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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Brit, so a complete outsider so bear with me.

It seems to me the mass shooting, and gun crime issue generally is the responsibility of the gun lobby to solve. If a constituency wants to have a certain set of rights, and those rights have negative consequences on the rest of the population, it's the responsibility of that constituency to come up with a workable way to regulate itself. If it abrogates that responsibility, it should be prepared to forfeit those rights.

So what is the US gun community's answer to shooting sprees and gun deaths in general? It's clearly a real problem, so what's the answer? I'm not interesting in hearing why this or that gun control legislation can't work or is unfair. It's up to you, it's your problem to fix. What's your solution?

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I don’t think that’s generally true. To draw a comparison, are there other rights where the same thing plays out? What are other examples of rights where we expect the people exercising their rights to come up with a solution for people who abuse the right? Speech? Religion?

It seems pretty clear that society as a whole is responsible for finding a way to maintain safety and stability in combination with upholding the rights the society has established. We don’t demand that the solution to radical religious extremists be proposed by churches or else we ban churches.

Pretty much every law ever made was passed to stop people doing something they previously did. They are a restriction on freedoms, or 'rights'. That's pretty much what a law is, though sometimes they grant exceptions to other laws.

Plenty of religions have been banned and members arrested.

Nazis and such get arrested for hate speech from time to time.

Until laws were passed to prevent it, anyone had the 'right' to make and even sell alcohol.

Most sporting bodies have governance organisations that regulate themselves, in an effort to avoid regulations being imposed by law.

The same is true of many professional organisations. In the UK the Royal College of Nurses, a trade union, gets involved in regulation of the nursing profession and advises on legislation.

Every right comes with responsibilities. At a minimum one person't right is another person's responsibility to protect and uphold. They are impositions. If you have or want a right, and wish to retain it, that comes with a responsibility to the rest of society, or they will be entirely justified in taking it away.

It's entirely normal and common for a pressure group or representative body to have input into laws and regulations. The NRA does this. It's time IMHO that they took that seriously and, along with their supporters, accepted some actual responsibility like grown adults.

My point isn’t that rights can’t or shouldn’t be restricted. My point is that we don’t generally ask a specific group how to best restrict themselves. Sporting bodies don’t “regulate themselves in an effort to avoid regulations being imposed by law”, they generally work to make the most money by pushing the boundaries of the current law, and are eventually curtailed by more or different laws that they did not propose.

Ok, take brain injuries in American Football. Do you think the sports bodies have a responsibility to ensure their sport is safe to practice? After all, deliberately smashing someone on the head, with force and in circumstances known to reliably cause injury, is really assault.

What job do the football associations have that is more important, in the broader context, than this? It could destroy the sport.

Ideally a sporting body should set things up so that they don't have to spend much time on this, but it's a serious responsibility.

The NRA spends an inordinate amount of it's time trying to avoid legal restrictions on their member's activities. They spend huge resources on it. To me, that's a sign that they are not doing their job very well at all, or taking their responsibilities seriously as members of society. It's their problem to solve.

This is not something people who don't want to own guns should have to worry about. The fact that they have to is a clear abrogation of responsibility on the part of those that do.

There’s a couple threads here, so I’ll attempt to delineate my responses:

Regarding the football comparison: there isn’t generally speaking a right to play football, and I’d prefer if sports bodies were committed to ensuring the health of players of their sport, but no, I don’t think that sports bodies should be relied upon to enforce some arbitrary standard for safety in their sport, with the threat of banning football. The football example is interesting because smashing somebody in the head as part of a football game isn’t “really assault”. If you and I agree to play football, and during the course of the game we collide and I get injured, you didn’t assault me. The problem with sports bodies is that they have several incentives that don’t align with overall player long-term health, and the players typically (especially historically) don’t have a strong enough negotiating position to push for systematic change. So to your question: no, I don’t think we should expect sports industries to carry the weight of making their sports “safe”, I think society should agree on laws that restrict sports bodies behavior so that they’re forced to operate in ways that are safe. We don’t ask construction sites to please make worker conditions safe, we set up OSHA and equivalent orgs, with regulations to mandate safety.

Regarding the job that football associations have, that’s more important than long-term health, “profit” is the answer. The football organization isn’t a benevolent charity, they exist so as to ensure their own continued existence. They also don’t represent the players, nor the fans.

Switching gears to the NRA: the NRA has a similar job. They exist in order to perpetuate their lobbying influence and perpetuate their funding. They are not an accurate picture of the average American gun owner. They push for or against policies on the basis of continuing that power, more so than any intrinsic goal of “avoiding legal restrictions on their members”, except insofar as their members are “NRA large-scale donors”, which effectively amounts to “gun manufacturers”.

Regarding it being “their problem to solve”, you still haven’t addressed my critique of that premise. Gun ownership in America is a right, written into the foundation of US government. There’s a whole body of debate as to whether or not it should be a right, whether it should be written differently, etc, but at present, gun ownership in the US is written into the constitution at a similar level to freedom of speech or protest. We don’t tell free speech advocates to find ways to limit hate speech or we ban all free speech, why would we approach this any differently?

