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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

My basic stance on guns is that people who commit or intend to commit crimes using guns do not know or care about gun laws. We can pass all the laws in the world to control guns and they will be about as effective as all the laws we have to control drugs, which is to say, not very effective.

My belief is that the more we restrict access to guns, the stronger the black market for them. This has proven true with alcohol (Prohibition) and drugs, and I believe, without knowing it to be a fact of course, that it will prove true with guns.

Criminals do not care about gun laws. Only law-abiding citizens will obey gun control laws. If we outlaw guns completely except for police, then I believe criminals will still have guns and will not need to worry about a homeowner, school teacher, or other law-abiding member of the public being able to challenge them when they (the criminal) commit their crimes with a gun.

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Even beyond that, I find the arguments of gun control advocates to be lacking.

"We need to take away guns because a very small percentage of people are violent with them."

"Well, what do we do when we need help from someone who has ignored the gun laws?"

"Well, you call people with guns, of course!"

"But, they're minutes away? How is that going to help me now?"

Advocates for gun control seem to forget that guns are the single greatest equalizer for self-defense this world has ever seen. Being attacked by someone larger than you? A gun is going to help. Someone attacking you already has a gun? You are giving yourself a far better chance of survival by being armed than just sitting there like a deer staring at car headlights waiting to be run over. Physical strength and in certain cases even numerical advantages mean little in comparison to the sheer stopping power a firearm can wield, even before it is fired.

There are not many people in this world who won't take a pause when a gun is pointed at them and many defensive gun uses in the US (of which the estimates range from 300,000 to upwards of 3,000,000) don't even require the firearm to be discharged. For all the gun homicides in the US, many more lives are saved simply by the presence of guns. Don't get me wrong, I get just as pissed off every time a gun is used in a manner like Buffalo, Uvalde, Florida, etc. but don't take away the tool whose presence has the greatest single effective in stopping someone in their tracks simply because of a few bad actors.

"There are not many people in this world who won't take a pause when a gun is pointed at them and many defensive gun uses in the US (of which the estimates range from 300,000 to upwards of 3,000,000) don't even require the firearm to be discharged."

The vast majority, otherwise we'd have some truly amazing gun injury and death statistics. From memory of some of the survey results, the first by a gun control group which figured 1 million uses but didn't check for more than one use a year, it was either around 85% or a bit over 90% where the gun being used in self-defense is not discharged, the credible threat is enough. Even more without anyone getting hit, or hit badly.

If you support drug legalization for responsible users, we're on the same page.

That's what the libertarians have been about for forever. Democrats: hypocrites. Republicans: hypocrites. Libertarians: you can be a trans, pot-smoking, gun enthusiast. We don't care.

People who follow the label affinities are PITAs. I'm not a libertarian, too much belief in the need for people to recognize obligations as well as rights. All the approaches have some positions of merit and many of BS.

> My belief is that the more we restrict access to guns, the stronger the black market for them. This has proven true with alcohol (Prohibition) and drugs, and I believe, without knowing it to be a fact of course, that it will prove true with guns.

On the political side, it also consistently hands Republicans an easy, winning wedge issue. Gun Rights is a "single-issue voter lightning rod" in the USA. There are lots of people whose political views are left or center-left (on the USA's weird scale of course), yet who hold their nose every year and grudgingly vote (R) simply Because Guns. I've always thought one of the best things the Democrat party could do to improve their chances nationally is to just give up on their gun control stance. That single action would probably boost them 10-20% in many rural/hunting areas that are otherwise democrat-leaning.

So let's just say Dems do that... how do you stop school and other public space shootings?

Since the Democrats are entirely willing to violate white line Constitutional language, why limit it to the Second Amendment? Enforce with extremely severe penalties a complete media blackout on the name and sufficient biographical details of such shooters. The lack of a notoriety payoff will address quite a few.

Reverse or as so many are now saying ignore the judicial rulings that removed force as a tool in dealing with the mentally ill. [Redacted], and I think the above harsh and Un-American actions would all but eliminate the problem, and not for example, not that's it's going to be impossible, simply shift the tool of choice to the much more dangerous one of arson.

You say this, but right this very moment a bill with more gun control is being whisked through the Congress with the support of 14 Senators, who've already got it past cloture.

Of course, one interpretation is that they don't want to win back the Congress this year.

As for the Democrats, they've been anti-gun too long, too hard for anyone in " rural/hunting areas" which they've also made clear they want to outright destroy if they haven't already for them to try to make a switch for the foreseeable future.

Those of us who are a bit old remember how 7 years of election disasters from the Republicans taking back the Congress in 1994 to Al Gore in 2020 (and no matter what you think about Florida, that the election was even close should tell you something) resulted in a truce that only lasted until Obama's reelection. The party would have to fundamentally transform itself and reverse 157 years of policy (Dred Scott, which Thomas quoted in his decision, or you could start with post-Reconstruction).

