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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

I might vote for Trump if he promised to fight against the second amendment. Enough lives have been lost because of our desire to potentially be heroes in a hypothetical uprising. The second amendment has been ineffective against so many government abuses to date, and enabled so much citizen violence. Nice idea to try, shame it didn't work, time to fix it.

Not so much the first, though...

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Why not just live in a state with more strict gun laws and let people of other states live like they want? As someone in the rural US, guns are part of my heritage. Police response times can be 40+ minutes in non-urban areas, and removing legal guns would just make us vulnerable.

Because the Republican party and the Supreme Court has been eroding the ability of states to HAVE more strict gun laws?

I live in California, why don't the folks who want guns GTFO themselves, instead of trying to change our laws through activist judges?

So we're in agreement that regional cultural differences need to be embraced and allowed in the legal system. Good! Now what do we need to do to make this a reality in our justice system?

I'm actually NOT convinced that such differences should be allowed, but given that you ARE: you should change the constitution - or the members of the courts interpreting it - to allow my state to restrict guns, because right now the claim is that such a thing violates the second amendment.

Why are you so concerned about how people in other states choose to live?

Guns don't stay where they start.

Hell, it's even an INTERNATIONAL thing - US guns end up enabling violence in Mexico, too!

> Guns don't stay where they start.

Neither do criminals, drugs or marriages, however I don't propose giving people in the next state over control of those things.

What are you talking about? States have been running wild passing unconstitutional gun laws for over a decade. All the Supreme Court has said on the 2nd amendment is the feds and states can't ban weapons in common use, specifically handguns - yet California has completely IGNORED this via it's handgun "roster" which is deliberately designed as a slow motion handgun ban. And you can't blame Republicans either - they have no power to stop California (which has a D supermajority) from passing gun laws.

"Over a decade" because pre-2008 it was much more of an open question what "constitutional" meant re: gun laws, no? Hence my claim of erosion: one party decided that their interpretation was now the law of the land, overruling what the populations of certain cities and states might want.

I thought activist judges were bad?

Is judicial activism now just any time a case is decided in a way you don't like?

Hah, I grew up listening to enough Rush Limbaugh to know that it's ALWAYS been that, I just like co-opting some of the terms.

There are literally millions of defensive uses of firearms every year. Source: the CDC. https://repository.gheli.harvard.edu/repository/12225/

1) That's not the CDC. Not even a little bit. You linked to an incubator at Harvard which links to a document produced in response to an executive order and whose suggested citation credits the National Academies of Sciences, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization. The chain went Barack Obama -> CDC -> Institute of Medicine (a subset of the NAS) -> A committee. At no point did the CDC adopt or endorse this report.

2) Following the trail of sources from the link you provide eventually gets you to https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3?term=defen#15 which repeatedly states "the exact number remains disputed" and "is a controversy in the field." The document does not endorse ANY particular figure, and provides 108k, 500k, and 3M as estimates produced by surveys. There is no discussion of the validity or reliability of these surveys in this cursory overview; given that the numbers remain controversial and disputed I expect that both these properties are wanting. All the estimates come from academic sources, not governmental entities.

The CDC did study defensive gun use in the 1990s.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-...

The TL;DR is that we don't have reliable data.

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