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Comment by vectorjohn | Hacker News Reader

We just need to ban guns. The second amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added.

People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But when guns are so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.

The ridiculous line "if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns" or whatever, is nonsensical. If guns are outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding guns. But all law enforcement officers will still have them.

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Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?

"We just need to ban encryption. The First Amendment isn't written in stone. Or it could get some extremely significant limitations added, like backdoors.

People wouldn't like it of course, so it would never fly. But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need encryption to protect yourself in a civil digital society. You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.

Are there exceptions? Sure. But when AES is so readily available, any criminal that wants one has one.

The ridiculous line "if you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption" or whatever, is nonsensical. If encryption is outlawed, most criminals will have a hard time finding algorithms. But all three letter agencies (ie: NSA) will still have them."

> Have you ever tried your argument with s/guns/encryption/?

This substitution is nonsensical. Fundamentally, encryption is a defensive tool. Where proponents of gun control (and I mean moderate folk, not just the let's ban the 2nd amendment folk) disagree with others is that guns aren't just a defensive tool. Given a sufficiently large population with poor safety nets and discrimination, adding encryption in everyone's hands will not change my day-to-day life significantly. Throw in guns and things change drastically. Now I have to be worried about a dark alley mugging at night at gunpoint.

Tight regulation of legal gun ownership and possession does not appear to lead to reduced gun-related deaths, (based on a comparison between state Brady Campaign score and gun deaths,) except perhaps suicide, though this is debated .[1] What you worry about is of little import to anyone but yourself (,for example, I am scared of getting hit in the head by coconuts, which are 10 times more deadly than sharks!), if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

> if you have a fact-based concern, we may be able to address it.

I didn't quite enjoy this dismissive tone, so I'll be more pedantic than usual. The study you cited is interesting but it's not the end all of gun control discussion. It's barely even the beginning.

First, it considers Brady scores at a state level to try to find correlation. Gun control legislation might be at a state-level but that's a nonsensical level of granularity. My concerns are about my neighborhoods, poverty, and guns. Not the state of California as a whole with over 35 million people.

Second, from the article you cited:

> Perhaps even controlling for those factors, there will be other missing factors that are hard to control for — for instance, maybe as the crime rate increases, calls for gun controls increase, so high crime causes more gun restrictions, or maybe calls for more freedom to defend oneself increase, so high crime causes fewer gun restrictions (e.g., liberalized concealed-carry licensing rules). And of course when small changes in the model yield substantial changes in results (e.g., if you calculate the state gun scores differently, the results will likely be different), you know how little you should credit the output. Figuring out the actual effect of government actions, whether gun laws, changed policing rules, drug laws, or anything else, is devilishly difficult.

is a succinct summary of why this comparison study is meaningless. It's a good retort to someone who says that gun control leads to fewer deaths but it has so many caveats and such imprecise applicability that the only useful take away point is that at a state-level with some gun-control scoring pattern (viz. the Brady Campaign scores) discounting ALL other factors, gun-related deaths are not correlated to gun control.

Lets continue your hyperbolic argument.

Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ?

The difference is two fold.

1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns.

2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people.

Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone.

TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid

That's not necessarily the aspect I was thinking of when I wrote my post. Surely, guns and encryption are different in their function... but who gets to use them is the more interesting point.

Try this on for size. In a post talking about our inability to analyze the potential abuse of deadly force by police, we're talking about surrendering the use of deadly force... ...to the police.

Guns and encryption aren't fungible in that sentence.

No one's ever been injured or killed by accidental application of encryption, but thousands of people are injured or killed by accidental gunfire every year.

Swimming pools are much more dangerous (100 times more deadly) than guns when it comes to accidental deaths; should swimming pools not be banned before guns?[1]

[1] http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/...

>when it comes to accidental deaths

Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.

>Accidental gun deaths are not remotely interesting compared to murder and suicide.

I was responding to a comment regarding accidental deaths and injuries, not suicide or murder. If this is insufficiently interesting to you, I suggest you read another comment.

I have never heard that analogy but it is a very strong and succinct argument. Thanks.

Making guns highly restricted/illegal doesn't make them hard to get. Did making meth completely illegal make it hard to get? To make this even remotely feasible imagine the New Orleans 2005 door to door SWAT raids coupled with the worst part of New York's stop and frisk.

In France, where guns are highly regulated, full automatic military AK's can be had for a few thousand dollars. A bargain by US standards.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/09...

> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society.

Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war.

If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms.

> You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family.

If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.

ban guns? really, tell me how making drugs illegal has stopped their procurement. tell me how making guns illegal will stop the violence?

Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide.

as for the statement people won't rise up against government, where have you been? They did after the shootings in LA, Oakland, and recently St. Louis.

Frankly the idea of a society where only law enforcement has guns with their track record isn't a society anyone should want to live in.

Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths.

