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Comment by Redoubts | Hacker News Reader

> No, says the gun lobby. It would give the government a tool to confiscate our guns. The idea of a gun registry is the great fever dream that lies at the heart of gun-control conspiracy theories: Government evildoers are going to attack us any day now. We have to be ready. (And you don't give the enemy an inventory of all your weapons!)

I mean, I constantly see the concerns of gun owners derided like this, but I've never seen a good reason why they shouldn't be scared of a national registry. The debate has been purely adversarial for quite some time, so I'm not sure why/how both sides should come together for a good-faith compromise.

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Thanks for recognizing the adversarial nature of the debate. Historically, registration precedes confiscation. Australia comes to mind.

As a gun owner, I'm not sure how there can be "compromise" with "universal registration", especially when politicians are actively touting confiscation as an option on the table.

Something I'd liken this to is Obama's "Key Escrow". Apple holds half the key to the encryption, The Feds hold the other. Look, a reasonable compromise! We promise that we won't do anything evil.

Australia comes to mind.

You can add California, SKSes due to an AG reinterpretation of the law, New York state, and right now Massachusetts is going through such an event due to their AG.

And as you note, it's not like there's any lack of public figures including politicians who are touting outright confiscation, including those praising the Australian model, which include one of the two major party nominees for this presidential election.

"You aren't paranoid if they are out to get you."

> "You aren't paranoid if they are out to get you."

You still might be. Just that thinking they're out to get you isn't, in that case, evidence of it...

Of course, that's why I put it in scare quotes, to in this case indicate it's not a real representation of reality, in this case merely a useful maxim.

Ah, I'd interpreted them as quote quotes.

My rationale behind not supporting any compromise is simple: the other side does not want me to have any guns.

Imagine if the most anti-gun position in America was still very pro-gun people like say Charleton Heston, then I'd be willing for a compromise. I would be ok with building a registry where the police can search for guns.

But the fact is, we know that Hillary Clinton talks about how Australia successfully got rid of all its guns. We know that the ultimate goal isn't a happy compromise in the middle.

This is why the 'cold dead hands' mentality exists in America.

It's like imagine if Republicans want a national registry of people by their religion. Or national ethnicity database. The Democrats wouldn't (and shouldn't) give an inch on that.

Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.

This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would ever try to confiscate all guns

> Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.

Are you serious? I can't determine if you're being sarcastic or not.

Sure the idea has never been formally proposed, because no politician will ever get elected in America if they proposed such idea.

But here's Hillary Clinton for you:

> I do not know enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how it would work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.<

Now you may say that Hillary Clinton didn't mean gun confiscation by 'Australian example', but it's clear she clearly isn't appalled by Australian gun confiscation.

Why Australian example? Why not Canadian example? Why not French example? Sure maybe this is not a strong correlation.

But then Democrats get caught all the time talking about complete elimination of guns when they think they are not on Camera:

http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/01/maryland-deputy-ag-reveals...

Matt Damon openly supports Australia styles gun confiscation:

http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/07/06/matt-damon-mass-gun-co...

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that the ideal vision of America gun control proponents have is to have no civilian ownership of guns.

Australia hasn't eliminated all guns. In fact, the number of guns owned legally by Australians now exceeds the number pre-Port Arthur.

Gun owners (I am one) regard compromise on the subject as they're the ones giving something up. The people on the other side of the table aren't sacrificing anything.

It's like your boss asking you to come in and work on Saturday for the good of the team. But won't pay you for your time.

It's more like having a team of mostly ok workers (all citizens) and one screw up who never shows up to work (violent criminals who commit crime with guns) and then making everyone come in on Saturday because they need to account for the work the no-show didn't do. Then you exempt HR and overhead staff (non gun owners) because you don't need them to be involved in that particular work. Then you exempt the HR and overhead staff because they have no skin in the game and as predicted the no-show no-shows. Of course the people who actually have skin in the game and do what they're supposed to are salty about it.

The people on the other side of the table aren't sacrificing anything.

Their lives and safety, on a daily basis?

It's the other way round, really: universal gun ownership involves the sacrifice of thousands of lives annually. Admittedly so does car ownership and OTC tylenol, but in those contexts we can admit the tradeoff and seek to minimise the cost.

> gun ownership involves the sacrifice of thousands of lives annually

I would put it to you that human nature is such that if guns weren't available, people would turn to alternative weapons. Knives. Bats. Fists. The UK is seeing this progression happen now.

