Iconic gun-makers gave sensitive customer information to political operatives
propublica.org
propublica.org
> At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
It is two different things, and both are bad (but one is way worse).
I'm not sure if that counts by your measure, but it involves the government directly.
I live in a country (Ireland) which only recently generally legalised abortion; before that people would normally have gone to the UK. If there had been any suggestion of the government prosecuting people who did that, never mind trying to force UK hospitals to divulge records, well... people wouldn't have put up with that. The situation as it was only continued so long because it was easy to ignore; ~no-one was ever actually prosecuted under the law, and the UK was enough of a safety valve that the human cost of the law was largely masked.
Like, doing things like this seems like a very good way to stoke national outrage and be forced to legalise it.
(At least they say they they consider it murder. The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it.)
Enough people in power believe it:
At least one woman (Marshae Jones) was put in jail for getting shot while pregnant, while the shooter was let free. The woman was accused of not doing more to protect the "unborn baby".
At least one woman (Brittney Poolaw) has been sentenced for having a miscarriage, and others have been arrested and charges brought against them.
> Pregnancy advocates and others on social media are expressing outrage after a 21-year-old Oklahoma woman was convicted of first-degree manslaughter earlier this month for having a miscarriage, which the prosecutor blamed on her alleged use of methamphetamine.[1]
I would argue she should be prosecuted (assuming the drug use can be proved) even if abortion in that state were legal right up until birth. This isn't a miscarriage due to natural causes or some kind of accident but due to drug use. Is the argument that the mother has absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of the fetus?
[1] https://archive.is/QHV3F#selection-1145.0-1145.260
Edit: It seems like the case hinges on the claim that the meth caused the miscarriage.
> Prosecutors argued that the miscarriage Poolaw suffered was from her use of methamphetamine. An autopsy of the fetus showed it had tested positive for methamphetamine, the Associated Press reported, but there was no evidence her use of the substance is what caused the miscarriage. The autopsy showed the miscarriage could have been caused by a congenital abnormality and placental abruption, when the placenta detaches from the womb, the AP said.
She's a woman, belongs to a minority race, and a criminal. Yet I still believe she should have the same human rights as a white Christian man.
First, in 2020 abortion was not a crime since it is pre-Dobbs.
Second, they don't know why she miscarried. They only assumed (as you've noted).
They simply got creative in the meth charges in an effort to push the "unborn baby" narrative over a "fetus". The fact that the woman was a minority and a criminal simply made it easier.
> Is the argument that the mother has absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of the fetus?
Not really, when it results in a miscarriage. There's just too many reasons that miscarriage can happen, and no real reason to prove why to anything resembling reasonable doubt. If the child had lived to be born and shown problems with meth during pregnancy, they would have been taken from the mother and put in the foster system.
But this argument also applies to the "You're killing Grandma!" crowd. Very few truly believe that refusing to take a vaccine is a murderous act, and that's why the most they do about it is whine online.
In both cases you have people using very hyperbolic rhetoric to support a position they don't actually feel so strongly about. Very typical of American politics.
But, the moment you start interacting with society at large, you have to follow that society's laws. Laws which have always included things like quarantining and mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
See, as one example, the 1920 response to the Spanish Flu epidemic.
Is it? I often frame abortion as murder, but even then this goes a little far. If someone travels internationally to Slovenia (or Thailand, whereever), and they rob a bank there then it is more than a bit absurd for my Attorney General to try to prosecute that bank robbery from here in Minnesota. Even if the Slovenian government declines to prosecute and people are generally worried about justice being denied... it just can't happen from here. It doesn't work.
Even that's not the end of it. A prosecutor who attempted it is merely wasting time and money, and maybe there's more than enough time (and though we shouldn't be wasteful, we're a rich country... wasting money's not as big of a deal as we might want it to be). But if it were more than a waste of time and money, if it undermined some principle or another that we should hold dear, then it becomes a big problem. General medical privacy is maybe one of those. How are we supposed to believe that it would only turn up abortion records? Maybe they're trawling for medical info so my insurance can be dropped even though my cancer's in remission.
