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Comment by gizmo385 | Hacker News Reader

> If the state of California legalized FAFO to include lethal force for self-defense, a vast majority of these problems would go away overnight.

I’m sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding but are you suggesting that we make it legal for you to just kill these people…?

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No. If you look over my comment history the last two years, you'll see I've advocated and argued against violence more than most here, despite it being unpopular most of the time.

What I'm suggesting that if people voluntarily makes a decision to put others in existential immediate danger, then the those whose lives are in immediate danger shouldn't have to pause, think, or call a lawyer before protecting themselves from an existentially dangerous threat.

If that means ending the life of the person that voluntarily made a very poor decision, that shouldn't be on the innocent person, nor should the innocent person have their life up-ended or put into financial ruin because the government failed and a person voluntarily decided to want to risk dying.

There is no distinction between voluntarily deciding to jumping out of an airplane with no parachute and voluntarily deciding to put others in existential immediate danger. This line of reasoning and justification stems from the same causality as laws against drunk driving.

It will be hundreds of years before political scientists and sociologists figure out how the state California managed to flip all this upside down.

The people complained about living on the streets of SF are generally doing and dealing drugs, not attacking random passerby. I don’t know what boogeymen this post is about, it’s completely orthogonal to the problems in downtown SF.

Edit: as usual, I regret opening much less participating in any politics-adjacent topic on HN.

As someone that was homeless in SF for about a month, spare me your enlightened bullshit. My position applies just as much to the homeless as you.

To say your experience living in sf has been very different than mine would be an understatement, so please educate me why given your experience you think this would improve the safety of the city.

If someone tries to rape or kill me, I am otherwise defenseless or have to just hope for the best.

This really isn't difficult to understand.

So you would not defend yourself in such mortal encounters because it hasn't been codified in law that you could or should?

Are you suggesting lethal force ("find out") should be the very first intervention at the suspicion of a threat ("fuck around")?

And if using lethal force were so liberalized, the city would assuredly be safer and there's no risk it would be more dangerous?

Would it be safer for everyone? Is it OK if it isn't?

It's not difficult to understand, but it isn't obvious that your ideas are good ones.

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