your encrypted hard drive has no more storage risk than the regular one, even in a plane or in a facility with fire hazard. All in all, encryption works by making it hard to do damages to you. It's passive. Weapons work by promising than attempting to do damages to you will result in damages to them as well. It's an important nuance. That being said, I go to the shooting range myself. I like it. It's fun, and it's a knowledge I don't want an elite to be the only owner of. But I want my ability to do so to be heavily supervised. Not so with encryption.
chillacy 7y ago
I don't think E2EE and guns are exactly the same but I can't help but notice that the arguments that always get brought up by E2EE hardliners are pretty similar to those of gun supporters. Namely: 1. It's vilified, by the numbers more people use this safely than for harm 2. Sure it can be used for harm but it's the only thing stopping the government from taking over 3. It's so simple that you could build it at home, and banning it would amount to banning math/geometry 4. The bad guys will have it anyways 5. Bringing up the 2nd/1st amendment a lot 6. Violence/identity theft will increase Anyways, not to pass value on any of the arguments, just wanted to note that I've seen a pattern in the types of arguments made.

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago

> And yet they're drawn to the position because of the emotional overtones that are ubiquitous in coverage of the subject. or because they are tools made to kill? Let's be honest this is not a good comparison (to stay polite). Not having guns at worst would force a group of people to find a new and less dangerous hobby, while not having encryption pretty much puts people's lives at risk in many countries and make having a democracy much more difficult.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Surely you see that this is the same kind of emotional appeal the original commenter is decrying. "Tools made to kill" and "less dangerous hobby" aren't dispassionate statements of fact.
- post_below 7y ago
  Both of those statements are factually correct.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    "Black people are more likely to score lower on IQ tests" and "illegal immigrants are more likely to be involved in drug trafficking" are also factually correct. It is possible for a statement to be factually correct and politically inflammatory at the same time.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      For purposes of this thread, "emotionally inflammatory."
    - komali2 7y ago
      The rub is in definition, though. You've assumed far too much with your "factual statements," specifically on what does "black people" mean, what even is an "iq test," or what an "illegal immigrant" or "drug trafficking" is. That's why those are not really even factual statements but are quite politically inflammatory. The people who feel they're wrong may think they're facts but can't figure out why they aren't, not realizing that they aren't actually facts at all.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        The statements are true under common and reasonable definitions of those terms. And you can do the same thing for anything. I could easily contend that "less dangerous hobby" is factually incorrect because there are plenty of more dangerous hobbies not being prohibited, like drag racing or skydiving. And we had the whole discussion in the other thread about "tools made to kill."
  - Thriptic 7y ago
    I don't think they are really. Guns are tools made to inflict kinetic damage. They can inflict damage on humans, damage on animals, or damage on targets. That may seem like pedantry, but a huge number of guns aren't design to be used in anger, fired at a living thing, or will ever be purchased for the intent of firing at a living thing. I own a shotgun exclusively for shooting at clay targets for example, and I have no intention of ever pointing it at a living thing. Firearms used for sport are frequently explicitly designed for use in sport rather than being designed for combat, self defense, or hunting.
Igelau 7y ago
> puts people's lives at risk in many countries and make having a democracy much more difficult. Funny you should word it that way, because the Founders had a similar attitude about firearms: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
- fiblye 7y ago
  I think most people agree that a country needs a well regulated, armed militia to protect itself from nasty invading forces. But arming amateurs and everybody around is about as safe as everybody rolling out their own encryption algorithm.
  - Igelau 7y ago
    The parallelism of the language was notable. You and I do not disagree.
eyegor 7y ago
I don't disagree, but the irony is palpable. > this is not a good comparison > tools made to kill > pretty much puts people's lives at risk
tal8d 7y ago
> ... and make having a democracy much more difficult. Are you unaware of the fact that this is exact argument made by those who argue for the 2nd amendment? While you could argue that they are fear-mongers, with the tree of liberty talk, you can't then go on to talk about a threat to democracy by way of the government's constant violation of citizen's other rights (the 4th in this case). Emotional appeals are much easier for the confiscation proponents, because nobody expects internal consistency from someone waving a bloody shirt.
- belorn 7y ago
  Just because two people use the same argument does not mean they have both the same validity. Almost all democracies gives the government an exclusive right to violence. The government can order the army and police to shot people, while every citizen are forbidden to make a similar decision. The exception that exist are narrow defined and up to the legal system to decide per case if a decision to kill by a citizen can be forgiven based on circumstances. Almost no democracies gives the government an exclusive right to private communication and private secrets. Countries which governments does claim an exclusivity in this area are called totalitarian and is seen by many as the contradicting in terms to the definition of democracy.
  - tal8d 7y ago
    Yes, I understand that logical correctness is different from universal truth. But using the exact same formula to argue two mutually exclusive points in the same breath is a very good way of demonstrating why emotionally driven arguments yield poor results. > ...exclusive right to violence. I know that duty to retreat is much more common outside of the US, but I don't think any democracy demands that you just die in the face of a determined attacker - which would be required in your "exclusive right" characterization. While the classic way of describing it is a "monopoly on violence", the scenario you describe would be better characterized as an exclusive right to classify murder and manslaughter. > ...exclusive right to private communication and private secrets. Because that would be impossible, as they can't exclusively have a right to information that you generated - at worst it would be a shared right. The US does claim shared rights to everything that is possible though: the moment you share that information with anyone they claim that right - 3rd party doctrine. Your two points would have better symmetry if you added that bit about the definition of democracy onto the end of both. That would make it easier to spot the fact that you've just made the exact same "threat to democracy" argument I just replied to.
