Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

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>At some point governments will have to address the elephant in the room.

Crime?

If a community is suffering from a very high crime rate (and some American cities are amongst the most violent cities in the world) - why are we prioritizing one set of rights (right to privacy) over another (right to personal security, right to raise children in a safe environment)? In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.

And there is a class component to this. If you live in a nice safe (and affluent) neighborhood, I'm sure privacy is much more important to you because you don't have to worry about your children being hurt by or recruited into gangs on the way to school. You don't have to worry about getting mugged or assaulted walking to the store. If you live in a community with a high crime rate, are you sure you want to focus on privacy and rights of criminals?

>In many cases, you can't have one with the other. Privacy or Personal security - pick one.

You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that infringing on our right to privacy makes use safer in any meaningful way - though I have seen evidence to indicate it, in fact, makes us less safe.

>You have a lot of work ahead of you to demonstrate that empirical fact.

It's self-evident that there is tension between privacy and security. I'm not making an argument against privacy. In fact, we now have entire political, activist and cultural movements advocating for the rights of the criminals. Who is making the case for the rights of the innocents to not be victimized by crime?

There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons. It's not a 2 way balance. America has chosen that access to weapons to commit crimes with is more important than personal safety or privacy, and no amount of giving up privacy will make up for prioritizing weapons

>There's a much easier way? Remove access to weapons.

There are no simple solutions and to pretend that all you need to do is X and then therefore everything will work is naïve to the extreme. This kind of argumentation, where reality on the ground is ignored in favor of some pie-in-the-sky hypothetical policy, is not actually conducive to actually helping people suffering from crime (not just gun violence but crime).

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