Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamhock666 | Hacker News Reader

> Slavery was only ended by violence

I don't think this is quite true, it may have ended it faster, but I don't think it would still exist today if the civil war had not happened. Most other countries ended slavery without a violent civil war, especially if you think about the way technology vastly outweighed the usefulness of having slaves.

And then when Charlie Kirk says "Some deaths were worth it...", he is talking about accidents and abuses of guns by shooters. He doesn't mean that violence is the answer to politics, it would be great if nobody died from mass shootings. But he is saying that having the right to bear arms to defend yourself is preferable to the alternative where you have no right to do that.

View on HN

He doesn't say that. You're editorializing on his behalf.

Here's the full quote. He's fully aware of violence cause by mental illness and domestic terrorism.

>> You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

>> So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?

it's such an insane american belief that the answer to safety is not: reduce gun amounts, reduce what guns people can buy, improve mental health counseling, improve healthcare, improve quality of life through cheaper housing and well-paying jobs, but instead the copout which doesn't even work--adding armed police outside of every school.

uvalde called, it doesn't work. and the rest of the world looks on in shame at this exceptionally american and exceptionally cruel system.

To be fair, it wasn't just Uvalde.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Scot_Peterson

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parkland-shooting-verdi...

We assume that the police will come to the rescue for all situations, but the fact is, they're human too.

This is typically different than the pro-gun mantra of "The best defense from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

He was clearly a good guy. But he didn't want to die.

GP reads to me like a fair summary of a natural, charitable reading of the quote.

> > Slavery was only ended by violence

> I don't think this is quite true

Slavery could have been ended peacefully if the slavers allowed it.

[flagged]

Mods: You know this post doesn't actually advocate violence. So why are you flagging it down?

I understand if this is a sensitive time, that comparisons to the civil war may not be the most helpful.

However, if these are not helpful, I would hope we would not attempt to use these moments that we should be united in attempting to claim that slavery in the United States would have simply stopped. Historians today reject this, and historians like Eric Foner, Gavin Wright, James Oakes have all written books that provide evidence that slavery was expanding and evolving, and that a major cornerstone for nearly half of the country's economy was not going to disappear in 10, 20, or 100 years.

IRC was invented before the end of the South African apartheid - the United States was lucky to avoid such a terrible fate.

As an aside, it's not pleasant to see speculative conjecture about the inevitable end of slavery side-by-side with quotations from RFK, and feels counter to the goal of the pinned comment.

Thanks to the mod team for generally keeping this comment section civil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com