> The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it.
How are they supposed to act? Like, is there a particular set of behaviors that would preserve your belief in their sincerity and their sanity? As far as they're concerned, they've lived through a half-century holocaust of baby murder, but the abortion clinic bomber was a terrorist and suggesting otherwise should have their names put on a watchlist. They're impotent to fix the greatest moral failing of their lifetime, ridiculed for even speaking out against it, and don't know how to pass their values on to their own offspring successfully.
I suspect that, given their need to cope with something that is intolerable-yet-must-be-tolerated, they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.
And what if I have reason to believe that those 350 women die because, more often than not, pro-abortionists hold them hostage and then whine "it's not our fault, you wouldn't let us deal with the ectopic pregnancy! only legalized partial-birth abortions could've saved their lives!!!" ?
It's difficult to even take your argument, as presented in the comment above, seriously. Are you just this bad at arguing, or do you just parrot the catchphrases without even thinking about them? Maybe you want me to feel bad about those 350 women? If I cry properly while singing the praises of their brave sacrifice, that's all you were asking for all along, and you'll stop supporting infant massacres? Is it that you've sort of ballparked how much of each occur, and you think the numbers are swapped? Only 350 fetuses aborted per year, but nearly half a million women? Maybe it's not even that one-sided, there's numerical parity?
So even if you consider the flushing of an embryo or fetus to be murder, the abortion bans have not (and likely will not) help the numbers.
Strange claim. Don't bother to try to substantiate it... just toss out some hypothesis of the mechanism. You should understand though, that someone like myself wouldn't believe you on that and definitely not without something to back it up. And that if someone like me did end up believing you, it wouldn't change much... just get chalked up as "well, another strange sociological trend".
It's interesting how this narrative has developed only in the past 40 years or so. At the time of Roe vs. Wade, the Catholic Church did not view a person as being alive until the first breath (a view held today by the Jewish Faith - I've heard they consider the truncated care available to women as an affront to their faith). It wasn't until around Regan that the view really started to change as stopping abortion became a mainstay of the Republican party's policies.
This incorporation into their policies and values is mostly what drove the change in view - going from "it's not a person until it's born" to "fetal personhood". Then after the Dobbs decision and in the leadup to this election, that the phrase murder started being thrown around.
Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder? It's because federal law (which trumps state law) only considers a person as someone who is born.
> they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.
I'd argue that they act quite sincere, and often violently so. Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.
I'm an atheist. All I know is biology. It's made of cells, it metabolizes, excretes, grows, etc. It's alive. I can run a genetics test on it, it will return results that it's human. I know physiology well enough to be certain women do not regularly have four kidneys. The presence of a second pair indicates a second person. Or that women don't have two noses, etc.
We might say, for instance, that religion is evolving (this isn't an absurd position from the standpoint of anthropology). Somehow, collectively, they've come to the realization that maybe their scriptures don't have all the detailed answers they need, and they're "stepping up" and trying to be moral. But this is the one time they shouldn't trust the science, I guess.
> Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder?
Because legally speaking, there are many different types of homicide that consider a dozen or more factors in the crime, and that even amongst the various kinds of manslaughter, society thinks some worse than others or not?
> Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.
Not really. The vast majority of it ends up being stuff the DA doesn't mind pleading down to misdemeanors, other than a few high profile cases over the decades (the Atlanta Olympics were 1996, so that's about the time frame of the bombings/arson, Tiller 10 years later, etc).
> Like, doing things like this seems like a very good way to stoke national outrage and be forced to legalise it.
That is absolutely happened. As soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned this stuff went on a lot of ballots and in every case the restrictions lost.
There are going to be a bunch of laws about it voted on in the election next Tuesday, as well as it being a very important thing in candidate races. We’ll see how it goes.
