Hacker News Reader

This comes across a lot like you're saying that your personal feeling of safety for you and your family is worth more than the actual safety of innocent schoolchildren who are being mass murdered.

I am personally concerned that I may be the victim of genocide, and far more people have died from genocide perpetrated by governments than by school shootings. I’m not trying to be dense, I’m simply saying that history of demonstrated this. I’m also concerned that I will be the victim of violent crime and I’ve also had to defend myself from violent criminals in the past. Have you had any of these experiences? I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve ever feared for your life in this way? Call me selfish, but I personally don’t want to be hurt. Thank you for your response.

IF you are going to be the victim of genocide they will take away your ability to defend yourself first.

This of course plays into the fear US gun advocates have of any attempt to remove their gun rights. If it were to happen though, then maybe as a prepper type with a house and lands in the woods you'd stand a chance against an armed mob that came for you, but certainly not the government. If you're defending your sub-urban house (or even worse flat), I suspect that the gun you have for self defense would make very little difference to the final outcome, but might make you feel a bit better about it.

I have had a gun pointed at me, and I've been where guns have been fired in anger around me.

I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.

Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.

The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.

It seems you have been around violence but have concluded differently than I have.

I think that all rights are hypothetical until they are used. People in America have the right to free speech and assembly but depending on your perspective these rights are hypothetical for most people because they don’t use their speech or right to assembly very often or to the fullest extent. In some states, women have the right to have an abortion but many don’t use that right so hypothetically for them it doesn’t have any value. I think with the right to keep and bear arms it’s the same, for a good person defending themselves with a gun this hypothetical right becomes applied and has an immeasurable value to them. I don’t think we should discard any of our rights even if they are rarely used. I don’t think the risk of a genocide or civil war is infinitesimal, I think these sort of events happen often and are guaranteed over a long enough timeline. I think that people who are well armed would be better off in these situations and may even be the people who put something like a genocide to a stop.

You're misinterpreting what I said. I said that your ability to defend yourself and your family with a gun was hypothetical.

I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/us/mass-shootings-fast-facts

I understand your position, it is terrible that adults and children die by the hands of others. Genocides have happened all over the world and have led to tens of millions of people dying. These events aren’t hypothetical they’re historical but happen in big chunks rather than uniformly distributed and frequent but comparatively small events. I would suggest the statistics indicate that a person is likelier to die from a genocide than from a mass shooting by a factor of >100 and that small arms ownership and competence is more helpful rather than harmful since these tools can enable individuals to defend themselves against state actors or violent groups, or by their existence prevent groups with malicious intent from acting out on their genocidal or authoritarian desires. Something I agree with is the FBI’s assessment that people don’t commit crimes if they thinks it’s likely that they’ll be caught. I think that the collective individuals in our government (these United States of America) wouldn’t want to mandate concentration camps or a genocide because of the concentration of citizens with diverse mindsets who would provide feedback through resistance. There are of course other factors like recency bias that come into play.

You've talked about your feelings a lot, which is the point.

Guns make people feel safe.

They don't actually make you safer.

You're more likely to be killed by your own gun than someone else's.

Realistically, you have no hope of protecting yourself with a gun if you're surrounded by gangbangers with a bunch of guns all pointed at you.

Etc, etc...

The gun debate isn't a debate about facts, it never was. It's a debate about feelings, and scared people won't change their minds unless they stop being scared.

Nobody in America right now is trying to make people feel safe, not in an era where the President of the United States feels it is appropriate to personally attack... anyone for any perceived slight, in public, with verbal violence and in the case of anyone looking even vaguely hispanic, physical violence.

I get where you’re coming from, but I lived in Portland for years where the police were essentially suppressed by the district attorney Eric Schmidt (and other factors that were occurring during this time in Portland and in America). This led to violent criminals essentially controlling the city at night and which lead to unfortunate outcomes for my family. Simultaneously this came at a time where the previous president was threatening my job and livelihood with mandates and I was receiving emails from our national HR that we may lose our jobs if we did not comply. These two events did not make me feel safe for years, I do feel safer with the current president.

Mike Schmidt? I think Eric Schmidt was the CEO of Google.

Rhetorical: What does it say about America that a large portion of its citizens (assuming OPs feelings are not unique) fear being a victim of genocide? Can't say I've met anyone from any other "developed" nation who share the same dread by simply existing as part of their country.

In other words, the sum total of America's values have resulted in a citizenry that lives with existential dread. Maybe those values need a second look?

My thoughts on this is that genocide has been common outside of America in the last ~100 years and that Americans need to act differently than the rest of the world in an effort to keep it from happening here.

Did the gun actually make you safer when retrieving your car or did it just make you feel safer? Did having the gun actually solve any problem, or just increase the chances of someone dying over a parked car?

Aren't there other potential ways to fix society from your example of your stolen car other than "we should just arm everyone"? Shouldn't the answer be we should have police actually help these situations and we should do more to reduce the rates of people living lives where they're more likely to steal a car in the first place?

There aren't any other solutions that empower the individual. The problem is when the police are underfunded and don't show up, or the judiciary continually lets dangerous individuals out on bail. We should be able to rely on the system, but it's not hard to see why people want firearms when the system fails.

In my case, the criminals physically left because I had a firearm. That week the police response time was anywhere from three hours to three days. This was in Portland, Oregon and our car had been stolen three times before, my girlfriend‘s bike was also stolen and my car was broken into three times, my other car was totaled by a drunk driver without any repercussions. We left Portland shortly after meeting a British person who had been kidnapped and forced to withdraw money from ATMs.

I would love to live in a world where everybody has what they want but we don’t live in that world. That being said there is no excuse for somebody taking something that does not belong to them. I was deeply hurt by these experiences and forever changed in the way that I think and act. I learned that sometimes when I told people about the things that had happened to us, I felt that that person had sympathy for the criminals and no sympathy for me. I learned that it is a fact that police cannot be everywhere, they cannot react instantly, and even if they can react sometimes they won’t for political reasons. I still think of the time where I was sucker punched by some man on the street for no reason which is what initially lead me to purchase a firearm for self-defense. I can’t fix society, but I can protect myself and my loved ones.

> how will good people defend themselves against evil people

The problem is in people assuming that they are “good”. That’s hubris. The reality is that everyone is equally capable of evil—we’re just looking at taking guns out of the equation so that gun violence becomes highly unlikely.

>I’ve read about genocides, the millions of people dead in China, Russia, Germany, Poland, Africa and Gaza too, I’ve also seen rioting and violence firsthand in Los Angeles and Portland and I wonder how I can ensure that my girlfriend and I will be safe now and into the future. I have no solution except for responsible gun ownership.

No gun will save you during genocide if you are a target. Best case scenario you kill few attackers and die anyway.

An armed person won't stop a genocide, but an armed populace might.

Genocides are not committed solely by governments. An armed and divided populace is just as likely to commit a genocide as they are to stop one. Look at the Rwandan genocide. Look at the mass shootings we have here by white supremacists.

All it takes is an armed populace that stands by while “those people” (their neighbors) are killed by extremists (their other neighbors).