Numerous states with significant rural populations and a lot of hunting activity have elected sitting Democrat senators. That includes Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, and West Virginia. Heck in Michigan the opening day of deer hunting season is practically a state holiday. Those senators tend to be fairly pragmatic about the issue and don't necessarily adhere to the party platform.

How about people who are crazy but have no access to guns on the black market?

Do you think unrestricted access is a solution just because gangs? Seems a bit dimwitted to me but that's subjective of course, I'd never ever have the desire to own a weapon, let alone shoot one. I have different hobbies, you know...

Also I understand the self defense stance, but why would anyone be able to own machine guns and weapons of mass destruction? It's beyond me. And not wanting to restrict crazy people from having this ability is starting to make me suspect gun proponents are a lil crazy themselves. They have and agree on no limits on what one can own. But when it comes to weed or prostitution or abortion they're the first ones to scream murder.

And people who legally and respectfully own guns don't have different hobbies? All they can possibly think about is going out a shooting?

Beyond that, clearly taking away guns doesn't stop violent crime. Domestic abuse is still a major issue even without guns. Knife, club, and acid attacks have taken the UK by storm. Robbery, rape, looting, arson, all things that can and in many cases are done without a firearm.

I don't think anyone has ever suggesting that gun control prevents all forms of violent crime. Rather that gun control prevents gun crime by virtue of not providing access to the guns with which to commit said crimes.

At the cost of otherwise disarming a much, much larger segment of the population who have never committed a crime with a firearm and are much better protected against crimes of many various types, including those with firearms.

No, at the cost of disarming everyone, including the population intent on committing a crime with a firearm.

That's a pretty big assumption, considering someone intent on committing a crime isn't exactly pre-disposed to follow the law in the first place and all you are really doing is disarming someone who does follow the law and placing them at a greater disadvantage.

I suspect harsher sentencing for possession of a gun during a crime is a deterrent, but I'm not invested enough in this conversation to try to find stats. I would also point out that in other countries with effective gun control - which is to say the rest of the civilized world - there isn't the expected rampage of gun crime your comments imply should be taking place due to gun laws only being effective against citizens but not potential criminals.

Harsher sentencing for violent crimes with a weapon already exist and I would love if they were applied more often. But that's a different discussion.

It's not about an expected rampage, of which I doubt there would be because we are not facing a rampage of gun crime as it is. On average in the US, of the approximately 35,000 gun related deaths every year (and considering an estimated 8 out of 10 Americans owns a firearms less than 0.01% of the population is killed in a firearm related death is another thing), on average 60% of that is suicide, not homicide. Roughly 14k. This doesn't even break the top 10 causes of death in the US and of the 805k deaths by other causes per the CDC [1] we're talking 2%. That's not exactly a rampage despite the voluminous amount of media attention this gets.

No, the point is that the volume of those killed by guns (even if you include suicides in that number) is miniscule compared to the potential of a firearm to stop a violent crime in process, even without the firearm being discharged. There is an estimated 300,000 to 3,000,000 defensive uses of firearms in the US. Even if you attribute all gun homicides (including suicide) to defensive firearms uses (which is absolutely not the case), death by firearms would be a mere 12% of even the smallest estimated number. This is why you allow firearms with as minimal restrictions as possible, because the number of people who will properly use them vastly dwarfs the number of people who will misuse them.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db427-tables.pdf#4

Self defense is okay, especially in the rural parts where police has a harder time covering the area. But why do they need machine guns for or war weapons? Just because they can it seems, it is really not very useful otherwise.

And don't even get me started on the second amendment. The way the constitutions' interpretation is stretched out nowadays borders insanity.

I don't think any pro-gun people have issues with stopping criminal and the mental ill from getting guns.

The thing is, we have laws on the books now that would do a pretty good job. However, they aren't enforced at all or only enforced during egregious cases.

Why not start enforcing the laws we have now and see how that goes before creating new laws for the people who never broke the existing ones?

Not the ones who legally own 34 weapons. I've seen some folks whose main hobby is collecting and shooting weapons. Sure, not everyone has that obsession with weapons but my point was different. The choice of collecting weapons when one or two handguns would be sufficient for self defense implies quite a bit about who we talking about: adult men whose maturity got stunted in the stage of boyhood.

I'm not seeing why having a gun hobby is bad. I am not sure you realize the benefits of doing a precision activity like this when you, by your own admission, have never utilized nor have been inclined to utilize a firearm. Properly utilizing and training with a firearm builds focus, mental acuity, strength, and a sense of responsibility. It can also be argued that it destroys a certain bit of naive innocence as well when you come to the realization of what exactly you are handling and what exactly you are on the other end of should you be attacked by someone with a firearm.

The Second Amendment doesn't cover weapons of mass destruction, so that's a total strawman argument. The intent of the authors was to cover individual weapons, of the type that a light infantry soldier might carry. (Although up through about the Civil War, it was relatively common for private citizens to own artillery and there were no licenses or permits required.)

What is a weapon of mass destruction? How does that get defined?