The right has pushed this for decades, it was a popular issue for them. As soon as they finally got their way it appears to have backfired big time and galvanized a ton of people against them.
Also worth looking at is how these state constitutional amendments have been attacked before they were even up for vote, and how many plans are in place to attack the results.
Even so, if the new president decides to, they can effectively destroy the ability to get an abortion anywhere in the US by using the Comstock Act; by enforcing a provision of the Comstock Act which prohibits the shipping of "... every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion."
All to prevent people from getting their say. Because it’s the “wrong” say.
They and their supporters want to punish people who have the audacity to be unlike them in dress, thought, and deed.
I'm deeply worried that the USA is headed towards a "dark valley" period, just like the Japanese in WW2.
I think the poll results have been skewed by their reliance on cold calling people, and those cold calls probably only really hit those who are 50+. I don't believe the Republican party has anywhere near the same kind of support from those under 50.
For monsters wearing human skin, the cruelty is the point.
And the biggest consumer of hormonal treatments as children (in the 99% range)? Cisgendered girls and boys who have no desire to transition.
And though you didn't mention it, let's do a quick aside on gender affirming surgery: Boys with gynocomastia get mastectomies while girls get breast enlargements to improve their perception of their bodies.
There are laws prohibiting drag shows which have been written so vaguely that they can be applied to trans people as well, especially those who do any kind of performance.
Next up are laws forcing trans individuals to use the bathroom assigned to them at birth. I'm very curious how they expect women to react to bearded, burly men entering their bathrooms, and how they expect men to react to women presenting individuals (actually I'm quite sure of how they'll react: they'll be SA'ed if not killed).
And then there's the bans on playing sports for Trans individuals - all 40 or so of them.
So no, they're not explicitly outlawed, yet. Just everything about them living their life is. Much like it was never illegal to be gay, they just outlawed sodomy.
What about hairplugs for balding men? Or cosmetic surgery for, say, gynecomastia? Is that restricted to cis men only in these places? Or facial cosmetic surgery, for that matter. There’s actually quite a bit of gender affirming care for cis men, when you think about it…
(I actually hadn’t realised that anywhere in the US had gone as far as banning gender-affirming care for adults; that’s bonkers.)
> There are laws prohibiting drag shows
Wait, wtf, seriously?
> The subpoena demanded the hospital system provide medications prescribed to children who reside in Texas, the children’s diagnosis, the number of Texas children in the hospital’s care and the name of Texas laboratories used to administer tests for those youth, [and] sworn written statements from doctors at Seattle Children’s who treated Texas children, describing the medications prescribed and information related to patients’ diagnoses.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/21/texas-attorney-gener...
So does he suggest that databases on advertisement/customer preferences, voters, ... be run by the govt?
All debatable but I'll argue the constitution never gave the govt the right to know who owns guns since the ratification of the 2nd amendment, the purpose of which is exactly to defend against unconstitutional govt acts. So per se, that means if it's legal to be tracked, it has to be done in private registries.
The manufacturers didn't compel buyers to provide this information with the thread of prison time, and perhaps more importantly, they didn't compel buyers to inform the manufacturer of every subsequent transfer.
For example, if a future government decided to round up all the guns and needed a database to find them, the fact the database is in a different building ain't going to stop them.
The fact that this particular database included data collected under false pretenses shouldn't preclude anyone from making a mailing list of gun owners.
But this is more bone-headed than sinister.
The government having any list of any kind of person is never good. Ever. The government already "has" a list of gun owners. 4473s are kept forever. If a gun store shuts down, the 4473s are shuttled to storage in the ATF's buildings/containers/whatever. They have, historically, used these for all kinds of questionably legal "enforcement" procedures.
However, since the 4473 list isn't entirely accurate - for example, gun transfers do not require a background check in many states, you could have destroyed the gun, lost it in a literal boating accident, etc there's plausible deniability. A government run list would certainly be designed to eliminate this - and that's a horrible, horrible thing for the 2nd. Presently the only "real list" is for NFA items. I'd imagine a government-run list would have the same privacy invading, civil rights abusing powers the NFA-owners list has.
