Hacker News Reader

Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

It's not 'trivially solvable' because a huge portion of the population will strongly resist the change you're advocating for. Social, political & cultural constraints are a real, serious thing- large-scale civil unrest is very very bad. The rest of the industrialized world didn't have more guns than citizens and a deep culture of gun ownership & resisting the government, hence why your analogy falls apart. You have to work within the social realities of every country, so incrementalism is basically the only thing that really works, as frustrating as that always is for more ideological types to hear

View on HN

How is "a huge portion of the population will strongly resist the change" (your words) any different from "you don't want it solved" (mine) except that you're projecting the opinion onto someone else?

I understand and agree with the rest of your point (even if you're needlessly and insultingly calling me "ideological" when I think my desires are entirely practical ones). But that's still not the same thing as saying that "there is no solution" or that the problem is "unsolvable". Doing that is making an excuse.

If you are willing to tolerate people being hurt and killed by stray gunfire, then just admit that you are willing to tolerate it and unwilling to see it solved.

>> If you are willing to tolerate people being hurt and killed by stray gunfire.

This is implicitly baked into the 2nd-amendment cause. It's the primary reason this is such a hot-button political issue.

Nothing comes for free. Every benefit has a cost. In the case of guns some part of the population belive (strongly) that the benefits outweigh the costs. The rest (strongly) believe the opposite.

The benefit of gun ownership is the idea that the citizenry can overthrow a future hypothetical tyrannical government [1]. The cost is the many lives lost in the real world now.

While it may be impossible to say, the phrase "if a few children must die to protect our way-of-life, then that's a price worth paying" springs to mind.

[1] the actual efficacy of such a resistance may be questionable (it didn't help the confederacy for example) that's not really the point. The argument is that merely the threat of such an uprising prevents the tyrannical govt from forming in the first place.

Of course the argument may be nonsense. New Zealand has survived tyrany with little to no gun ownership, whereas tyrany in places with high ownership, like say Iraq, is not uncommon - which suggests there are other factors in play.

But the quality of the argument is not material. The fact is that a significant number of people believe that guns are important, and that the cost of guns is worth paying.

Ultimately that is the problem that is "not solvable".

Seems to me that many (most?) successful overthrowing of tyrannical governments have been conducted through mostly peaceful means. Where armed insurrection has taken place the result has been a long bloody revolution and in the rare cases it has succeeded the replacement government has many of the same faults as the one it replaced.

Don't get me wrong, there have been cases where armed revolution has been successful, but in most cases, it's been average people getting out into the streets and saying enough that has made the big difference.

There are not many governments that can continue when the majority of the people are actively protesting against it.

Funny, the same people that talk about needing guns to protect them from a tyrannical government get real shy about actually using those guns against a government they claim to be tyrannical. I'm tired of defending a "right" to protect from "tyranny" when everything seems to come down to a "Not true tyranny (yet)" fallacy.

More importantly, women in the US are literally dying due to tyrannical oppression from their government. Where are the people with guns to fight said government?

Surely if you believe it's trivially solvable and you haven't solved it, that is evidence that you either do not desire to solve it or that it is not trivial to solve.

Like, if you think it's trivially solvable then just solve it trivially and we can all move on.

The problem of falling projectiles from celebratory gunfire is trivially solvable insofar as the solution to the problem is simply to not fire the guns. So in that regard, it is a trivial solution.

The practical problem is that despite risks, people choose to be stupid. I think even an uneducated person knows that a bullet fired into the air will eventually return to the ground.

The social reality is that humans oddly seem obsessed with doing things which are clearly detrimental to themselves or others, in the short or long term. This part of the problem is not at all trivial to solve (I doubt it can be solved).

It is trivially solvable in principle, not in practice. Political constraints are as real as technical constraints, and you cannot make sense of and intelligently affect the world without understanding that. Similarly, political constraints do not simply issue from the stupidity of the people who stand in your way. That is political philistinism.

If fellow gun owners considered idiots shooting guns into the air to be the actual threat they are, it should solve itself. These gun owners have no problem flagging strange black people protesting in front of their houses, why do they have such a problem keeping their friends from being idiots with lethal weapons?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com