Is the American government position “Guns don’t kill people, encryption kills people”, or am I just combining the personal opinions of a bunch of unrelated people who work for the government?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-... [1] https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
or Thomas Jefferson in 1787:
"We have had 13. states independent 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure."
Now the police even has tanks and army level guns, and the army of course has 1000x the resources, airplanes, drones, etc.
And of course, at the time the states were indeed independent and fighting fiercely for that. Now (and ever after the Civil War) it's all a charade, from what I understand, and it's all as the Federal government says, not really a union of independent states (as independent countries), but a state divided in N prefectures that just happen to be called states...
I'd say this idea, that after you are guaranteed worse results, you should double down, is even more insane.
If anything, what I wrote is all the more reason to find new strategies that don't involve "we'll fight them with guns".
Besides who'll do the fighting? The kind of people that have guns are in more in favor of fascism and army rule than those who don't. So all it takes to get them on the side of the opressors it's to sell it to them as army control, as opposed to "big government" control.
I feel like you have never talked to a gun owner before. Though they may lean towards the pro police/pro military side, they absolutely would not bow to the government implementing some kind of mass martial law.
Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders. Any hint of stuff like you're talking about would lead to mass revolt within military ranks themselves. Militias would form, and armaments would be taken from the military's caches to launch a resistance.
That's what they pay lip service too. In practice the huge majority are chickens, when they're not pro-army (and the first to cheer for an actual martial law, as long it was done by favorable politicians to them).
>Lastly, our military swears an oath to the people and the constitution, not the government. Every Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine, and Guardsman is bound by oath to refuse unlawful orders.
Yeah, good luck with that if push comes to shove.
Because the average law abiding, fast-food fed Joe Public is gonna fight a full on war? Or get guns, support, and people to come join "the cause" from abroad? Or have any advantage over the government forces in "knowing the area"?
Get with the times: our governments oppress and control us in ways that don't require open conflict. The 1860s are gone forever.
Disclaimer: I've never owned a gun, and I have no military or government experience.
I disagree, especially with these quotations, which are disingenuous.
Patrick Henry was a firebrand. His words were meant to incite violence and insurrection for the financial advantage of the order of people to which he belonged.
The Jefferson letter you are quoting[1] doesn't mean what you imply with how you quote it. The real meaning, if you use the sentences right before that, says that some part of the population is always going to be ignorant and misinformed and discontent in proportion to that, and that it's better they rebel openly so they can be corrected, patted on the head, and sent home instead of stewing silently. From that point of view, the people should be minimally armed so this could be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.
It's also fraught to impute anything about constitutional matters to Jefferson, since he regarded a constitution perpetuated more than a generation or two as a form of tyranny.
The scholarship on Sparta has been pretty thoroughly revised over the past few decades. Any reference to Sparta rooted before that is of at best suspect legitimacy.
[1]: https://thefederalistpapers.org/founders/jefferson/thomas-je...
And if you kill many more of the enemy than they do of you despite being vastly outnumbered, you can justifiably say you gave a lot more than you got, which is a victory of sorts in its own right.
Getting (benefitting) a lot more than you gave (spent) makes more sense to me.
So there's that...
Guns last a lot longer than 30 years. 80-120 years sounds more like it. They are not going away anytime soon even if you do ban them (which wont happen).
The police in Hong Kong would be a lot more respectful if the (massive, dense) crowd was armed with more than laser pointers. The riots in LA where Korean shop owners defended their property. Etc., etc. Hell there were violent protests in Ferguson, MO not long ago.
"Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
Some people in the US think "It can't happen here, now we should get rid of guns!" - as we watch the authorities putting children in cages, and protests in other countries where the police beat up protesters, and riots where people defend their loved ones and property, the rise of White Nationalism from "simmer" to "boil" and people still think we shouldn't have guns?
There's absolutely no way, in hell, Americans would willingly disarm - nor should we.
This statement is laughable, yet terrifying in its naiveté.
> "Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
The history of gun politics is inextricably tied to race, but your comment is as dismissive of gun control as it is unsupported and vague, as if waving your hands and dropping a hint of racial bias categorically invalidates arguments in favour of restricting firearms rights.
