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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad the story brought up the comparisons to the early days when exporting crypto was similarly restricted under munitions laws. That era was similarly full of calls to ban or regulate or backdoor encryption, saying that only terrorists or evildoers had need of such "military-grade encryption."

Putting aside the specifics of the gun control/rights question (if such a thing is possible), it's downright refreshing to see this guy's attitude. It's reminiscent of some of the earlier, more libertarian hacker ethos, of being focused on being able to do something and fighting hard against authority figures wanting (justifiably or no) to step in to suppress it. With the growth of the SV tech industry, it seems a lot of that fire has been stomped out.

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Why on Earth would we want to blindly cultivate that attitude? Sometimes authority figures overreach, but plenty of laws exist for good reason. We wouldn't look at someone trying to make it easier to distribute child pornography and say "putting aside the specifics of the child pornography question, it's refreshing to see this guy's attitude."

The outcomes of our actions matter. Fighting for something unethical against authority figures who justifiably want to suppress it isn't praiseworthy, it's shameful.

Guns can be used for good, and they can be used for bad - exactly the same as cryptography. Child porn is something that relies exclusively on exploiting people who cannot in any way consent to the actions involved. It's in no way comparable. The conversation beyond this depends on your view of the role of government, and opinions there vary. I see the role of the government as maximizing freedom and liberty for people to live and prosper (or fail) in accordance with their own actions. Banning items which the vast majority are completely capable of handling responsibly because of a tiny minuscule of abusers is not something that I think the government should ever do.

And really the fundamental problem is not guns, it's people wanting to hurt other people. London is a good example of this issue. As the demographics and state of that city have changed, their crime and murder rates have soared. Even with extremely strict gun control, they managed to briefly surpass New York City in murders. This has now led their government to begin to implement, literally, "knife control" along with "acid control" given a rise in people spraying others with things such as drain cleaner, as a weapon. And when the perpetrators start killing people with steel rods, will we then move to try to ban weights? If people want to kill or hurt each other, they're going to find a way. Looking at the way is missing the actual problem - which is the people that want to kill or hurt other people.

With regard to the "fundamental issue", number of guns is extremely highly correlated with a high murder rate [1]. General crime rate, on the other hand, is not [2]; London's brief passage of New York in murder rate belies this.

More generally, though, OP's statement was explicitly made without regard to whether gun control was right or wrong. It supported standing up to authority figures in the abstract, which is why I used child pornography as an example of something authority figures are (uncontroversially) generally regarded as right in suppressing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe

He stated literally that the action was 'reminiscent of the earlier, more libertarian, hacker ethos'. You are straw manning his comment.

As for the issue, do you really think news articles are reasonable sources on an issue like this? This [1] is a list of countries by intentional homicide rates. This [2] is a list of countries by gun ownership rates. Here's a sampling of your "extremely high correlation."

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Top 5 Countries by Gun Ownership -- Intentional Homicide Ranking (lower means more homicides)

1. USA -- 90

2. Serbia -- 170

3. Yemen -- 77

4. Cyprus -- 179

5. Saudi Arabia -- 166

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Top 5 countries by Intentional Homicide Ranking -- Gun Ownership Ranking (lower means more guns)

1. El Salvador -- 92

2. Honduras -- 90

3. Venezuela -- 60

4. US Virgin Islands -- unranked

5. Jamaica -- 73

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The numbers get even sillier if you do the top 20. You have to remember that some of the gun heaviest nations in the world include Norway, France, Canada, Austria, Iceland, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, etc.

The full sentence you quoted, and the preceding one:

> Putting aside the specifics of the gun control/rights question (if such a thing is possible), it's downright refreshing to see this guy's attitude. It's reminiscent of some of the earlier, more libertarian hacker ethos, of being focused on being able to do something and fighting hard against authority figures wanting (justifiably or no) to step in to suppress it.

i.e. it's "refreshing" to see someone fighting against authority figures, whether or not those authority figures are justified. I'm not straw manning his comment; I simply disagree that the "earlier hacker ethos" he describes is something to be revered, and I've explained why.

You are cherry-picking the data in your charts to support your conclusion. The US Virgin Islands, for example, has barely 100,000 people; the US has 320,000,000. Just 4 gun homicides per year there would vastly exceed the US's gun homicide rate.

