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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

Few people would be surprised if a car drove forward when on, in gear, and the gas pedal is depressed.

When a specific make/model has a nasty habit of driving through the sides of garages when off and no one is touching them, and eventually runs someone over and kills them? People get concerned.

Especially when the manufacturer knew this could (and was!) happening and insisted on gaslighting everyone about it for years.

That cars can be used to run people over (and sometimes are even designed to do so effectively!) doesn’t change that. Especially since most miles driven never run anyone over at all.

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I find the car = gun analogy so tired. A car's purpose is to transport, and sometimes it accidentally kills. A gun's purpose is to kill. People always say "it's a tool"... yeah, to kill. Anytime you have a device like that, unexpected killings can happen. People shoot themselves and other people accidentally all the time; not because it was not "used as intended", but because it's a killing device.

I find this argument tired and poorly thought out. As a hunter there are many times kill is my goal. I also use my guns for target practice where kill is not the goal. Just because a gun's purpose is to kill does not mean it has to kill anything, or that car drivers should get off for their killing. A death is a death, it needs to be intentional killing only with either a gun or a car.

Most gun owners are very aware of how deadly their tool is, and are careful with it. Most car owners do not put anywhere near the safety thought into how they drive (it is rare to see someone maintain a 3 second following distance even though that along could save a lot of lives)

The P320 is a service pistol used by various US military branches, police forces and other people with an obvious need to carry a gun. The design is unsafe compared to other designs. People who's job requires carrying a gun are made less safe by this pistol. How would "guns are made to kill people, so who cares" justify an unsafe design?

Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?

That is why your post was flagged. A snarky, snide response like your detracts from meaningful discussion.

> Devices are supposed to work as intended, implied is WHEN intended. If you have a circular saw that randomly cuts when not asked, is a mature response "oh no our cutty thing cuts" ?

Yes, always assume that you will get cut and treat it as such.

> That is why your post was flagged.

I don't care. I knew it was gonna get downvoted to hell. I'm not trolling, I'm trying to point out that people shouldn't be surprised when something like this happens. That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally. In this case, it goes off unintentionally a little more often.

> That's why you're "never supposed to point a gun at something you don't want to shoot", right? The logic there is that it could always go off unintentionally.

I'm going to take you at your word that you're not trolling and treat this as a legitimate good faith question/argument.

The logic of that is emphatically not that guns randomly go off on their own so you do that for safety. They're not supposed to (obviously), and if you're looking at modern firearms it really only happens due to damage or massive design flaws (which would cover the 320).

The logic is that it's a Swiss cheese threat model that is designed to reduce the odds of a negligent discharge and reduce the damage should one happen (which in 99.99999% of cases is someone pulling the trigger unintentionally).

1. Treat all guns as though they are loaded - if you're ever handling a gun, the first thing you're supposed to do is visually and physically check the chamber and the magazine well that there is no magazine and an empty chamber.

2. Don't point the firearm at anything you don't want to destroy - even immediately after checking a firearm if you flag someone with it a lot of gun stores will kick you out. Even with no magazine and the slide locked back it's incredibly poor form to point it anywhere close to another person.

3. Be sure of your target and what's behind it - pretty self-explanatory and a borderline repeat of #2. In a self-defense type of scenario this also means "don't shoot at unidentified things."

4. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot - the only purpose of the trigger is to send a round downrange so there's zero reason to be messing with the trigger otherwise (one notable exception not really worth discussing here).

So it's really not "don't point the firearm at stuff you don't want to shoot" because guns occasionally go off on their own, magically, it's really "people make mistakes, the Swiss cheese model of accident causation is real, and this is one more thing to mitigate the impact of accidents when they inevitably happen."

All of those rules exist in order to prevent an unintended killing. They would not be necessary without a machine designed for killing. I don't know why this is so complicated. No gun present, no gunshot. Gun present, possible gunshot.

I'm not trolling. You can have all the "safety" protocols you want, but at the end of the day it still won't stop every unintended killing due to a killing machine.

Don't pretend. You are trolling.

The same thing can be said for circular saw. The intention is the important aspect regardless of the purpose of the device.

Stop being coy and immature.

If I had to guess I'd say less trolling and more "my chosen political faction doesn't like guns and therefore there is nothing any human being on earth could say that would make me think they're okay, or even morally neutral."

I agree with you.

The problem is people use these objective facts (none of which are in dispute so far as I know) to make completely asinine arguments like "just make some guns illegal" or "just take away everyone's guns." So that makes it very difficult to have level-headed discussions.

The problem in that case is that it kills unintentionally when it's used in a way that shouldn't end up in a discharge at all.

If you put your gun in your pants pocket and shoot your balls while running around it's on you, if you safely put your gun in a safe holster and it shoots your balls while your walking it's the gun's problem.

A nuke is a killing device, we never made one go boom unintentionally despite abusing some of them way past what's reasonable.

A car's primary purpose isn't to kill or maim humans. If you think handguns are made for anything else then you're fooling yourself.

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