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Comment by allover | Hacker News Reader

He said the drills are misguided though right?

Not that the US obsession with guns and lax gun control that enables school shootings is defensible.

Americans have guns because we believe that individual citizens may, god forbid, need to kill people. Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that they are past that, at a point in history where only the State needs the power to kill.

Who knows who is right. But it’s ridiculously arrogant to say that the American position is not defensible. It was literally just a couple of generations ago when the US was air dropping rifles into France to support the Resistance. Even if we have now entered an age where ordinary people don’t need guns—that new age is younger than computers, supersonic flight, or television. Its far too soon to conclude that’s this is how the world will always be from here forward.

I think you're missing that Europeans also recognise that giving every dumbass, desperate person or dormant psychopath a gun, is far more likely to get people killed NOW, than the chances that when the 'end-times' you imply come, all these same people are going to someone effectively unite and overthrow the regime.

It's a crackpot idea to think that 'arming citizens' helps the whole. And the fact you think it's 'arrogant' to spell out a basic truth that the rest of the world understands is dumbfounding.

Yes, that the drills are misguided. And he is fine with the obsession with guns, suggested using palm/grip recognition to tie guns to owners with free updates paid for by govt. Reasonable.

More reasonable than the anti gun control people, but it's still an insane solution to the problem, in the grand scheme of things.

Because?

Because in the grand-scheme of things, the countries that have banned guns don't have the problems you have.

Crazy, I know.

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