tonyztan 7y ago
> "Not having guns at worst would force a group of people to find a new and less dangerous hobby" No, not having guns at worst would deprive minorities of the ability to protect themselves. It is not only a hobby; it is also an effective means of self-defense.
- nemothekid 7y ago
  >No, not having guns at worst would deprive minorities of the ability to protect themselves. Are we talking about America? Where those same minorities are shot for holding toy guns?
  - tonyztan 7y ago
    Well, I know many minorities who carry guns to protect themselves. Both racial minorities and sexual minorities (LGBT+). Racism and police violence are real problems that need to be addressed, but taking away guns is not the solution.
L-four 7y ago
Encryption was literally invented to communicate and plan killing people.
- m463 7y ago
  The earliest known use of cryptography is found in non-standard hieroglyphs carved into the wall of a tomb from the Old Kingdom of Egypt circa 1900 BC. These are not thought to be serious attempts at secret communications, however, but rather to have been attempts at mystery, intrigue, or even amusement for literate onlookers. Some clay tablets from Mesopotamia somewhat later are clearly meant to protect information—one dated near 1500 BC was found to encrypt a craftsman's recipe for pottery glaze, presumably commercially valuable.
  - wl 7y ago
    I don't trust your source. 1900 BCE is Middle Kingdom, not Old Kingdom. Also, a lot of those older cryptic hieroglyphs turned out to be in an early Northwestern Semitic language. The idea was apparently that you're going to have spells effective against snakes coming in on ships from Byblos, the spells should invoke the deities they know in the language they know. https://semiticmuseum.fas.harvard.edu/publications/early-northwest-semitic-serpent-spells-pyramid-texts https://semiticmuseum.fas.harvard.edu/publications/early-nor...
- humbleMouse 7y ago
  I suppose you could say the same thing about the internet, and a number of other widely used technologies to come out of ww2 era.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- komali2 7y ago
  Encryption can be used for a lot of things. Guns can be used either to kill things, or to practice at getting better at killing things.
wyager 7y ago
Are you willing to take a bet on what fraction of guns sold to civilians have been used in a homicide? If you’re going to insist on a teleological argument, you might as well use the same standard we use for other tools: how people actually end up using them. No rational person describes knives as “tools to stab people” even though this is part of the historical basis for their development. Instead, the vast majority of knives are used to cut food or spread butter or open boxes. Indeed, these are all more plausible descriptions of what a knife is “for”, just like target shooting or hunting food is a much more plausible description of what guns are for.
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  Just to put some rough numbers on it: - 393,000,000 firearms owned by US citizens - 39,773 firearm related deaths (including suicide) as a decent base yearly rate [this is the actual 2017 number] 14,542 firearm homicides as a decent base yearly rate [again, actual 2017 number]
gonational 7y ago
Not having a gun puts your life at risk, if you encounter a deadly threat beyond your ability to defend against. For 110 pound woman this might be a large man who wants to rape her, or for a 200 pound man capable of reasonable self-defense this might mean somebody attempting to rob him at knife point.
- girvo 7y ago
  And yet so many other developed countries are significantly less violent than the US, despite having far fewer guns in the hands of civilians
  - gonational 7y ago
    I wonder what things they have in common, if guns don’t seem to be a factor. Maybe we could figure out whatever that is and work on that, instead of focusing on gun ownership, which demonstrably does not lead to more violence, and in most cases, leads to less violence.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Those countries tend to already have better economic safety nets / welfare systems and mental health systems, thus mitigating the reasons why someone might be driven to engage in violent crime (let alone use a gun in said engagement) in the first place. That is: you're arguing that wet streets cause rain.
shard972 7y ago
> or because they are tools made to kill? Which makes it more important if anything. If its important not to give the government a foothold into knowing all information then how is it irrelevant to then give the government all power of force? Seems like the power to kill is the ultimate power in any society whether we like it or not.
throwaway17_17 7y ago
The number of injuries per year due to firearms (including homicides and suicides) in America is 106,000 approx. The percentage of firearm deaths including suicides is slightly less than 2% of total deaths. Those are barely significant figures. Less than .03% of Americans are effected by those 106,000 firearm incidents. There were 39,773 firearm deaths total in 2017 while there were 47,600 opioid causes deaths in the same year. And that is with an estimated 393 million small arms in the country. I’m not claiming that these deaths do not matter, I’m just saying that the impact of firearms is much more prominently discussed than other causes of death. I find it very much in line with the emotional pleas against encryption.
pyuser583 7y ago
If end to end encryption became the norm, people would die as a result. Children would be raped, radical groups would spread, etc. It’s still a good thing. But let’s not pretend there’s no cost. Freedoms have a price, and that price is often the inability of the state to protect us from malevolent members of society. That true for guns, and it’s true for encryption. There’s shared ground between the NRA and EFF. I just wish more conservative, law-and-order types would realize that.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
Owning guns means not giving the gov 100% monopoly on violence. There is a fundamental right somewhere in there and you are glossing over it like it's an afterthought. That's what the poster meant.