> there isn’t generally speaking a right to play football

Just curious, are you American? Because this comes across as a totally alien way of thinking - why would there be or why would you need a "right" to play football? Do I, generally speaking, have a right to stand on one leg? If I'm reading you correctly there's no right to perform any novel activity, because the right couldn't have been granted yet!

People don't, in the normal course of things, have a right to charge at and assault each other, with enough force to cause life changing injuries. That's the context of this discussion.

Before it was known that AF seems to consistently lead to these injuries this wasn't a problem, but now the evidence is amassing that it does, if the game doesn't get reformed there is a risk it could get sued and legislated out of existence. With that background, clearly the game doesn't have a legal right to exist, to stop that happening.

I am American, but the relevance of there being an explicit right in the US constitution isn’t as part of some hypothetical claim that one may only do things which are enumerated. The relevance is that in the US, removing a named right is more difficult than removing an unnamed right. In the absurd case, this is obviously not a risk, because an attempt to ban standing on one leg is obviously not reasonable. But if the 2nd amendment didn’t exist, gun regulation in the US would have looked very different over the past century.

> removing a named right is more difficult than removing an unnamed right.

That doesn't immediately strike me as obviously true. Many states attempted to remove the unnamed right to an abortion (by which I mean, abortion is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution); but that was struck down on 14th Amendment grounds. It wouldn't surprise me if an enterprising lawyer could contest a statewide firearm ban (assuming no second amendment) via the commerce clause, for example.

I think your point agrees with mine. In the US, the path to defending an unnamed right generally involves an “enterprising lawyer” drawing a line to try to bucket it as a part of a named right. Defending the named right directly requires strictly less mental gymnastics.

There are plenty of sports that have been made illegal, and plenty of sports that have been reformed to avid that fate. I can see we're not going to agree on regulation of sports and other activities, so ok. Not the main question anyway. And btw I appreciate your engagement on all of this.

Gun ownership is only a right because a law says so, and laws are made by people. Things change. People change. Technology changes. The US constitution has been amended 27 times, and amendments have been revised or revoked by other amendments. Just look at what happened to the 18th. If you want to keep the 2nd, you'll need a better argument than because it's an amendment.

>We don’t tell free speech advocates to find ways to limit hate speech or we ban all free speech, why would we approach this any differently?

What forms of speech are allowable or not is up for debate. There are plenty of things it is illegal to say or print, and even most free speech advocates will agree with many restrictions. Free speech advocates have to fight cases all the time though, it's a constant struggle as to what can or cannot be said. Why should firearms, which weapons can or cannot be owned or carried in public, be any different?

Nobody is talking about banning all guns. That's a complete straw man. I'm not talking about banning anything. I think most people campaigning for gun restrictions aren't trying to ban all guns, or even most guns. What I'm saying though, is this is a question for you.

What is your answer, and that of your community, to this problem?

Do you think the current rate of mass shootings in America and gun deaths in general is acceptable, and if not how does it get under control?

>Regarding the job that football associations have, that’s more important than long-term health, “profit” is the answer. The football organization isn’t a benevolent charity, they exist so as to ensure their own continued existence. They also don’t represent the players, nor the fans.

I will put forth the argument that profit is not be the sole motive for any organization. That is a relatively new and immature [1] way of thinking about economic activity which ignores the context and environment in which economic activity takes place. Profit above all else should be considered the false narrative that it is [2]. Even if we did consider profit to be a primary motivation for an organization, that ignores that the organization is composed of people who should care about their fellow man and work to reduce the chances and effects of injuries in the people who labor for them. I will go further and propose that putting profit above the long term health of players is short-termism, a disease that affects far too many today. In fact, this disease of thinking is so bad that the executives of some of the largest corporations now need to explicitly tell people to stop thinking like that [3]. Ignoring the dangers of traumatic brain injury could have negative consequences for the long-term profit of the NFL - through lawsuits, negative publicity, and less productivity from the players.

1: See more here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250185983

2: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

3: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/business/business-roundta...

People routinely make those demands of mosques, though.

True. I wonder what the overlap of people is who make that demand of mosques, vs people who would make that demand of the gun lobby.

For what it’s worth, I think the gun lobby in the US does a disservice to the majority of lawful gun owners, as well as a disservice to victims of gun violence. Their primary goal as an organization seems to be remaining a large, powerful organization, and I find the majority of their policy positions and rhetoric to be fully detached from either lowering the rate of gun violence or protecting the rights of actual individual gun owners. See, for example, the waves of rhetoric leading up to each election cycle, warning that any liberal politician is going to “take our guns”. The impact here is a massive spike in gun sales and profit for gun manufacturers, despite the fact that liberal politicians haven’t had any substantial impact on individual gun ownership in a long time.

Canadian here.

Can you imagine how unreasonable this sounds for any other rights?

Try the right to protest: "It's the responsibility of the bandana industry to regulate all protests, and since they have abrogated that responsibility, protestors must forfeit those rights."