It isn't "a hint of racial bias" - gun control is directly racist, always has been. "Well it isn't now" doesn't hold much water.
The entire purpose and history of gun control in the US was to keep black people from being able to defend themselves from the KKK.
They were all cool with being ground up by armored vehicles and washed down storm drains?
Would the Jews of the Holocaust have rather had guns, or not?
By not having guns, you're not preventing a bloodbath - you're delaying it, and ensuring that you're on the losing side 100% of the time.
Not necessarily insurmountable, but potentially a significant obstacle.
Lots of people care a whole lot about gun rights. And all you need to do is win 1 Congress and presidency, to temporarily reverse the law, and allow people to purchase these guns again, and reverse all the effects of the law.
I don't understand your parenthetical assertion that domestic abuse and mass shootings are not crime. Of course, they certainly are crime.
My point is to separate the actions done by career criminals, (organized crime, burglars, gangs, drug dealers, the mob, etc). As opposed to a casual, accidental, one of, not intended, breaking of the law (even if they committed crime) by an ordinary person who doesn't live off of crime.
(Perhaps the distinction is more powerful in my language, but I think there's a distinction in casual conversation in English too. E.g. you'd call someone who abuses their spouse a "wife beater", or "creep", or "abuser" or several other terms, but you wouldn't say that they lead "a life of crime" (even tho domestic abuse is a crime). The same way you usually wouldn't call a mass shooter a "criminal", but a "deranged person", "psychopath", "terrorist", etc). If I say "criminal" or "outlaw" for example, does that bring in mind someone deep in crime, or a person involved in a DUI?
Anyway, my point is, in a total gun ban, you'll still have the gang/career criminal/etc people have guns and you could even have the same amount of gun crime of that type as now, but you'd have much less murders within a family, mass shootings, etc... -- as it would be way more difficult for lawful people to get their hands on guns, have them casually at home, and e.g. use them on a sudden rage against their spouse or parents or whatever.
(I'd say even the career criminal type of crimes will be less -- criminals will also have a worse and harder supply of guns).
My current preference would be:
1. A weapons licensing program requiring training and passing a test both on general use and much more heavily on safety and responsibility/ethics. Biennial refresher course for license renewal.
2. A complete ban on gun ownership for any violent crime history or history of mental health issues, or known affiliation with a group classified as a terrorist group or criminal gang, or any other well known factors which significantly increase the risk of gun related murder, allowing unlicensed persons access to your firearms, including mandatory immediate surrender of arms and amo for anyone with a gun license if any of these points should become relevant after the fact.
3. Significant funding for means of identifying other factors that could help reduce gun deaths and implementing laws that integrate such factors once they have been demonstrated, as well as education to help the public at large identify the factors that are statistically relevant to gun deaths.
That's such a painfully white suggestion - to readily remove liberties so hard won, in a way that will only effect people of color.
You do know gun control has historically only effected black/brown populations right?
> We can reduce gun ownership Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2) * 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3) * 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4) * 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5) * 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
[1] 30k deaths per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf, minus 23k suicides per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhamcs/web_tables/2015_ed_web_... [2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm [4] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... [5] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/22/med... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
If California's laws decreased the frequency of shootings, we'd expect California's shootings per year per person to be better than Texas.
How many of those had an out of state purchase like the most recent one though (Gilroy)?
That horse has already left the barn.
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/05/7435796...
[2] https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
[4] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxWw1fYoGc
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/14/gunsmi...
[6] https://www.propublica.org/article/why-do-democrats-keep-try...
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-yellow-light-for-red-flag-law...
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
---------
Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-I-need-a-license-to-drive
Yep! You can ban truck rentals with little to no side effects, while banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide. Or is that not the comparison you'd make?
> Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about
I'm not quite sure what comparison you're trying to make here. Yes, most vehicle rentals require you to show a driver's license, but that's a technical competency requirement, not a intentions requirement.
Basically every other developed country has stricter laws than the US (which is what we're talking about, not full bans). It's ridiculous to suggest those lead to genocides.
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
I'd like to do the same here.
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
Flash suppressors make shooting at the range more comfortable, and ar15s don’t have “1000 yards of range”, but hunting rifles often do.