A manufacturer on the other hand could be coerced, as "ghost gun" 80% lower manufacturers were, to narc on their customer base. However, there are legal avenues to at least slow this process down significantly. It's far better, if we have to choose, to let manufacturers have the data. They have historically been far better stewards of the bill of rights than the ATF ever has.
Their point is that all the hand wringing over privacy they use as the reason to prevent any kind of registration (whatever you think of it) seems very incongruous with giving away warranty information, which often they explicitly said they wouldn’t do, to whatever political cause they want.
It looks extremely hypocritical and in many cases violated a promise to the customers.
Yes the consequence of the government having a list instead of a lobbying group is very different.
The issue is the lobbying group shouldn’t have had it period.
Gun owners who fear a government-run registry should fear a privately-run one just as much, if not more.
Now that the government knows that this database exists, it seems like a partially-complete registry could be a lawsuit (and years of appeals) away.
The participants of this may have accidentally built their own Torment Nexus.
However the fact that they can now get it without having to sue for warranty information is certainly a new twist.
Of course they’d have to get it from a lobbying group, which wouldn’t exactly go over terribly well either.
However, if we presume that the data were of good enough quality and available to government, I believe that at least California would try to do something with it.
Are they saying that Joe can’t tell the county commission that I bought a banana?
This is all just stuff we learn. It’s basic freedom of speech.
Sure, if I paid Joe $2 to keep it secret because my wife thinks I’m allergic… that’s different.
Can you please elaborate on that?
Try to grow a boquet of cannibis indica.
You may just find armed men at your door.
As for cannabis, all you need to do is move to one of the more enlightened states that allow cultivation. Given time, I believe all states will recognize the benefits it brings.
Yes, that's what gun-owners have been saying for decades about gun sellers.
> Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people.
The assault rifle in question is an "AR-15 style rifle". I.e. not an assault rifle.
> Semi-automatic-only rifles like the Colt AR-15 are not assault rifles; they do not have select-fire capabilities.[1]
In conclusion, I don't know who this article is for. Gun owners and pro 2nd amendment readers will probably be put off by technical errors like this and the thinly veiled contempt for gun ownership. Many non-gun owners and anti-2nd amendment readers will probably think: "good, fuck em".
Personally I think it's valuable to have this information out there. Both for the folks whose privacy was violated, and for people who are concerned about how closely the gun industry works to coordinate its customer database with lobbying groups. (PS I own a gun and don't like anything about this news, from either of those perspectives.)
This part was unnecessary btw.
Please be mindful that this sort of talking down to people poisons conversation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
I'm a gun owner and I can overlook them using a term in a way that it is popularly used among laypeople, even if it is technically not correct [0]. Discarding the content of the article on that premise would just be abdicating my responsibility to think.
[0] I gotta say, though, who exactly gets to insist on the definition of a general term like assault rifle? Seems like another instance of useless gatekeeping. A distraction.
>The term "AR-15" is a Colt registered trademark which it uses only to refer to its line of semi-automatic rifles.
So, yeah, sure, it's not technically an automatic rifle, but if the manufacturer is going to call it a semi-automatic, I'm not going to fault the average joe for not getting it perfect. "Semi" is halfway there, or at least "is that thing to a degree", after all.
To be entirely honest, the whole semantics debate around "BuT iT'S nOt AuToMaTiC" misses the forest for the trees and shouldn't be given much space. As another person said, a distraction.
If this is something that you're genuinely asking me for my opinion on, then I'd ask you to re-read my comment, because you've missed my point entirely.
It's not a distraction. The government is always trying to reduce functionality of available firearms as well as increase costs. There is a huge difference between fully automatic weapons and semiauto. Nearly all guns on the civilian market are semiautomatic, aside from some antique designs, and full auto weapons manufactured prior to the NFA. I don't agree with the NFA's infringements on our 2A rights but I think a fair number of gun enthusiasts might agree with restricting full auto somehow. Semiauto is a big step down from that, and going away from semiauto is a HUGE step down from there.
