Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

We as a society are fine with mentally unstable individuals having access to multi-shot, and semi-automatic handguns and assault weapons.

When a person takes one of these weapons and begins indiscriminately killing people it's not an "evil" act, it's the act of a mentally ill individual, plain and simple. When we label it as "evil" we absolve ourselves of our duty to act, because evil is a nameless, faceless, and uncontrollable entity, it's just something we must live with. When in reality what's causing these shooting is the crisis of mental illness that is facing this country, and that is something we can control, but we've chosen to ignore. Mental illness is one of those topics that can't be discussed, it's private, and it's embarrassing, but it's killing us.

Mentally unstable individuals have unlimited access to weapons and ammunition is fully supported by our laws, and by the majority of the population. It's only prudent for schools to hold drills for dealing with active shooters because it's an accepted and encouraged part of our culture.

Here's the challenge with "more arms".

We talk about the "need to protect against an unjust government" (going back to the original reasoning why 2A was enshrined)...

You basically have two scenarios there, as we've seen play out around the world:

1. The military / soldiers revolt, 'remember the patriotism', whatever you want to call it. The government is toothless because their military isn't going to quell civil uprising.

2. A general or colonel decides it's his time, and has the backing of the military. A military with access to fighter jets, armored helicopters, bombers, not to mention the actual big guns, NBC weaponry. And then we have the 'militia' populace, limited to largely semi automatic small arms or less. Is the military going to "play fair", or are they, per current US doctrine, "shock and awe" a demonstrative show of force.

Either way, largely, we'd be fucked. The days of rebel insurgencies hanging out in the jungle/desert/ wherever providing credible resistance to a tyrannical government never really applied to the US.

If that were true, the USA would having a good time in the middle east now.

Advanced weaponry is great to destroy,but you arent going to rule a population with it.And you sure aren't going to get away with nuking a country to glass.

You still need boots on the ground for an occupation. Civies with guns will make that a nightmare, if not impossible.

We cant even do it in a small third world desert countries.

A nation like america would be near impossible to occupy.

There's no need for that, the US is already occupied...

I think the intent of the second amendment was also very much about a man being able to defend himself when police forces were not around.

That being said, it's wrong to assume that a popular revolt would automatically lose an asymmetric war against the US military. History is full of examples of local rebellions winning against greater numbers of professionally equipped soldiers. See: American Revolutionary forces vs the British Empire.

> The days of rebel insurgencies hanging out in the jungle/desert/ wherever providing credible resistance to a tyrannical government never really applied to the US.

It did at the very beginning. The rebel insurgency had just used weapons they had personally available to resist a tyrannical government until it gave up. (Or at least, until foreign powers were willing to provide enough aid that the foreign aid plus the personal arms of residents was enough to defeat the government.)

Immediately after that experience, they wrote the amendment.

If you want to make a case that things are different now, you can perhaps do so. But don't say it never applied in the US. It did.

I suspect that both the willingness to attribute shootings to "evil" and the reluctance to address mental health both stem from the religious belief that still pervades American society to a much greater extent than it does other western countries. I have actually had a person tell me that this is a "sin-sick country" as his explanation for the recent event.

Perhaps things will improve gradually as the population becomes less religious.

I don't know about that. If you take the doctrine of human sinfulness as a hypothesis, and read the news for a month, you could reasonably regard it as empirically proven...

>When we label it as "evil" we absolve ourselves of our duty to act

Likewise, when we automatically label someone as crazy/mentally ill we absolve society from critical introspection as to the causative influence it may have had on the person's actions.

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