Hacker News Reader

Comment by SlowRobotAhead | Hacker News Reader

Worked for drugs, and tax evasion, and human trafficking, and alcohol for awhile.

Simply make it illegal and it goes away!

The logical conclusion from that train of thought is that laws have no meaning if people break the laws. So why have any laws?

Why have a society if you cannot trust the people in it to defend themselves?

Because when we organize a society, we can specialize into roles like policing and become more effective at defense as a whole?

So ask the threat to wait a 5+ minutes while you call the cops?

Should we DRM 3D printers (DMLS@home is coming) to a walled garden of things? The 2nd Amendment is not separable from general purpose computing. Who needs "assult crypto" anyway?

Police in United States do not have to protect you:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...

Average national response time is 10 minutes, even in cities the median is 5min, but can be as high as 30min for some remote areas.

In certain situations there may be no police response at all, as was the case in 1992 Los Angeles riots or practically any major natural disaster.

The ‘let the police do it’ argument would only logically work with incredibly pervasive and invasive surveillance technology and/or police robots (https://goo.gl/wpMV8).

Even so, 2nd amendment would be even more relevant to balance the killer robots.

> In certain situations there may be no police response at all...

This more or less describes the Parkland shooting.

This isn't like organizing roles at a startup company. We're talking about an individual's right to defend themselves against someone bigger and stronger, someone with a weapon who wants to take your shit or fuck you or just fuck you up.

You put much faith in the Government, and I put it in the individual.

What happens when your police force is turned against you, becomes incompetent, gets lazy, or just doesn't show up?

It's idealistic. Life is a struggle for the individual, no matter how much we'd like to forget it or offload our worries.

Guns also equalizes the power disparity between a man and a woman. I see gun ownership as female empowerment, but the left never seems to mention that.

That might be a good argument in theory, if it wasn't for the part where US police don't have to protect citizens and all the population that are outside of effective police coverage. It's not the argument gun control campaigners seem to be making right now. They mainly seem to have gone for the approach of supporting police officers standing by and doing nothing as kids are murdered one by one. Given that, I suspect you're going to have a hard time convincing people who don't already agree with you that they should give up their guns and let the police take care of everything.

why not defend yourself with something less likly to accidentally kill some random people?

Why not defend yourself with a towel??

a towel isn't a good defensive weapon. a firearm isn't so good either. it's a great offensive weapon though.

It's a valid question. If we had something like phasers instead of firearms, I'd be more than happy to use those exclusively. The problem is we don't really have a good alternative. Tasers that shoot tend to be one shot solutions, and even then they don't always bring down targets, or they might prove as lethal. Rubber bullets you can fire multiple of, but they could cause serious damage too, especially if shot in succession, and there is no guarantee of taking the target down. There just isn't a solid alternative right now.

Not to offer a complete solution: Lasers, and pervasive societal warnings about the danger of lasers.

That is too simple. The conclusion is the laws only work as long it is percieved better to follow than not, either by force, violence or social coercion or their actual concequences.

Drug laws for example does not really work, since some people self medicate no matter if there is a death sentence. Others don't care since they probably wont get caught.

While other laws kind of does work, people can rationally choose to follow them because the concequences of doing so are the "best" available option.

Laws have no meaning if [most] people can break the laws without consequences. The ability to enforce is important.

Do you understand that outside of obvious moral ethics - that a law against murder doesn't stop someone from murdering. It only gives lawyers a way to punish it.

It's the punishment that is the deterrent.

Why should law abiding gun owners be punished again?

Adding punitive laws is not a deterrent. Enforcing those laws is. We don't enforce many guns laws, then you come in yelling about adding more laws.

The logical conclusion isn't that laws have no meaning if they're broken, it's that they have no meaning if they aren't enforced, and we're not.

Parkland could have been avoided in at least 6 different ways. So tell me how your new-laws that make illegal things illegal-er would stop people with no criminal record from being bad.

A person is law abiding until they aren’t. It’s about keeping people from having ready access to so much lethality when that person decides to become a bad actor. Banning guns would lower the likelihood of a bad actor having as much lethality as they currently are easily able to acquire.

Parkland could have been avoided in a 7th way too. Without access to guns it wouldn’t have been as lethal.

People do illegal things. This isn’t surprising nor an argument against making something illegal. If it could be shown that banning guns and making it illegal to sell guns didn’t decrease the frequency of their usage to commit crimes then I would no longer be advocate for banning guns.

Except that there is no correlation to gun ownership and crime.

We know the places that have more guns don’t have more crime, we can’t call correlation to that, but we do know adding guns doesn’t increase crime - because that’s been true since the high crime peak of the early 1990s where crime has been falling with guns skyrocketing.

It’s painfully childish to claim that it’s some surprise that where guns are that there is more gun-crime. Something can’t be abused where it doesn’t exist - the joke is that people look at gun-crime compared to overall crime.

Rape rates in Australia are 40-45% higher than the USA. If you’re a rapist, it’s much safer to “work” in Oz, does the rapist getting shot in the USA contribute to “gun-crime”? On paper, yes.

Adding guns probably doesn’t increase crime rate. It does the mass murder rate. It is precisely gun crime that I abhor. Thus I'm opposed to their availability.

Can't wait for the citation from an actual study (try the CDC, they've put out at least 3 since 2013)!

You should be able to easily show that rural USA with it's murder rate on part with Europe is definitely not the place where all our guns are... oh wait...

I don’t understand your sarcasm. I agreed with you that the crime rate has not gone up due to an increase in gun ownership. But guns in their current form certainly increase the lethality of those with bad intent. This isn’t deniable.

My claim is that the mass murder rate, the rate at which we have mass killings in the U.S. would go down if buying/selling guns were illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com