Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> At no time did I have to demonstrate that I could safely bring my weapon from concealment to ready without shooting myself in the leg or a bystander.

It's not hard. If you pull the trigger, a bullet comes out (if the safety is off and if there is one in the chamber). So, simply don't pull the trigger until you are ready to fire a bullet. Most (if not all) people that buy guns, you included, understand this basic concept.

It's not like guns require massive amounts of experience to achieve proficiency. It's a simple tool, not a piano.

View on HN

How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year, the least we can do is treat it with at least the level of respect we give other potentially deadly tools (hardly a piano).

Most gun owners give their gun that level of respect.

Car owners kill far more people than gun owners do not give much respect to how deadly their weapon is.

Car owners kill ~38,000 people a year. Guns kill ~15,000 a year (excluding suicides). There are roughly 20,000 suicides a year via firearm. I would argue that if you compared the number of cars driven on a daily basis in the us vs the number of guns fired, that guns cause far more deaths on a per use basis. Seems like Car owners are far more respectful of their 'weapon' on a per capita basis.

+1, on top of that

Car killing people -> mostly accidents.

Gun killing people -> mostly intentional.

> How do you store and carry your weapon safely? How do you transport it? Who has access to it and the ammunition? It is a simple tool that kills tens of thousands of people a year

Unintentionally? I highly doubt that. I would guess the majority of the tens of thousands of deaths were the result of the gun owner intentionally pulling the trigger, not because they were bumbling around transporting it incorrectly, storing ammo incorrectly, etc.

According to this[1], only 500 people died in 2016 due to gun accidents. The rest were intentional.

[1] https://www.aftermath.com/content/accidental-shooting-deaths...

You do realize that 500 gun deaths alone would make headlines in most other countries?

500 accidents in a country with gun rights and a population of over 300M is nothing. You have like a 1 in a million chance of dying by a gun accident. Even lower if you don't own or use guns. It's a non-problem.

Pulling the trigger when you need to sounds like a simple problem in theory, but much more complicated in practice.

My uncle told me a story about when he was deployed to Afghanistan there was a designated area by the mess hall you were supposed to use to ensure your sidearm chamber was clear. Every once in a while, there was an accidental discharge and an officer would be seen over there sheepishly holstering their sidearm. My uncle pointed out that it wasn't required that you had to pull the trigger, just that you had to ensure the chamber was empty. My uncle said he never had a single accidental discharge in the 2 years he was there because he simply never pulled the trigger. If you don't pull the trigger, no bullets come out.

Meanwhile, this happens:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/police-off...

And this:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/03/19...

So soldiers trained by the US military would sometimes make mistakes with their weapon resulting in a discharge they were not expecting? Seems like perhaps its not so simple a tool after all...

That's like saying a knife isn't a simple tool since chefs sometimes cut themselves despite being trained to use them.

The Mask of Zorro (1998)

Don Diego de la Vega [indicating sword]: Do you know how to use that thing?

Alejandro Murrieta: Yes! The pointy end goes into the other man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com