The AR-15 has been vilified to an unfair extent. There is no particular feature about it that makes it more dangerous than other semiautomatic rifles that shoot ammunition in the same ballpark as far as caliber and velocity. Moreover, the whole point of having a weapon like that is for it to efficiently and accurately hit whatever you need it to hit. The only real way to protect your rights is to be adequately armed. The Founders knew that. The right solution to be secure is not to ban guns, it is to get more guns in more hands. Without a gun you will always be victim to someone who is bigger than you, groups of thugs, and any criminal who doesn't let the state dictate his choice of weapons.
As someone who lives in a society where firearm ownership is heavily regulated, I can tell you serious crime is not rampant, that I don't feel unprotected, and that I am confident very few criminals do have firearms, and that those criminals who do are very conscious about firearm usage and only employ them against similarly armed criminals.
As an added bonus, my kids don't need to go through active shooter drills at school.
It is a completely different cultural background, I understand. It's, however, always possible to change a culture, and that's something I always remind my American friends it can be done.
The classic gun-free society is the UK where even decorative knives or anything resembling an effective weapon will land you in prison. The place that sends people to jail for such things as witnessing a protest, or posting mean tweets online. Once you give up your guns, you have given up any hope of actually curtailing government power. The people who want to take our guns all have guns and professional armed security.
Another point to consider is, guns are only one possible weapon. In gun-free societies like China, they face mass stabbings instead. Then there's always someone willing to run people over with a car. Too bad the victims of those crimes did not have guns. They might have had a chance.
So in summary, I don't want gun-free culture. I want everyone but known violent criminals and mentally deficient individuals to be armed. The gun is the great equalizer, and it insures your freedom against all kinds of brutes. Without a gun, the average person doesn't have a chance against a typical criminal.
It is much easier to stop a stabber than someone armed with an assault rifle, and it’s much harder for the assailant to stab a dozen people.
Is there any other country in the world where there are more mass killings per inhabitant than the US?
You're wrong about this. A knife does not need to be reloaded and many knife wounds can be more deadly than gunshot wounds. A person with a knife can stab random people in the back and run off, probably indefinitely. If they decided to stab them all at once then they might have a bit of difficulty and have to do it in a confined space. But this does happen in China.
As for stopping someone with basically any gun, any other person could stop them with a gun. It doesn't matter if the guy with the gun is an elite soldier and the defender is a little old lady, so long as the lady has decent aim. Guns are only a problem because people scoff at their right and duty to defend themselves.
>Is there any other country in the world where there are more mass killings per inhabitant than the US?
So-called "mass shootings" are not the only violent crime you need to worry about. The definition is skewed to make the problem sound worse than it is, by including gang violence and gang wars in there. You need to consider violent crimes vs. violent crimes. And frankly, the agencies that report violent crime have a conflict of interest when it comes to that. You also don't get stats about violence prevented or mitigated because of guns, because it is not tracked.
I think there are other factors that go into violent crime prevalence beyond gun availability, that make it impossible to reach any meaningful conclusion about whether banning guns would lower crime overall. Guns were very common in the entire world until recently, and nobody was really concerned about mass shootings. Any perceived violence problem is really a cultural issue or a perception issue. Even if banning guns did lower crime somehow I would not be interested, any more than I would be interested in banning cars because someone might get run over or banning printing presses because they can print offensive words. Self-defense is a human right and we all need effective tools to defend ourselves from all enemies. Some amount of regulation seems to be a necessary evil, but a ban on guns is as preposterous to me as a ban on pointy sticks.
It absolutely is. It asks people to engage in a frivolous debate about semantics when, in reality, the issue is much larger and far more complex, with more intrinsically important and impactful aspects to it than that.