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Comment by ljw1001 | Hacker News Reader

The first rule of gun culture is don’t talk about gun culture

The first rule of being a decent human being is to not walk up to someone who has just had something terrible happen to them and gloatingly say something like "He he, there's your problem. It's your fault this is happening to you. Glad I and my neighbors are so much more civilized."

I cannot fathom how anyone can mistake such comments as evidence of civilized behavior.

Nobody here has done that.

But nobody's walking up to the victims and saying this. HN is an open -- and international -- forum for discussion.

Given that the US is affected by gun-related violence unlike essentially any other developed nation, it's completely reasonable to bring the American gun fetish up anytime there's a shooting, to draw attention to it and to (hopefully) enact change which can prevent these kinds of tragedies in the future.

I understand your averse reaction to the root comment in this context (and posted a moderation reply above), but the site guidelines do ask "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize," and this surely isn't the strongest plausible interpretation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nor was that the framing of my initial reply. As stated elsewhere, I probably should not have replied to any of the replies to me. It's a bit like the telephone game where each reply perverts the original intent a little bit more.

The only winning move is not to play.

My apologies for the failure on my end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com