Drugs, not so much. Your analogy completely fails.

Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths.

Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid.

I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.

Yes, that's the fantasy reasoning, the bears no relation to how mass slaughter actually does and does not happen.

You are welcome to provide modern era examples of populaces armed with firearms being slaughtered by their own governments. I don't know of any.

There are, however, numerous examples of modern era populaces who aren't armed and also haven't been slaughtered by their own governments.

How many of them are running roughshod over their (nominally) legally binding mission like the US government?

Probably all of them, to some degree or another, although not every culture considers the US libertarian ideal of limited government (much less the right to keep and bear arms) to be necessary, so any realistic answer to that question would probably be more complex than you're implying. But, where remedies within a political system exist, then the system can't be assumed to be tyrannical.

An equivalence drawn between the US and other governments would seem to suggest that civilian gun ownership doesn't deter the violence and corruption of the state, nor does its absence elsewhere appear to have led to the inevitable slaughter of those populations for whom gun control is much more strict than in the US.

Rather, it seems that when one enshrines into the culture the precept that the only free state is one cultivated by popular violence, it gives both the state and the people an excuse to justify violence as being an unavoidable cost of civilization. Political and social alternatives can't be seriously considered when, for many people, all other roads lead to slavery and death.

Instead, mass shootings in the US lead to a spike in gun sales, because they're effective advertising and recruitment tools for the NRA, even as the police and the government are becoming more militarized and surveillance more aggressive, in no small part because after 9/11 the American people wanted them to be. And if it's the case that the US is a more tyrannical state now, then I believe that's due to American democracy having worked as intended, rather than that tyranny having emerged from a vacuum, or some implicit tendency of states to creep towards totalitarianism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061

... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?

Yes, yes I did, in part.

For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.

Are there some instances where dictators have been stopped because of guns? Because the assertion that guns could prevent a dictator from taking overs seems, well, outlandish, if I'm being honest. I'm willing to be corrected, however.

I think it's a difficult question because "guns" are a moving target along two or so dimensions. The obvious is rate of fire with an efficacy twist:

Muzzle loaded smooth-bore (short range, relatively fast to load).

Muzzle loaded rifle (long range, slow to load)

Then the muzzle loaded rifled musket, which used the Minié ball to achieve both, and great carnage in the Crimean War and our Civil War.

Now the developments are rapid:

Breach loaded single shot rifles.

Repeaters with relatively slow loading, with a move to smokeless powder.

Clip fed repeaters, a critical Mauser innovation. With the 1898 model, the battle rifle is fully "modern". With of course effective semi-auto models to follow, plus the lower powered/lower range assault rifle (and I can't help but notice that the short ranged AK-47 is something a dictator would prefer to be issued, vs. something more able to reach out and touch him).

But ammo, going back to the rifled musket, we're using corrosive primers, and black power residue attracts moisture. That is, it takes a fair amount of diligent effort to keep a rifle from rusting out.

In 1911 the Swiss switched to non-corrosive primers, appropriate for their militia system. Our first weapon with 100% non-corrosive primers was the WWII M1 Carbine, a weapon for officers and rear echelon troops.

So the likelihood of a less organized having a lot of functioning weapons increases with their using non-corrosive primers. Or, in the case of the Soviets, using chromed barrels.

Now you have to factor in wealth. Poor people who can't afford much in the way of weapons aren't going to have a chance here. See e.g. Rwanda, where rifles didn't play a big part on either side.

So ... what examples might we have? The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is suggestive. You might count Hitler deciding it wasn't worth breaking 80 divisions to take (most of) Switzerland.

More than a few liberals had an epiphany about gun control in the dark days of Watergate ... how many dictators/oligarchs/tyrannical whatever didn't try, or try very hard, because the cost would have been too great?

I'll start looking for examples; today, all I know is case after case, USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nazi Germany, those are just the most prominent off the top of my head, where gun confiscations preceded slaughter.

These are pretty weak correlations. Gun control has passed all sorts of other places, which looks like gun confiscation, without mass slaughter.

Also, gun confiscation was not at all the defining characteristic of these other places that experienced mass slaughter. There are many more things that accompany that type of political landscape, and are more common.

And without an example of where citizen gun ownership prevented a dictator from coming to power, the whole argument is extremely weak, though it definitely gets repeated quite a bit.

> Why not ban cars, more people are accidentally killed with automobiles than guns used for homicide or suicide.

The auto fatality rate has been drastically reduced through better regulation and better technology. Safety features, insurance, inspections, traffic regulations, registration and transfer documentation, taxation have all increased public safety and reduced the burden auto use has on society.

Regulating guns like cars would be a great idea.

What, exactly, would you have us do to "regulate cars like guns"? What safety features are missing from them? How many accidents can be traced to a lack of inspections or the like (a few, I grant you).

