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Comment by _vbdg | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue a fairer metric would probably be to compare gun deaths to car deaths; nearly twice as many people died to cars in 2019 [0] [1].

I definitely don't think Trump will be "Hitler 2.0". He probably won't even be in office after this election.

Again, however, my primary argument is normative and values-based. I'm not arguing that we only have gun rights because they don't kill x number of people. Even if a hundred thousand people were killed by mass shootings I wouldn't support gun restrictions. We don't restrict people's liberties because others break the law. The thing most gun grabbers miss and that most gun rights proponents won't say is that our primary value is liberty not saving more lives.

[0]: https://www.thetrace.org/2020/01/gun-deaths-2019-increase/

[1]: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...

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Well you're in a dying breed it seems. These days liberty is not worth more than death. In other words, it's increasingly popular to trade some liberty in exchange for saving lives. Take away people's gun liberty, take away people's liberty to refuse wearing a mask, take away people's liberty to say hateful/hurtful things to the vulnerable on social media and you can save thousands, even tens of thousands of lives per year.

The problem with liberty is that some % of people (bad actors) abuse it to cause harm to others

Dying breed? Golly I sure hope not. There's at least two of we liberty guards left at least. The entire country was architected around the premise of liberty being more important than the State's capacity to deliver perfect security.

I certainly hope I'm not a dying breed, though the last few months have sadly made it appear that you may be right. I don't see why a sufficiently large number of people believing otherwise is a good argument against my position, though. While I'm certainly open to arguments to the contrary, my general worldview is simply that life is not the paramount value to be sought, but rather liberty instead.

It must be a cultural difference. For context I'm in the U.K. where a gun being fired would hit local news, a gun-related death would probably make the papers

I'd rather aim towards zero deaths in both columns rather than decide which is the better cause of death. You do you America

You're right that cultural attitudes towards such things are different, but as I said, my argument isn't really about number of deaths but values-based. I value liberty higher than life. I regard those that attempt to deprive others of their liberties to improve their sense of security as authoritarians who must be opposed, forcibly if necessary. My attitudes aren't really predicated on how many lives are lost.

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