But with a tool like a firearm, any 45 kilogram woman can defend herself against a stronger attacker. Or a 77 kg man against someone stronger than him, or perhaps a group of attackers. In the rural USA the attacker doesn't even have to be a person - it could be a brown bear (which are absolutely huge, BTW), a wild boar (increasingly common in the South), or a venomous reptile. Not having a firearm to defend yourself in those situations means you die alone in the wilderness.

But the key thing to all those examples is that they are defensive uses of a firearm. You will seldom see examples of this in the news because it's not lurid enough. And that most of the time, the gun is never even fired - the credible threat is enough to stop the attack.

I'm guessing that you are European, and as such have never seen a defensive use of a gun. You have only been exposed to negative views of them via the news services and Hollywood films. If you visit central Texas anytime, I'd be willing to take you to the range and give you an introduction to safe operation of a firearm and show you that gun owners are regular people too.

Thanks for the offer; I'm a Brit who got my firearms training at school courtesy of the army cadet scheme, with a set of antique .22 bolt-action rifles on the school range. Then I went to university and met someone who'd lost a close relative at 17, short dead by a British soldier in Northern Ireland. So in some ways I've seen a little of both ends of the gun.

> The UK is seeing this progression happen now.

Crime is slowly falling (as it is everywhere) in the UK; there is a bit of a knife problem in some places, but not one that dominates political conversation. Nowhere near as bad as the 50s. Responses range from the ineffective - literally a ban on scary-looking knives ("zombie knives"), to the quite effective Scottish Violence Reduction Unit.

The one thing I accept as a completely legitimate use is against wild animals in the rural USA. No argument there. It doesn't follow from that that everyone needs to have guns in a densely packed city.

You don't see a trade-off in our allowing effective self-defense, which by data collected by gun controllers decades ago happens a minimum of a million times a year?

Or the difference between citizens, who are traditionally defined as those who bear arms in defense of their polity, with subjects?

From the other side, I also feel like the adversarial nature of the debate has gotten completely out of hand. Democracy is all about compromise, but when it comes to guns people just go off the rails.

Here's how it feels from my point of view: I'd like it if the police could really just run a serial number (perhaps with judicial oversight, warrants, etc.), like they do on T.V.

But the right takes my genuine desire to take some sensible measures to reduce violent crime and turns it into a desire to take away all of the guns and commit some atrocity.

It's like I'm asking you if I could use your cellphone for a second to call for a ride, and you treat me like I'm definitely planning to steal it. Perhaps a sensible measure in some contexts, but it is always a fundamental statement about how little you trust me, and frankly insulting.

Many on the left, of course, do the same thing, although obviously I'm not in as good of a position to describe it.

Somehow we need to restore our trust in one another's shared values. It seems to me that a heavily partisan media has done the most to erode this trust (for example, the vicious attacks on the fundamental values of Bush and Obama), but there might be more too it.

> my genuine desire to take some sensible measures to reduce violent crime

How is a database a sensible measure? Even in your example (like on TV), the crime has already been committed.

We see this in the real world too. After the Pulse massacre, they looked up the gun. Sure enough, it belonged to the shooter, who passed background checks, took training courses, and went through psych evaluations. All of the above (frequently touted) measures were completely ineffective at preventing or even mitigating the disaster.

I too have a genuine desire to stop mass shootings, but the genuine-ness of my desires doesn't necessarily mean effective-ness.

This is the kind of thing that deserves study and debate. But when study is cut off from federal funding, and debate constantly suffers from a lack of trust, we're really screwed.

This so called study still has plenty of dollars chasing it, with Bloomberg's billions now stepping up to the plate, the problem is with that "so called" detail. The major medical journals such as the NEJM are quite willing to publish self-evident garbage, like Kellerman's infamous one that only scored a successful self-defense use of a gun if it killed the perpetrator, which we're not legally or morally allowed to intend, nor is the common outcome (about a 1/4th chance of a handgun round to the torso killing the target, and most are never shot at, few are hit, and fewer hit in a vital area).

I for one think e.g. the the CDC has one job, one that it's manifestly been failing at as has become obvious with the lab screwups and the Ebola response, and which we may now be seeing with Zika.

As for the lack of trust, the gun control side does not hide its desire for confiscation; how is the other side supposed to have any trust in its good will?

Democracy is all about compromise

Can you tell us what you are willing to give up to gain any of your goals?

Compromise does not mean only we give up something, but not quite as much as was asked from us at the beginning of the process of drafting a law.

What do you want?