jdietrich 7y ago

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527 https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

heartbeats 7y ago
It's true that the US has more gun violence than other first world countries, but we also has more violence and crime in general. Within the US, there is no statistically significant correlation (r = -0.02) on the state level between firearm ownership and firearm homicide. (There is a statistically significant correlation between firearm ownership and firearm deaths, but this is due to suicides.) Make of this what you will, but it's not substantiated by the facts the claim that restricting gun ownership would have a strong impact on homicides. You can look at this list and sort by gun murder rate and see what kind of states come out on top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... Here is a strongly political Medium article about the matter: https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide-1108ed400be5 https://medium.com/handwaving-freakoutery/everybodys-lying-a...
- stephenr 7y ago
  So what you’re saying is, the real problem is that Americans are just a violent bloodthirsty lot. Maybe the rest of the world should stop telling Americans to control gun ownership (ie ”ban guns”, despite nobody ever suggesting a total ban) and instead we should be promoting control of Americans (ie. “ban Americans”, although nobody would suggest a total ban. I’m sure zoos would want some).
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    That's incredibly racist.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      I know they/you may think otherwise, but "American" isn't a race, mate.

hdjejdjd 7y ago

Your analogy to guns would make sense if other developed nations didnt have civilized gun policies. Seeing as they overwhelmingly do, its nonsense. Stop using a legitimate issue to pry nonsense about guns into it.

gonational 7y ago
I think what you mean is that the rest of the world has domesticated and pacified its populous. Things were so bad in the United States, why would everybody want to come here?
- hdjejdjd 7y ago
  You're right, also the criminal justice system must be good by your logic too then. Pretty insipid answer don't you think?
  - gonational 7y ago
    I guess I really don’t need an opinion on the matter, since the rest of the world has already voted with their money and migration preference, no? Don’t be so salty ;)
- rfrey 7y ago
  You're almost certainly trolling, but rest assured everybody does not want to go to the US, especially those from other prosperous nations. There are plenty of places just as bad as the US in terms of violence and public disenfranchisement, for whom America is a trade up.

