love that Americans are always worried about some sort of national ID/database of citizens being used for nefarious needs
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30431203 and marked it off topic.
US violent crime statistics are at near all-time lows. Yet I know many, many people that will not leave their house without at least one firearm. This is in small towns that haven't seen a violent crime justifying the use of deadly force in many years. Many of these same people refuse to "live in fear" of the coronavirus yet they live essentially petrified of violent crime to the point of carrying a deadly weapon for self-defense on their person at all times (not to mention the likely hundreds-thousands of rounds of ammunition and small arsenal they keep at home).
We're terrified of a national ID "because big brother" yet almost no one cared or batted an eye at the Snowden revelations "because terrorism". 9/11 was 20 years ago and killed 3,000 people. Tragedy for sure but never before in human history has the trajectory and cultural makeup of a country (let alone a superpower) been so drastically altered by what is essentially a rounding error in terms of deaths in two decades. If warrantlessly surveilling an entire population isn't big government/brother I don't know what is.
The ATF isn't allowed to have a searchable database because "the government is going to take away our guns" yet your entire life is accessible to the NSA.
It's truly bizarre.
That's an odd way of stating it. They're concerned, so they're arming themselves.. but continuing on with their lives. Sounds like the opposite of "petrified" to me.
And don't for one second pretend Americans are "continuing on with their lives", what a joke; gun culture is huge in the US, people are absolutely obsessed with the things.
Hardly a more obvious "not over it" situation exists than Americans and their guns.
It's clearly a major driving force in their lives. Perhaps petrified wasn't the best use of words. I'll suggest terrified as an alternative but the actual reality is all the same.
I've been kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint in the US. I'm pretty sure if I had a firearm that situation would have been worse. I would have either gotten myself killed or suffered the trauma of killing someone and watching them die. This isn't a movie where you go bang and the bad guy cleanly falls to the ground. Death by firearm is brutal and changes you forever (as my ex-military friends will tell you). Life isn't Hollywood and anyone who thinks their life will be the same and just fine after using that weapon is either a bona fide psychopath or delusional.
I also can't imagine waking up everyday and strapping a gun to myself just to leave the house. I'd consider that fear winning and an event that I've long sense gotten over continuing to have an outsized amount of control and power over me. I got out of my traumatic event losing an iPhone and $100. After a few months of initial PTSD my life hasn't changed one bit. I won.
I'm more speaking to the motivation behind absolute, 100% carry everyday. It's completely emotional, fear driven, and not in any way supported/justified by the data.
I'll bet you money that most Americans are not okay with this either.
I'm actually not a huge fan when people act like Americans are a a bunch of flag-waving morons, because I think that people who say that are often being extremely reductive to a borderline-offensive level [1], but in this case I do think Americans are uniquely ok with pretending their rights don't exist when they're convinced it's for a greater good.
[1] Disclosure, I'm American
Check Canada. We are way more screwed up in this department
I know people like this and it's not a good mantra to follow. I have to remind them that all that needs to happen is to have political winds go the other direction and soon something they do regularly becomes illegal or suspicious. So dumb to give up privacy for safety.
I'm not a fan of that, and the only way I can think of to avoid this being an issue is for them not to have the information in the first place.
Practically speaking the United States has been a "papers please" country for a long time.
What we're talking about here is a standardized, national ID. It's currently a weird patchwork of driver's licenses, identification cards, etc - each of which are slightly different variants issued by each of the states. So we don't have a standardized national ID. We have at least 50 of them, all with different formats, different issuing criteria, different validity, etc. We've tried to have some bare minim standards for years (REAL ID act) but the mandatory compliance date for that keeps getting pushed (currently next year).
Stop and identify" statutes are laws in several U.S. states that authorize police to lawfully order people whom they reasonably suspect of a crime to state their name. If there is not reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, is being committed, or is about to be committed, an individual is not required to provide identification, even in these states
Don't let your bubble from small town USA distort your view of the entire country.
If you live in a city and carry a gun, you're not protecting yourself, you're escalating the violence.
Getting robbed is exceedingly rare anywhere in the US, and trying to stop a robbery with a gun is among the stupidest things a person can do.
Further, robbing someone doesn't mean you should die, and killing someone over property is evil beyond comprehension. No society should support it, and very few do (nearly nowhere in the US, for example).
I don't understand what you're arguing. Cities unequivocally see more crime than rural areas, even in nicer areas within a city (which may only be 1 mile from the "bad parts").
> Getting robbed is exceedingly rare anywhere in the US, and trying to stop a robbery with a gun is among the stupidest things a person can do.
> Further, robbing someone doesn't mean you should die, and killing someone over property is evil beyond comprehension. No society should support it, and very few do (nearly nowhere in the US, for example).
1. Not everywhere is the same. Just because you feel comfortable in your bubble doesn't mean that owning a firearm is a ridiculous proposition for all. In my past 10 years of living in Atlanta, I've witnessed or been a victim of enough crime to fully understand why some folks here choose to own a gun.
2. The second part is totally ridiculous. Nobody is arguing that all thieves should die.
And no, “cities“ are not one solid, unbroken group, they are not universally more dangerous than rural areas.
