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Comment by mmm_grayons | Hacker News Reader

Ahh, I love the McNuke argument. It's like "what about the roads" but for firearms policy. I've actually thought pretty hard about it, but no, I don't think so, and I believe my reason is consistent with the ideology I expressed above. The issue with nukes is that it's simply not possible to detonate one without causing collateral damage. Fallout, radiation poisoning, etc. So the government can in fact act to keep these externalities from harming others.

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> The issue with nukes is that it's simply not possible to detonate one without causing collateral damage.

Sure, how about a howitzer then?

What you're failing to see or refusing to admit is that you too want to restrict access to weapons based on a certain threshold of collateral damage/body count each of them can inflict.

It's just that for some (perhaps most) of us, an AR-15 is way past our threshold.

As for the truck you mentioned that was used in France: if it's ever found that a certain truck model makes it particularly easy to run over people with, I bet my bottom dollar that soon after there will be legislation enacted restricting access to it.

No, I don't want to restrict ownership of howitzers. Though personally, I'd prefer an M61 vulcan. So no, I wouldn't say I'd restrict based on body count.

Just to be clear, you’d be fine with a personally owned nuke if it didn’t have fallout?

The issue is not the fallout but the fact that a nuclear weapon cannot be targeted - it by its very nature and design harms innocent civilians. Compare that to a fierarm, which can obviously be directed one way or the other. It's the same reason I wouldn't load my concealed carry handgun with FMJ rounds.

Realistically, if you fire a howitzer you have zero assurance that the shell will only land upon legitimate targets. The recent hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan are testament to the indiscriminate destructive power of military weapons.

Private ownership of nuclear weapons has a slightly different problem that isn't usually brought up in the "nuclear garden gnome" discussions: it has a capability to break the MAD doctrine. If your country allows anyone to own a warhead (and perhaps also a delivery system), then from the outside perspective, you're an unpredictable first strike threat. Which means suddenly the best option is to preemptively glass you, in order to not have to deal with you anymore.

It's interesting to consider power balance theory in other contexts, eg the # of applications for NICS background checks (a loose proxy for firearm sales) have massively increased this year: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_mo...

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