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Comment by igetspam | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong. This state is getting worse all the time. A little kid was shot an killed because his mom flipped someone off for cutting her off. The kid's last words were something like. "mommy. my tummy hurts."

Last I checked, they still hadn't caught him. This is not a state where more guns us going to make things better. It's a state that very clearly represents the temperature of the country: financially strong liberal strongholds arm wrestling with the government around them. (Abbott and Patrick don't hold back on how much they hate Austin.) We're just going to shoot at each more and scream Castle Doctrine about it.

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Liberal strongholds tend to be soft on crime. When your response to someone who assaults another person "just because" is a slap on the wrist, it's no surprise they move on to more heinous crimes.

"But the guy didn't kill anyone, he deserves a second chance" -- right. And the rest of us deserve some safety from people like him.

You can't ban your way to more safety if you can't reasonably control the thing that you're banning. The US government can't reasonably control who has a gun in this country, that's just a fact and it will not change as long as the second amendment is a thing.

What you can do is adjust sentencing standards so that the people who are at highest risk of re-offending in a violent way are locked up.

I find it bizarre that your stance on civil liberties allows people to carry a gun freely but is totally OK with totally taking away someone's freedom for years or decades because they are supposedly a threat to public safety.

> I find it bizarre that your stance on civil liberties allows people to carry a gun freely but is totally OK with totally taking away someone's freedom for years or decades

What is bizarre? Freedom, personal responsibility, and the right to defend oneself are not mutually exclusive. Your freedom is yours to lose, and that happens when you infringe on other peoples' right to freedom.

> because they are supposedly a threat to public safety.

Strawman. You take away someone's freedom because they committed a crime of some kind and are likely to be a violent re-offender. Most likely that means they committed a violent crime in the first place, and were just lucky to not have killed someone. That sort of determination requires looking at the totality of circumstances, too, not just checking a couple boxes.

We're hard on crime in texas... Unless you're white. Then we let you castle doctrine your way out of almost anything.

And that's a problem that needs addressing on its own merits, with different circumstances and a different solution.

SF and NYC are supported by the government around them, and look at the explosion of violence and crime in those cities over the past year. Not so in Austin.

https://www.kxan.com/news/crime/violent-gun-crimes-and-homic...

You're not from around here, are you?

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