You’ve turned the conversation into something else entirely. You think the entire country of 350M lives in fear? Seriously? I get that HN loves to shit on Americans but what exactly is your point here?
My first comment says “many cities see crime” somehow that became “all cities see crime everywhere” in your mind.
And if you think me saying "And no, “cities“ are not one solid, unbroken group" means “all cities see crime everywhere”, you've gotten yourself very lost, friend.
You seem to be lost yourself. What exactly do you disagree with me on from the original comment?
Violent crime rates in the city very low relative to the past.
You are much more likely to be injured or killed in a suburban car accident than an urban assault/murder/mugging.
Paradoxically, I don't have a single friend in Chicago, Denver, Miami, Los Angeles, etc that carries a gun. These cities run the spectrum of gun laws and all have higher crime rates than a small town yet fear of violent crime runs higher in communities where it's non-existent.
This is anecdotal but statistics back it up. Most gun ownership is rural, personal protection is often cited as the primary factor, most gun ownership is handguns (i.e. not hunting), and white males (small town friends) love guns and carry everyday.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
And yet, I know people in each of those cities that own firearms.
> This is anecdotal but statistics back it up. Most gun ownership is rural...
The study you cited doesn't support that claim. What the study says is "Among those who live in rural areas, 46% say they are gun owners, compared with 28% of those who live in the suburbs and 19% in urban areas."
You're failing to consider that <20% of the population lives in rural areas according to the latest 2010 census: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
This means <10% of the population is a rural gun owner. Your study also states "When it comes to hunting, however, rural gun owners are far more likely than their urban or suburban counterparts to say it is as an important reason they own a gun; 48% of gun owners in rural areas say this." Also note the study says 30% of rural firearm owners do so for sport shooting, 15% as part of a collection, and 8% as a requirement for their job.
Less than half of rural gun owners do so solely for protection. All in all, <4% of the US population owns a gun in a rural area solely for protection. That's a pretty far cry from your original claim that Americans live in a culture of fear.
The two options presented before my comment are not the only ones.
They already do!
There is so many quasi-national tracking and gov approved monopolies that they already get what they need.
Everywhere is tracked with license plate scanners, so you can't go anywhere.
Everyone realistically uses VISA or mastercard, so you can't buy anything. If you don't you're still probably banked and connected to credit agencies, so you can still be tracked. Good luck getting cash without the gov knowing. Just look at the IRS data.
You register with the gov to drive, so your IDed already by someone.
NSA et al. track god knows what about you across the internet and abroad, and where they don't go some ad network goes.
I think the only thing that we don't track is guns... and thats probably something we should track.
Fingerprint and DNA are a completely different thing, and crazily intrusive to collect on a central location.
DNA is collected on all military members. Ostensibly, they tell you it's to identify your remains if necessary. I'm sure it's used for that also :D
The most intrusive thing they did to me was the polygraph :)
Hard disagree. If you live in the US you have a connection to the federal government. I'm not saying everyone should have fingerprints or DNA on file but a national ID is something I'm fully behind. The shit show that is social security numbers, KYC, and other ways to identify a person are such a pain and for literally no good reason that I can see.
Now as a matter of authentication - verifying the identifier, we have left this up to the states in the past, with opt-in federal IDs for various purposes. Though with RealID this is being standardized. Login.gov is a way to have a digital equivalent.
But every state has an ID system, and they're all known to each other, and tied to your SSN which is a national id number. We already essentially have all the parts, just messier.
> my fingerprints and DNA are already on file with the feds somewhere
Same. Probably same for lots of people.
> US Citizens with no particular connection to the federal government
We all have a connection... we live in the US!
We first got an income tax during the civil war, and the 16th ammendment before the 1920s. Thats the relationship we've had with the government. How many people alive "almost never dealt with the federal government directly" at any point in their life?
By virtue of living here, you already have a connection. At minimum, you have to tax various taxes.
If it's just Uncle Sam that's the problem, then we use something like RealID at the state level.
Replacing SSNs with an alternative built on public-key cryptography seems like the best way forward. I do not understand the opposition to this. Having citizens sign their tax returns, loan applications, etc. with their private key instead of just writing their SSN on it would eliminate most SSN-related identity theft and fraud.
Because much of Europe has living memory of national registries used for fatal purposes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_nationale_de_l%27in...
In my mind, governments are like companies both are comprised of people making decisions which may or may not align with my personal interests. I want a GDPR for the government.
I do not really see how replacing your SSN with a public/private key pair that you use to cryptographically sign tax returns, loan applications, or election ballots would make a repeat of World War II any more or less likely; I just see it making identity theft a lot harder. Any government that decides it has the will and power to start a genocide isn't going to be stopped by antiquated blue paper cards.
And before you say "but that can never happen!", stop for a second and rethink that. It has happened many, many times in human history, and it will absolutely happen again somewhere unless we do our best to confound it.
Unless you want to argue that the lack of security is a feature, and that rampant identity theft is somehow stopping the US government from perpetrating the next holocaust.