He specifically says the earlier, more libertarian, hacker ethos. While libertarianism ethos would not be in support of child porn, it is in support of many things that people might believe are justifiably prohibited. For instance, many of a libertarian ethos feel that all drugs should be legalized under the logic that the government has no right to tell people what they can or cannot put in their own bodies. This is debatable however, and an example of something that somebody might want to fight against (perhaps by telling people how to grow/refine various drugs), even if others might argue it is something that is justifiably prohibited.

When you're trying to find a correlation between homicide rate and guns per capita, you think looking a listing of nations by homicide rates and guns per capita is cherry picking? If so then, at the minimum, you've got some crazy cognitive dissonance going on. Though I failed in my last link to include the sources. You can see quite clearly that if there is any correlation, it's would be an inverse - though I would not suggest causality there. As I said, the problem is not guns - it's people. And even if the countries the fewer undesirables have more guns, I expect that is probably just a spurious correlation.

[1] = list of countries by intentional homicide rate

[2] = list of countries by guns per capita

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...

> He specifically says the earlier, more libertarian, hacker ethos.

Which was explicitly described as trying to fighting against authority figures' attempt to suppress something, whether or not they were justified. I don't know how much clearer that can be.

> When you're trying to find a correlation between homicide rate and guns per capita, you think looking a listing of nations by homicide rates and guns per capita is cherry picking?

Choosing to ignore other evidence which refutes your claim (in this case, the wide population disparities that prevent direct comparison of the two lists, due to high variance in countries with low populations) is cherry picking.

If I say, 'this action is reminiscent of a ruthlessly capitalistic ethos, trying to make a profit wherever one is to be made' that doesn't mean you're endorsing for instance the holocaust even though seizing the possessions of the victims there probably showed a net profit.

There's a reasonable argument to be made for restricting the nations to some minimum population. The typical figure is 250k-300k which is also likely conservatively high. The reason your article wants to restrict the data to populations of 10 million is precisely to cherry pick. For instance this [1] is the murder rate for Jamaica, a country of some 2.8 million, over the past 5 years. The numbers themselves have some variance, but the rate's magnitude is relatively unchanged because of how high that scale is. It ranges from something like 600% to 900% higher than the US over those numbers. It's the same thing domestically within the US. Places like Detroit have obscenely high and consistent murder rates. The population? 672k. Guess we can just discount it as variance?

You can find the sort of same head-in-the-sand attitude when discussing matters with people on the opposite end of the spectrum. For instance, Scandinavia has done some great things. But wait... What about the population? Sweden? 9.9 million. Denmark? 5.7 million. Norway? 5.2 million. Finland? 5.5 million. Iceland? 0.3 million. Well I guess we can completely discount Scandinavia for any and all statistics. Since none of the nations reach that magic 10 million mark, they must be completely irrelevant. Right?

[1] - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2_nhWaXUAgKKfq.jpg

> If I say, 'this action is reminiscent of a ruthlessly capitalistic ethos, trying to make a profit wherever one is to be made' that doesn't mean you're endorsing for instance the holocaust even though seizing the possessions of the victims there probably showed a net profit.

Right, except my reaction is to the literal description of the attitude in question, not something that happens to incorporate it. The statement was "I admire X, which is a component of Y", and I'm saying "I find X, specifically, objectionable".

No one is claiming 10 million is some magic statistical number for sample sizes; that is a straw man.

Ahh. I would rarely consider, let alone object, to things outside of context. X of course means very different things given varying Ys.

The reason I am talking about 10 million is because it's the magical number that the study the NYTimes chose to run an article on, decided to pick. It has nothing to do with reducing variance, though of course that's used as the justification. In reality even in populations of tens of thousands there is surprisingly low variance in homicide rates.

I mean if you look at what they're doing it's really scummy. They're juking their numbers to try to create a correlation when one does not exist. That's already really bad. But then they take it a step further by just jumping to correlation = causation. Try to imagine that this was a topic that did not confirm your biases. I think you'd be out of your mind with how really trashy this whole article is. It's like they took a list of things you should not do when reporting on statistics, and decided to do them all.

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