Can you make a case for insurance requirements? Seeing as how we shoot billions of rounds per year with few incidents, and only 600 accidental deaths per year. Guns are much easier to use safely than automobiles, and the 25% decrease in fatal accidents during a period in which the population and number of guns increased by roughly 50% indicates there's not a crying need here. We gun owners do, you know, teach gun safety and proficiency, that's what the NRA was about until the mid-'70s, when they couldn't ignore the political threat.

Most of the rest exists, e.g. taxation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Fede...), or is a non-starter in an environment where the people proposing these measures continuously demonstrate their bad will.

Registration? Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.

> What, exactly, would you have us do to "regulate cars like guns"?

Given what I have read about most guns used in crimes originating through straw buyers or stolen guns, I think substantial penalties for people who don't properly transfer guns if they wind up being used illegally would be the most effective way to reduce gun related violence. This, of course, would require a system of registration and proper transfer documentation, like we have for cars.

This, along with secure storage requirements, I think could do a lot. I agree accidents aren't that big an issue when compared to intentional violence, I assume secure storage would substantially help with this along with suicide. I'd also be in favor of severe penalties for not using secure storage.

In terms of new technology that could improve safety, fingerprint readers and id stamped ammo would help with both violence and safety.

Insurance could play an important role. If you pass a test, get your refresher training and have proper storage you'd pay a low rate. If you have an accident or have a gun stolen insurance could pay part of your penalty but your rate should go up enormously.

> ... non-starter in an environment where the people proposing these measures continuously demonstrate their bad will.

Continuously demonstrate bad will? 10s of thousands die yearly and even modest proposals are dismissed with hysteria like:

> Registration? Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.

Seriously, this is into "UN black helicopter", "Obama is an Al-Qaeda member" territory.

ugh.

> Sure, go ahead if you want a 2nd Civil War, we know our 20th Century history. Never again are not empty words to us.

That sort of sentiment and posturing is very core of what is wrong with the "gun-ownership" movement.

Do you really think if the government wanted to put down a rebellion (or whatever you are ominously alluding to) your paltry weapons would really make a difference? The "suicide by cop" statistic would increment and things would carry on.

There really needs to be a change on how easy it is to procure fire-arms in the US. That shouldn't be up for debate or sidelining through traditionalist arguments. We have a problem today where people are actually getting murdered. So, your rhetoric is pretty empty and over-used.

It's not posturing, it's fair warning.

Our adventures in the sandbox suggest your faith in our government's ability to suppress armed rebellion is grossly excessive. It also had a secure rear area. You're also assuming all the military will agree to this, despite what it'll cost them.

I'm not alluding to anything, I'm frankly stating that, if you and yours succeed in this effort, me and mine will start killing you and yours (assuming you're in the US, of course). And if you think we're limited to out "paltry weapons". you suffer from an extreme lack of imagination.

We've been debating this since at least the 30s, and I'm (not very) sorry to say that your side has decisively lost the debate. Sucks to be you, but in balance I like the result.

You are doing it again. "killing you and yours"? Give me a break.

If rebellion or change is what you really want to affect, then you would be better served to look into how Gandhi managed to win against overwhelming odds, rather than whatever hollywood(?) fantasy you envision living out.

Yeah, I have guns just like I have other tools and toys. But I don't have the same chip on my shoulder.

If there needs to be a rebellion, I will be reaching for my camera and my twitter account, not my walther.

If rebellion or change is what you really want to affect

No, not in the least. Leave me and mine alone, and you'll be perfectly safe from us. Sure, I'd like for my brethren in California, Hawaii and the northeast (well, if you count Maryland and D.C. as part of that) to be less oppressed, but they can vote with their feet. As I did when I left Massachusetts.

Gandhi won against an exhausted, civilized empire. Change the antagonist and he's a forgotten anonymous corpse.

Treating possession of guns as a revocable privilege, with the necessary licensing and registration to make it meaningful, would very likely result in fewer gun deaths. I think it is pretty likely that this will continue to get more politically tenable over time (my hand wavy impression is that younger people are generally less interested in guns, at least, lower rates of young people care about them).

Insurance might come into play in such a world, if people were made liable for (at least some) misuse of guns registered to them (the at least some means that I would hope such a thing would only really come into play if actual negligence were involved).

I have a question for you - if the people of the United States are disarmed, by what right does the government remain armed?

Because we entrust certain actors to be the enforcers of laws in society. This is the way societies have worked since the dawn of time; we aren't all charged with upholding laws, we give that task out to people to have that be their job.

This is in fact not how "societies have worked since the dawn of time".[1] The innovation of the monopoly of use of violence by the state is a relatively recent one, and not demonstrably necessary or sufficient to maintain an orderly and just society.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

The 2nd amendment was added based on how societies have worked since the dawn of time. Keep in mind that even in our "modern" era ~100,000,000 people were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century.

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