And what business is it if anyone in a free country wants to own more guns than you feel happy for them to?
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Guns that are stolen would carry a punishment for the last registered owner?
Of course authorities don’t always pay attention to registration changes — one UK police force sent me a speeding ticket for a car I had sold nine months previously, even though the DVLA had actually registered the sale and transfer of ownership.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffi...
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
[0] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/1814426/accessibility-fir...
It doesn't say that, exactly, since it doesn't distinguish between properly stored and not properly stored cases. It is a meta-analysis; they took a bunch of papers and did the best they could. We can't say that if they're properly stored it's about the same, or worse, or better.
It also acknowledged some methodological limitations, including studying overall death rates, and not specifically deaths due to guns:
...we considered studies of suicide and homicide victimization by any means, and firearm-specific outcomes may differ.
Another issue the study encountered, was that gun ownership rates were not directly available to many of the aggregated studies, which therefore relied on various proxies.
What makes relying on a study like this to initiate a policy of reducing gun ownership not premature?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
We do have laws like this already -- FFLs do background checks for every purchase and if they fail to do so, they can lose their license. What are the expansions that you'd like to see?
We already have background checks. Licensed dealers who fail to follow the law lose their license and are prosecuted. The atf has no difficulty in enforcing that.
And as already posted, there’s really no useful information in that “review”.
30 rounds is standard? That's terrifying.
Anecdata but the NZ shooter had large clips (many dual large clips taped together in fact), and Las Vegas shooter had some crazy "niche" shit.
If it's so niche that nobody cares then what's the harm in restricting things like that? People don't need 40 round magazines to shoot targets.
They don't even need semi-auto to shoot targets, but that's crazy talk.
The same thing goes for asking “Why do you need that?” and if people don’t have a reason you like, taking that as a basis for restriction. In a free society, the people don’t need a reason — we can do what we like. It’s the government that needs a reason. We should be questioning proposed policies, with an eye to the public benefit, not because of any love of guns, but merely out of a basic requirement for government accountability.
A ban on "large capacity" (greater than 10 rounds) magazines was implemented 25 years ago [0]. In actuality, it did very little except to drive demand (and increase prices) for such magazines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
Guns don't kill people, encryption doesn't kill people, backwards nutjobs kill people. Politics in America, currently, can entirely be summed up as the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.
Even a nutjob armed with the latest encryption, still needs a gun to kill people.
To be fair, it can also prevent people from being killed in extremely oppressive regimes, just by association with 'x' out-topic (e.g.: the gay community).
I dunno, I'm pretty sure a determined enough assailant could beat someone to death with a hardcover copy of PGP Source Code and Internals.
or defend their owners, or hunt, or...
If I had to bet, I'd say at least 25% of US guns have been used within the past year, and 99.9% of those will not have been used to kill others.
They have no such actual position regarding encryption killing people, they're entirely flexible, able and more than willing to sway with the wind when it presents. Whether or not encryption kills people, so to speak, is not their concern, it's nothing more than the opportunistic excuse framing. They'll use anything that will stick, anything that gets the result they're seeking.
Having a backdoor in software NOT only enables US government and other cyber criminals to have access. It also enables other governments like Russian, Chinese, Israilean, North Korean governments too! Keep that in mind too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Austral...
We'll really need sources for claims like that...
* Nearly all iPhone users use iCloud.
* If obeying 'local laws' is enough for Apple to allow external access to iCloud, the same logic must apply to the iPhone.
* Note that Apple refused similar requests by American courts.
I feel like most times I hear iCloud mentioned by non techies they are confused about what it is. Like when their storage is out and they get nagged about it.
Here's a link to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Maybe, in that scenario, gun-rights voters end up carrying privacy-rights US policy influence, but then we might also have a lot of other US people thinking privacy is not for them, in their own day-to-day lives.
Politics and perceptions are way outside my expertise, but things like this sometimes come to mind when working on technical stuff with privacy&security implications.
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." plus "Encryption hinders us from finding people who commit crimes."
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" plus "Pareto is a pain and maybe if we fight encryption we can get public support but we don't want to break it because post hoc analysis doesn't actually help us catch the next guy because Pareto is a pain."