We already have thought crimes, I mean red flag laws and no fly lists.
People need to stop giving up their liberty and privacy for perceived safety.
You're much more likely to be killed by an automobile than a mass shooting. This is the new flavor of scare tactic.
My man! 3,424 people per Day are killed in car crashes. That is 1 million and 250 Thousand people every single year who die in wrecks. Here in America alone we lose over 100 people every single day--give or take a few.
My point being, there is a lot of room for improvement in _both_ numbers.
I, personally, based on my demographics, activities, and location, have a very low chance of being murdered. Less than the average European. But probably more than a European of similar traits to me. But the odds at that point are so low it is really irrelevant in life.
RE: red flag laws, I don’t see them rising to the level of thought crime. For example, I do not think it is unreasonable to use a legal process involving a judge to take away guns (either temporarily or permanently) from unstable people who are making thinly veiled threats. Society should have that right, and I for one fully support it.
Equating mass shootings to basically the “well, terrorism is so rare you’re more likely to get crushed by your TV” scare tactic argument isn’t really fair. I’m sorry, 283* mass shootings in one year in one country is absolutely insane. It’s not a scare tactic, this is quite literally a mass shooting crisis.
Short of national background checks, assault weapons bans and a whole host of other common sense things that Republicans and the NRA will never let happen in the US, I think red flag laws involving a judge are worth giving a try.
This new trend on HN of hammering red flag laws is really hard to understand. These laws are not oppressive overreach. They are common sense, reasonable approaches to dealing with the greatest domestic threat we actually have.
*https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mass-shootings-2019-more-mass-s...
Want to take a stab at how likely it is that you are in a school shooting, even if there were 280 shootings involving three or more people?
To be clear, I definitely support gun control. But I also support expanding medicare/medicaid and I'm probably going to fight more the second than the first when one is likely to save many more lives.
Real solid leadership.
By that same logic, let’s go bust out the 737 MAX’s! Hey, they only killed a few hundred people. But nah, must not be that big of a problem.
Come on.
No, mine is really not a disingenuous argument. It’s the same thing: you’re saying it costs money to prevent a small fraction of society being horrible maimed or killed with guns. Same for airplanes. Please explain why it it better for society to minimize low-probability deaths in plane crashes at extremely high cost, but not mass gun violence?
But back to the constitutional argument: no constitutionally recognized rights in the US are unlimited. In this case, yup, I’m completely in favor of curtailing gun rights in a limited fashion if it helps prevent this insanity. If that is a problem for you, go ahead and build a coalition to out-vote my broadly held position. You’re entitled to that.
As to the constitutional point: the second amendment is not up for a vote. While gun rights aren’t “unlimited,” the second amendment must be interpreted consistent with the right of people to effectively resist government agents, and that means stuff like assault weapons bans are not constitutional. If you think those rights are misguided in the modern world, fine, gather up a coalition that can amend the constitution. You might find that difficult, because contrary to what you might think, belief in gun rights is the strongest it has been in half a century: https://images.app.goo.gl/9HJwcRLRrdxepDnUA. Even young adults are more pro-gun rights than the same cohort was when the first assault weapons ban was enacted in the 1990s: https://images.app.goo.gl/Vyc2UduAa9Mqehc68. In 1990, 2/3 of young adults said gun control was more important than gun rights, versus 1/3 saying gun rights were more important. Today, it is evenly split.
If you're telling me I'm absurd to be focusing on that rather than a phenomenon that kills a few dozens of people, boy do I hope the people in charge aren't listening to you. I care about helping society, not posturing on an issue that is deemed "insane" or a "crisis."
And guess what, I’m also for expanded healthcare. I just don’t want that to have to include caring for even a fraction of the population having large chunks of their body blown apart.
Yes, there are some prices too high to pay and that is certainly one of them.
Gun control? Yes, sure most of us can agree on that. But that's not the context that I was responding to you with.
Tell that to the MILLIONS of Unarmed North Koreans and Chinese in death camps.