Beyond that, I don't believe the Second Amendment was ever meant to be framed in that manner. The idea was that firearms helped keep the government from ruling over it's population by physical force rather than the consent of the governed. This, in simplest terms, would mean that what the government was allowed to use for force, so too should its citizens, thus carrying on the whole idea of checks and balances.

"Although up through about the Civil War, it was relatively common for private citizens to own artillery and there were no licenses or permits required."

This was implicitly acknowledged in the Constitution's provisions for issuing letters of marque and reprisal.

A general point to make: widespread private ownership of weapons was so accepted, was in fact a key to our winning the Revolutionary War just a few years earlier, that the Second Amendment just acknowledges the fact and enforces it on everyone because the Anti-Federalists were wiser than the Federalists, they knew some hard red lines had to be drawn limiting the power of the new central government being created because any claims it would be self-limited were ludicrous. As we saw almost immediately, then through tyrants like Lincoln and FDR; Stalin wasn't the only national leader in the 1930s to deliberately starve people.

Weapon of mass destruction is clearly defined in 18 USC § 2332a(c)(2). I agree that the individual right to keep and bear arms is an important component of our Constitutional system of checks and balances, but weapons of mass destruction have never been considered "arms" in that context.

18 USC § 2332a(c)(2) and it's companion in the definition of "Weapon of Mass Destruction" of 18 USC § 921 defines a WMD firearm as:

(3)The term “firearm” means (A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; (B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon; (C) any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; or (D) any destructive device.

This is basically any firearm. By this definition, any firearm not considered an antique is considered a weapon on mass destruction, which is clearly completely unworkable when considering allowing firearms for not just self-defense in the terms of attack but to the original reasoning of the second amendment which was to provide a check against a government ruling over its populace by force by allowing individuals to possess that same force.

Unfortunately, it's a fairly ambiguously-worded amendment. The authors aren't around to explain their rationale.

Not only is "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" about the least unambiguous and far reaching language in the entire Constitution and its amendments, except for those who never learned about the concept of subordinate clauses, the authors were around for others and themselves to explain their rationales and the historical context (which per an expanded version of the SCOTUSBlog article goes back to the 12th Century).

You could try reading the decision, or Heller, but the go-to foundational book has long been That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right by Stephen P. Halbrook.

Don't cherry-pick phrases. The text is: > A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Our formal militia is vastly better regulated than the population bearing arms.

It's true for all laws, and yet we write plenty of laws. Like pestilent microbes or pieces of space junk, once there's enough of them out there it's hard to navigate and easy to catch damage for a long time. For guns in working order, even completely freezing all manufacture would leave lots of rapid semi-autos out there for a century or more. Same for the ammo.

Horse and barn door. No vaccine for this like there is for smallpox or polio, though, you can't fix criminal or stupid.

What is your definition of a rapid semi-auto? This is certainly not a term used by the majority of gun owners/manufacturers. EDIT: A semi-automatic firearm is defined by that which fires a single bullet per pull of the trigger and then automatically reloads a round for the next pull of a trigger. There really is no "rapid" to it because this kind of reloading is either a do or do not.

There was a really good writeup posted on HN a couple of weeks back, I need to locate the link. The gist was that there is a combination of factors for receiver and magazine that define the assault factors of the rifle, and anti-gun people always get pwned by being steered to minor and irrelevant differences between the military and civilian versions, and trying to define gun instead of platform. The author is a gun owner and enthusiast, but not a Wayne LaPierre.

> It's true for all laws, and yet we write plenty of laws.

True, but doesn't mean they're effective. I've long held that before enacting a new law, lawmakers should be required to remove an existing ineffective, unneeded, or outdated law, even if it's in a different area.

Someone below mentioned "unrestricted access to guns". I don't have a problem with registering a gun, or even background checks, though since we have that now, it doesn't seem to be very effective.

People get outraged when horrible things happen, as they should. They want to do something to try to prevent it from happening again, which is also good. But bad things do happen and will continue to happen, and we need to accept this as part of life that we can't control.

We also need to make sure we're addressing the real problem when looking for solutions. I just read this article related to the Uvalde shooting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa...

I'm not taking up for the shooter, but was interested in his background.

a) lived with his mom who was a drug addict

b) was 18 and bought the guns when he turned 18. So I'm guessing he had planned this for a while

c) was never in trouble with the law, so not sure how gun laws would have prevented anything

d) had only 1 friend who moved away

e) was bullied since middle school for stuttering, so if he was 11 then, that's 7 years of bullying and harassment

f) was later bullied and called a fag (I guess, article didn't specify) for wearing eyeliner to school

Who among us could endure 7 years of bullying, 5 days a week, without even 1 friend or a decent parent? And maybe also wrestling with being gay? The human spirit does have limits...

Well, that's where access to guns comes in. Suppose every bullied kid had several at their disposal? Maybe that would reduce bullying. I'm very sympathetic to the bullied, we lose a lot of human capital to bullying.

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