It's an honest question, but I think that part of the problem is that gun rights are at a sort of apogee in this country - I don't really have much more to give.

gun rights are at a sort of apogee in this country

I don't think it's quite that simple, for it's rather binary. In what I call the free states, it's still climbing, with e.g. 2 states going Constitutional Carry (no license required for concealed carry), with my Missouri likely joining them this month.

In the slave states, its getting steadily worse, California is front and center, but also see the Massachusetts AG continuous redefining of the state's "assault weapons" law, and the various laws that have been passed in the last few years, plus Bloomberg's initiative campaign to ban the lending of firearms, a very direct threat to US gun culture.

And of course there's the minor detail that a very large fraction of the country doesn't see this as a problem at all. The overwhelming majority of the states (42 with shall issue or better), and most of the people (72%, ditto), are directly living and driving this "apogee", through the politicians we freely elect.

As for what we want, let's start with:

Nationwide shall issue concealed carry.

Nationwide reciprocity of concealed carry licenses.

Going further, nationwide Constitutional Carry (no license required, which is the law of the land in 10 states now).

An end to statewide "assault weapons" and magazine capacity bans.

An end to statewide inexpensive gun bans (that's California and Massachusetts.

Cut the thicket of "20,000" gun control laws nationwide to a relative handful, few enough that everyone can know what the law actually is. There's a whole bunch of "flypaper" laws that, whatever the claimed or real intent, just entrap those trying to abide by the law.

Deport Michael Bloomberg ^_^. Seriously, rule unconstitutional the laws he's getting passed, generally by deceptive initiative, that ban the lending of guns, and that are directly aimed at strangulating the creation of new gun owners.

End the VA's polices of removing gun rights from veterans without a real adjudication as is required by law, and stop the extension of this to the elderly on Social Security.

End the ITAR attempt to put most of the nation's gunsmiths out of business.

Put a stake in things like the BATFE's proposal to redefine what nitrogen percentage makes wetted nitrocellulose a high explosive (only stopped for now because of the disaster it posed for the DoD and the rest of the government).

Terminate the BATFE with extreme prejudice, and forbid all in it from ever working in law enforcement again. This article paints a nice picture of them, but in the field they're murderous and incompetent thugs. The ban is to keep them from polluting other law enforcement agencies.

I can go on if you want ^_^.

Well, I'm going to replace my comment.

I'll just let yours stand as evidence of the kind of thing that happens when you ask for compromise on such a strange issue.

Again, I ask you, what are you willing to give up?

If you can't list a single thing, where's the "compromise"?

And please don't take a list and assume I'm demanding all of it in exchange for one of your items, "kitchen sink" may be what I ultimately want, but not in this narrow context (by the same token, the liberals are not shy about calling for total confiscations, so where's the compromise on that side?).

ADDED: And I have no need to replace my comment, since you are not willing to specify anything you're willing to give up. Not. One. Single. Thing.

Maybe we have different definitions of the word compromise?

> Maybe we have different definitions of the word compromise.

Well if yours is to ask for measures so extreme that I've never even heard of them, then yes, we do.

You make responsible gun owners look like nuts. But thanks, you've done a wonderful job of illustrating the problem I was commenting on.

If you've never heard of nationwide reciprocity of concealed carry licenses then you simply don't know very much about the subject, it's probably #1 on our long term wish list right now, seeing as how 42 states have shall issue or better concealed carry regimes that create a confusing patchwork of laws, reciprocity here but not there, etc., a perfect thing for the Federal government to apply itself to.

And I'm not surprised you haven't heard of the ITAR effort to put most of the nation's gunsmiths out of business, it's very new and still fairly obscure, but are you telling me you see nothing wrong with the general concept of destroying their livelihoods and the work they do for us?

I also gave myself great wiggle room in the "20,000" laws and flypaper bit; are you telling me you can't think of one gun law that makes no sense at all, perhaps one that hasn't worked out in practice? Maybe a relaxation on "the shoulder thing that flips up"?

And, again, ignoring any of the "extreme" items in my wish list, You. Can't. List. A. Single. Thing. to give us in return. If you're asking us to "compromise", but have no idea what you're willing to give up to get what you want, how should we view your offer?

As for your opinion that this makes half the country "look like nuts", "We don't care." We'll just keep piling up the legislative victories in our free states, and sending enough Congresscritters to D.C. who know better than to cross us to keep the Federal government in relative stasis. And it looks like we'll help elect the most pro-gun President since JFK.

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