bsder 7y ago

> Basically all of my tech friends are passionately against guns despite never having been victims of guns Because the statistics are against you for the vast majority of people who don't live in crime prone areas. For people in relatively low crime areas, the mere presence of a handgun has increased their extremely low probability of death by an inordinate amount because of gun accidents. The probability is still low, but is vastly higher than if a gun wasn't present at all. You can argue that this is due to stupid gun owners. Perhaps, but as technology folks, we also understand that you set up systems so incidents don't occur in the first place. Every single person I know who has a handgun has at least one "accident" over 20-30 years. I know of zero who actually used a handgun against a criminal. I will also point out, that I know a lot of people with rifles and shotguns, and those almost never have "accidents". I think I know of one over the last 30 years. Draw your own conclusions. Obviously, if I lived in a high crime area or in a profession where it mattered, that's different.

deleted 7y ago
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heartbeats 7y ago
But I can do all sorts of dangerous stuff already and it isn't illegal. Guns are like vaccines, I think. If only some people own guns for self-defense, as you say, they will not have too much use for them. But if some double-digit fraction of the population are packing heat at any given time, there is a sort of "herd immunity" effect. While the individual chance any single individual will get to use them is still low, it will put powerful incentives against robbery and free up our prisons.
pdonis 7y ago
> You can argue that this is due to stupid gun owners. Perhaps, but as technology folks, we also understand that you set up systems so incidents don't occur in the first place. You set up technologies for this, yes. In this particular case, you design handguns that are much harder to have accidents with. You do not set up legal systems to restrict everyone's liberty because some people have accidents.

meowface 7y ago

Guns are an offensive implement, while encryption is a defensive one. A better parallel would be arguments in favor of banning bulletproof vests for civilians, because a criminal might use them during an attack.

heartbeats 7y ago
This is already done in many countries.
- meowface 7y ago
  So are mandatory encryption backdoors, unfortunately.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

You may be onto something. It took my wife years to accept my gun ownership. In her case it was very emotional response based mostly on never having seen one ( and I guess seeing all sorts of movies and breaking news on a regular basis ). She recently started talking of getting her own. I may have said before on this site, but we, as a group, suck at framing issues. We try to appeal to logic and reason, while other groups play full-blown manipulation campaigns. It also does not help that as a group we are not that cohesive.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

You are right saying geeks are emotional like everybody else. The answers you receive to your comment are a proof of this, and I, for one, felt a strong emotional urge to respond :) Yet I don't know anybody personnally who has been killed by a crane or a forklift and still want those to only be in the hands of trained professionals. Some tools demultiply the potential for a single human to do damage so much that I don't want any individual to casually be able to yield them. You cannot have an encryption accident in the same way you can have a car accident. It's ok to use signal drunk, it's not more dangerous than drunk irc. It's ok tu use https if you are uneducated or in rage, it's not more dangerous than http. You have a can fully encrypted veracrypt file in the hand of children. Nobody is going to kill you with a pgp key. Your encrypted hard drive has no more storage risk than the regular one, even in a plane or in a facility with fire hazard. All in all, encryption works by making it hard to do damages to you. It's passive. Weapons work by promising than attempting to do damages to you will result in damages to them as well. It's an important nuance. That being said, I go to the shooting range myself. I like it. It's fun, and it's a knowledge I don't want an elite to be the only owner of. But I want my ability to do so to be heavily supervised. Not so with encryption.

chillacy 7y ago

I don't think E2EE and guns are exactly the same but I can't help but notice that the arguments that always get brought up by E2EE hardliners are pretty similar to those of gun supporters. Namely: 1. It's vilified, by the numbers more people use this safely than for harm 2. Sure it can be used for harm but it's the only thing stopping the government from taking over 3. It's so simple that you could build it at home, and banning it would amount to banning math/geometry 4. The bad guys will have it anyways 5. Bringing up the 2nd/1st amendment a lot 6. Violence/identity theft will increase Anyways, not to pass value on any of the arguments, just wanted to note that I've seen a pattern in the types of arguments made.