Hacker News Reader

Why are school shootings the bar here? Do we care about murdered children, or very specifically only murdered children in school by a gun? Certainly the US has tons of room for improvement, but it seems very disingenuous to cherry-pick a subset of what people actually care about just to oversell your point.

It's an example, and a compelling one. That is not the same as cherry picking.

School shooting statistics are a deeply uncompelling example.

Tragedies are often non statistically relevant

Luckily in this case they are.

When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard.

This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not have been so kind.

These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems to pick up where other systems fail provides us the ultimate leverage in the end.

Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes fail and always harm those who feel their impact and chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by law" anyway?

> When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government,

I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government.

The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, very easily.

You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you?

I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?

In that case surely the second amendment isn’t necessary, then. You’ve already got the army!

Look to Turkey for a failure of that model.

Although I should say that I am always convinced by those who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan as a pretext.

> It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction.

I think, as we have seen over the past ~40 years, it is very easy for either of them to abuse power. On the other hand, it is very difficult for voters to implement legislation that improves the lives of everyday people in any meaningful way. That is really what the Constitution did. It created a complex system of government with veto points around every corner to, in the words of James Madison, "protect the minority of the opulent (wealthy property owners) against the majority (the plebs)". And this is certainly how it is currently functioning. I stopped romanticizing the constitution years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Background

> The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken,

When the first amendment was written, they only had primitive printing presses. Obviously it does not apply to the internet, electronic printers, etc.

This is quickly devolving into a Facebook "conversation". I'm disappointed.

In any case, there is a very good argument for the first amendment changing in response to today's challenges, culture, and technology.

Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault rifles available on the civilian market are registered pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF and pay a special tax to purchase one.

Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?

An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my home state of California that ban certain cosmetic features on guns. These are completely pointless as an AR-15 is functionally no different from any other semi-automatic firearm.

Examples:

Assault Rifle

https://i.imgur.com/pGnxHRD.jpg

"Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/xhsZ2dK.jpg

Not an "Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/VKtpdSy.jpg

This is the kind of autistic pedantry I come to HN for. I don't know what I was thinking.

thank you

What makes an Armalite Rifle-15 significant to you?

I ask because it isn't actually all that interesting as far as guns go.

It shoots a fairly low-power cartridge, roughly equivalent to 30-30, which means that it isn't powerful enough for deer hunting in some states. That's part of why it's easy to shoot even for XX folks. (Another part is the ergonomics; the stock and hand-grip make it easier to shoot correctly from the shoulder than most rifles.)

It's semi-auto, but so are most guns these days. It doesn't shoot any faster than other semi-autos. Standard capacity magazines aren't any larger.

It is possibly the most popular rifle of all time, certainly in the last 50+ years.

> Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally

The US has a high rate of firearms fatalities. Around two thirds of these are suicides. Around zero thirds of them are school shootings.

School shootings are sufficiently rare that when they happen, they make national news. Which is catastrophic, because studies have shown that media coverage of school shootings induces school shootings. It's attention-seeking behavior by the criminally insane, so if you show them that it generates attention, it increases their attraction to the act. Most US media outlets know this and do it anyway, because it generates a lot of hits. This is the primary reason why the US has relatively more than other countries, including other countries with a high rate of firearms ownership.

> Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

It doesn't work for this. If you have a driver's license and know it will be taken away if you drive drunk, that's an effective deterrent. School shooters tend to be young people with no prior criminal history. They would pass a background check. Having a license to take away after the fact is meaningless when after they fact they're going to prison forever.

In theory where this does something is for criminal gangs, where you say you want to deny people with a criminal history a firearm. Criminal gangs actually are a significant fraction of firearms fatalities. But here's how that works out: People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

Meanwhile, people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life. Laws against this don't deter it when the alternative is getting murdered. Then this otherwise reformed criminal gets caught in possession of a firearm yet not committing any other crime, so they go back to prison and get another chance to get caught up with criminals. A large number of black people are currently in prison for no other crime than "felon in possession of a firearm," and were in possession of it for no other reason than self-defense. Or weren't in possession of it at all but were near enough to one owned by someone else for a bad cop to opportunistically file the charge.

Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

Between 2009 to 2018 there were 288 school shooting incidents in the US. During this time there were a total of 5 similar incidents in the rest of the world. Something is definitely wrong.

> Something is definitely wrong.

Oh absolutely. More than one thing.

The US is structurally messed up in a dozen different ways and it puts people in a corner. People are angry and have no idea what to do about it. Undirected rage because people don't know where to direct it.

Then the media directs it to shooting up schools by plastering that all over the screen. It could just as easily be pipe bombs or political assassinations or riots.

Or something actually constructive. But actually solving the problems that many organizations exist only to mitigate means you have to fight them, and they often win. Especially when people are led to believe that supporting those organizations is the way to eliminate the problems that they now exist to preserve.

> People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

> people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life.

Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

> Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.

> just because they can have weapons somehow is not a reason to make it very easy and legal.

Laws have costs and benefits. When the benefits are not actually realized in practice, that's relevant.

> Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I don't see how it will save your life or protect you.

If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

This is especially relevant for people in bad neighborhoods where the police can't be expected to do this job or provide an effective deterrent, and many of the victims are people who have a criminal history.

An obvious and common case being where you get caught committing a crime, are pressured into testifying against someone else to avoid going to prison for ten years instead of one, and then you get out of prison and they or their people are after you.

> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively. There are certainly less death by firearm though.

Ban red cars and there may be fewer accidents involving red cars, but is that really the right metric?

Firearms are aggressively prohibited in Mexico and they have an even bigger homicide problem than the US. There is a high rate of firearms ownership in Canada, and they don't. The reason for this difference is where we should direct our attention.

> I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.

I notice you haven't answered that part :)

In a country with a low violent crime rate, banning guns has no benefits, because you have a low violent crime rate. All you're doing is inconveniencing honest people using them for recreation or as a bulwark against prospective future government failure.

In a country with a high violent crime rate, victims need weapons for self defense. If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

> If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you at risk to their own life.

Maybe there is a gentleman rule among firearm owners to let the other side the opportunity to shoot first, but there is always the risk of someone not following that rule.

They can try to shoot first. That doesn't mean they always will, or that their first shot won't miss. Or that you won't still manage to shoot them even if they hit you first, the risk of which acts as a deterrent.

I guess criminals in your country use nice low damage weapons, in that case I guess it works.

In my country they seem to use some kind of automatic weapons, where the odds of really missing is low :) (I have seen some cars destroyed by such weapons, I'm not sure high precision is needed to be effective ^^)