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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

Generally speaking weapons are a problem on boats. Many countries will require you to have a permit for it, which can be problematic to obtain. At the very least you have to declare it, which probably also means handing it over to the harbor authorities. Which means you don't have it when you would be most at risk and most need it.

Second, say you solve the above and decide to deploy the gun. You don't have a lot of time, and you don't know if the approaching boat is a pirate or a local fisherman who wants to sell you a fish. Make the wrong call, and bad things happen.

Say you solved the permit/registration issue by hiding the gun and then you deploy the gun. Bad things happen. Ok, it might have been justified and might have saved your life, but you are still probably going to jail for not declaring the weapon.

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Do you still generally need a permit if the "weapon" is part of the boat — for example, a harpoon gun mounted on a swivel — rather than something you can pick up and carry?

(My thinking being: pirates generally use speedboats, and a harpoon gun is plenty good at shooting holes in fiberglass and/or destroying outboard motors; and so pirates wouldn't want to get near your boat if you had one. But this sort of setup is not really useful for shooting at people — especially people less than 50ft away from the boat, which puts them in a "blind spot" for aiming, and especially not people who have already boarded — and so it would be irrelevant when docked.)

Maybe a water cannon that's big enough to create issues for typical pirate boats? I don't know what the cost is, but if the pirate boats are smallish, you have essentially unlimited ammo.

Large merchant ships do use water cannons for repelling small pirate boats. But that wouldn't really be practical to mount on a typical private yacht. They're just too bulky and heavy.

It depends where you go. In many places, you’ll need a firearm license and a lot of marinas/harbours won’t allow even licensed firearms.

Nothing like popping deck canisters of carfanyl to diperse a cloud of sweet sweet dreams. "It's for the sharks"

> carfanyl

What is that? Brave Search showed results for Carvana, and I clicked "show me reaults for carfanyl," and it then showed me results for Carvana and Carnival.

Google Search just shows your comment.

He meant carfentanil

A flare gun is common emergency equipment for a boat and could easily be repurposed if the occasion called for it

Flare guns are considered firearms in many countries, which is why flare guns are nearly completely obsolete for international sailing. They're also much less visible than equivalent handheld flares.

While there are USCG-compliant flare guns, you also cannot satisfy SOLAS requirements with a flare gun. You need to carry (depending on voyage and vessel) handheld distress, collision avoidance, and/or paraflares.

> Say you solved the permit/registration issue by hiding the gun and then you deploy the gun. Bad things happen. Ok, it might have been justified and might have saved your life, but you are still probably going to jail for not declaring the weapon.

Is your argument that death is preferable to jail?

you are right that I didn't phrase it well, but no.

My argument is that a method of defense that carries a jail sentence if it succeeds is suboptimal.

> say you solve the above and decide to deploy the gun.

We're talking about a handgun not a artillery peice, "deployment" is taking it out of a biometric gun safe, 5 seconds max. Also you wouldn't open fire on someone just beacuse they are near your boat.

ok. So you are on your boat. Small craft with three people is rapidly approaching on a direct course. You are nervous so you grab the gun (probably more than 5 seconds because you are out on deck and the biometric safe is fixed in the cabin, but I'll give you a pass on that).

Where do you aim the gun? At them? At the deck?

They see you are holding a gun, get a different look on their face, and one starts to reach under the seat.

What do you do?

Remember you are in a foreign country and don't speak the language, don't know the customs, cannot read the body language, ...

I would shoot a warning shot into the air. But maybe at that distance it wouldn’t be clear enough and that’d just escalate the situation..

It would be very bad if it were to come back down onto you, or someone else.

> Where do you aim the gun? At them? At the deck?

Nothing. You don't aim a firearm at anything you don't want to destroy. Until they take action like attempting to board the vessel, you don't even want them to know you have it. Keep it concealed until you need it.

In this situation the first thing you want to reach for is the radio. The gun is more for situations where you would be below deck sleeping and hear someone kicking in the door. Going up against a fully armed team of men isn't possible as a single person with small arms, small arms are useful for one or two burglars breaking into boats on the slip though.

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