Rights are granted by society because they choose to do so. It's a deal. Anyway, answered in more detail elsewhere in the thread.

It’s not a “deal”. Society didn’t make a wager with some governmental body for free speech, contingent on free speech organizations policing undesirable speech.

The deal metaphor breaks down pretty clearly. If advocates of democracy don’t do enough to curtail voter fraud, society cancels the right to vote? If the auto lobby doesn’t figure out a solution for vehicle deaths, we stop building paved roads? Society as a whole is responsible for finding a way to respect granted rights and balance the risks of exercise of those rights; it’s not incumbent on specific groups to own that, just because they exercise that right.

Speech legislation, including the US constitution, was constructed as a result of deliberation and political horse trading. That’s particularly true of the amendments.

On free speech particularly, what constitutes free speech and what speech is controlled or banned is constantly under review. Free speech advocates exist precisely because of this. If there was no issue around free speech there would be no need for advocates.

Laws around voter fraud are constantly under review. Cancelling all voting is not the only way to address electoral problems. Similarly banning all guns doesn’t have to be the only way to prevent frequent mass shootings.

Or is it? I really don’t know. You tell me. Just as electoral reformers are constantly addressing issues of democracy. As free speech advocates are constantly fighting for open discourse, why shouldn’t gun owners have to argue for and justify their privileges?

So what solution to mass killings and gun deaths do you propose? Just like anyone else exercising a right, you can legitimately be expected to justify it. Please do so.

Please stop equating rights with privileges.

In the same way stabbings are not a UK knife community/constituency issue they need to solve. It's a problem bigger than that.

The problem is that we're beholden to a Constitution written in a time where personal possession of firearms was a much more practically relevant issue than it is now, and you take the good with the bad. And: there's a lot of good that comes from not cracking the Constitution back open and mucking with it.

The US has a written constitution and list of amendments; one of the downsides of this (vs. the largely cobbled-together unwritten constitution that the UK operates under) is that you can make arguments that hew to the letter of the law, rather than its intent.

The current situation re: mass shootings and proliferation of guns is that the Supreme Court parsed the awkardly-phrased 2nd amendment as mandating that ownership and possession of weapons be completely unrestricted and unabridged.

Part of it is that the version of the 2A that was passed by the states differs from the one ratified by the first Congress.

The original text:

> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The ratified text:

> A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The ultimate solution is to amend the 2nd amendment, but that would require substantial effort and consent of all states.

It’s worth noting that the Supreme Court did not parse the 2nd amendment to mean ownership of weapons must be “completely unrestricted and unabridged”, as evidenced by the variety of restrictions in place across the US, both at the federal and state level.

It’s pretty clear that we should be evaluating ways to adjust gun law in the US to prevent the kinds of violence that are occurring under the current set of rules, but we should accurately portray the current state of the world while we’re having that evaluation.

>The ultimate solution is to amend the 2nd amendment, but that would require substantial effort and consent of all states.

You're probably right, we can't have any serious gun control in the US as long as the 2nd Amendment remains as is, post Heller. But any state supporting the amending or repeal of the 2nd Amendment, despite that being a perfectly legal and Constitutionally approved process, will find itself turned into another Northern Ireland and any Senator or Congress person approving such a measure, should it pass, will spend the rest of their life avoiding sniper fire.

Which is why no serious attempt to touch the 2nd Amendment will ever happen. The best we can do is what we've been doing - regulate around it as much as possible, even if such attempts are doomed to be ineffective.

>The best we can do is what we've been doing - regulate around it as much as possible, even if such attempts are doomed to be ineffective.

We can do much better than that. We can take a deep look into our own society and address the underlying reasons why people are trying to hurt themselves and others in such large numbers.

For instance, we could try to figure out why over 20,000 people per year are killing themselves with firearms. Is some aspect of their lives making them despair? If so, let's take a serious look into the causes, and try to correct them.

There are parts of the country with extremely low rates of violence and near universal gun ownership. Let's figure out what's going on in those parts of the country, and try to make the rest of the country like that.

Are there any commonalities we can identify between people who attempt to commit mass atrocities? If so, let's figure out what they are, and see if there's anything we can do to reduce the incidence of those commonalities in the general population.

How does that sound?

>How does that sound?

Sounds fine, I support everything in your comment.

However, I believe keeping guns out of the hands of people who would harm themselves and others is also a legitimate part of the solution. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and Constitution of my country disagree with me.

Everyone believes that trying to keep guns out of the hands of people that would harm themselves and others is a part of the solution. That's why there are laws against felons possessing them.

That's the commonsensical position, but that assumes some kind of social responsibility that as far as I can tell doesn't exist in that part of America. A dozen children murdered in a school prompts a response of "what does that have to do with me?" The gun lobby does not see themselves as having any kind of real responsibility for addressing the problem. They may not even see it as a problem. Even the really wacky solutions (armed guards in every school! bunker architecture!) they don't want to actually pay for.

Then there's the part of the gun industry that sees gun crime as a means to sell more guns to people concerned about gun crime. Rather like the international arms trade, there's lots of money in provoking conflict so you can sell to both sides.

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