If any sort of true tyranny came to pass in the US, I don’t have much faith in a bunch of rag tag right wing militia men hiding in the woods fighting back with much success.
60 MILLION gun owners... and they All have more than one gun. That's enough guns for Every Man Woman, and Child. Good Luck beating us ;)
Sure, we could and should do better. For example, why doesn't any SUV come standard with built in car seats in the back for infants and children? I watched a ted talk from back in 2009 which asked this question but humans are irrational. They think clearly little Billy is safer if we spend $599 for a car seat.
If humans were immune to emotional manipulation then Google stock would crash because basically any advertising is emotional manipulation I think.
CBS quotes:
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is facing criticism for a tweet comparing the number of people killed in two mass shootings this weekend to those who died in other ways during the same amount of time. Some perceived the tweet as insensitive, as at least 29 people were left dead and dozens injured in the wake of the tragedies.
"In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings," Tyson wrote Sunday afternoon. He then compared the "average" number of people who die in other ways across "any 48hrs."
"On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose… 500 to Medical errors, 300 to the Flu, 250 to Suicide, 200 to Car Accidents, 40 to Homicide via Handgun," he reasoned. "Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data."
No. There really isn't. The solution is simple and every racer knows what it is: teach skid control and proper use of the brakes. That's half the equation right there; the other half is eye technique which would be more difficult to become proficient in But for God's sakes At Least stop telling people to "watch where you going"--which is certain "death" when the car starts to slide, and instead start telling them to "look where they want the car to go".
Not every SUV buyer has children at car seat age. Those children will outgrow the need for car seats, at which point the built in car seats are wasting space that could be a regular seat.
Not just cars. A result of the emotional manipulation surrounding mass shootings has resulted in attempts to ban semi-automatic rifles. But rifles are used in about the same number of homicides each year than there are deaths from people falling off ladders.
2017 had more than 80 deaths, with the Las Vegas (58 deaths) and Sutherland Springs (26 deaths) exceeding that total for those two events. These events are becoming more common and deadlier, as shown on this Axios chart [0].
You're right to point out that there are many causes of death that are more common, but rapidly increasing and unpredictable causes of death are typically covered more in the media, for better or for worse. It's why the 738 Max 8 was all over the news, even though car crashes are a more frequent cause of death.
[0] https://www.axios.com/deadliest-mass-shootings-common-4211ba...
West Nile seems like a pretty unpredictable and scary cause of death. The media covers mass shootings more because reporters are overwhelmingly members of one party and gun control is a critical wedge issue in the culture war. West Nile isn’t.
*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
https://www.cdc.gov/westnile/statsmaps/preliminarymapsdata20...
> Since the virus has become widely established in the U.S., an average of 130 deaths a year occurred.
I'm British, and I find it really weird that Americans apparently live in abject terror of the world around them. The notion that anyone in Britain would ever need a deadly weapon to defend themselves is completely alien here. We just ... don't.
I wouldn't want to be in the tank killing civilians because "I was following orders" won't work when all is said and done.
My understanding is that guns are not the main source of resistance against tyranny. It is the fact that an economy as complex as ours requires broad participation by many people with specialized skills. A dictator can't run the economy simply by mining blood diamonds or crude oil here. I imagine you need the backing of at least twenty percent of the population.
Let's also not forget that our country got its start by a scrappy group of farmers and tradesmen armed only with muskets and flintlock pistols that defeated the greatest world power at the time.
I'm American, and Your Country is The Sole reason why we will Not give Up our right to defend ourselves against any Government--And most Especially our own. We Just... Won't.
A quick look around the Globe at Nations that Enslave and/or Torture their Citizens because they can, because the peope are unarmed--is really the only modern day reason we need to Never give them up.
Of course Not... but it Is the reason We never will be.
While that seems really inefficient to me as a Frenchperson, I understand that British people like it.
I’ve categorized this in the category of things that I’ve noticed but am not interested in enough to work toward the explanation, but if I ever learn it I’ll remark “hmm, that’s neat, I never knew that.”
Most of the state-owned "crown estates" land is open to the public.