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Comment by b0ringdeveloper | Hacker News Reader

Would you say that some car deaths are OK in service of transportation or that we should lower the speed limit until there are 0 deaths from vehicle accidents?

Tradeoffs between rights and safety are always made. I interpret "some gun deaths are ok" as to mean that they are inherently dangerous, and that seeking 0 accidental deaths is too high of a standard for something to be allowed. And we don't hold other parts of daily life to this standard, like vehicles or medicine. If you want to get into degrees, that's fine, but a blanket shutdown on the sentence doesn't do that.

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Transportation is required for daily life for almost all Americans. Gun ownership isn’t.

If it were upto me, we wouldn’t have such a car dependent culture. It is absolutely possible to invest in public transportation/multimodal transport and reduce this number significantly.

They certainly are, police cause gun deaths all the time in service of maintaining law and order.

But to middle class snobs who think they're morally above it all, such dirtiness is a reality they can wave away with a dismissive comment of superiority, safe from all that messiness, in their nice suburb homes.

So long as they intentionally ignore these lower class facts that some wrongdoers exist who can literally only be stopped by deadly force, they can continue to put their chins up and lament the inferior-to-them simpletons who think guns have to be a thing, in between taking long savouring sniffs of their excrement after every bathroom visit.

Speaking as an amoral low-class snob who grew up in Detroit, the prevalence of concealed carry didn't make me feel any safer than I felt in Windsor. Lot more gunfire at night on the stars-and-stripes side of the river too, which always struck me as rude when people are trying to sleep.

And why exactly do police need to have guns on them at all times? Right, because each citizen they meet has a high chance of having one. In contrast, UK police don't carry guns. Let that fact sink in.

I'm not surprised. The UK police prefer to arrest people for mean tweets, and let the knife criminals run around Scot-free. Perhaps if they had guns they'd do their jobs properly (joke - they still wouldn't).

Police worldwide, where guns are usually illegal, are usually armed.

There are many countries on Earth that don't need every citizen to have easy access to military hardware to protect them from the underclass.

> that we should lower the speed limit until there are 0 deaths from vehicle accidents

We totally should. I mean it isn't even controversial idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero . If we start with "all traffic related deaths are excessive" then trying to get rid of them in any way possible is only natural. Shame that 2nd amendment fans will be against any requirements for gun owners, event if they are similar to European commercial drivers tests.

Psychological test before buying a gun? What a heresy.

You've missed the parent's point. Society routinely accepts some level of risk, even when it leads to deaths, in exchange for other values. For example, dogs kill about 43 people annually in the U.S., yet we still allow them as pets. Electricity causes over 1,000 deaths a year, yet we don’t ban it. Kirk's position was simply that gun deaths are an acceptable price for the right to own guns - a fairly mainstream view in the US.

What do we get out of guns that would justify all those deaths, exactly?

You can keep poor people in more desperate circumstances, and fantasise about how you and your militia will resist a tyrannical federal government and restore the country.

Hunting, entertainment, tyranny prevention and respect of the constitution.

> tyranny prevention and respect of the constitution.

Haha, sure. One, the tyrannical government is taking roots day by day and no one does shit. Two, even in this fantasy world where half the people wasn't on board with the destruction of our democracy, if the people as a whole were to take arms, they'd be going after a professional army whose budget is many orders of magnitude higher than this citizens militia's.

> they'd be going after a professional army whose budget is many orders of magnitude higher than this citizens militia's

History shows that an underfunded militia can still tie down or even outlast the U.S. military in a guerrilla context - Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are all examples.

To that I would say that the relationship between vehicle speeds and deaths is not linear. Lowering speeds (via infrastructure, not limits) in cities to 20mph / 30km/h would probably cut deaths by 80% without affecting average travel times much.

It is a great analogy though, in both cases the issue comes down to ease of access to deadly weapons capable of killing a lot of people in a short time period. I remain ever surprised that we think the average person is qualified to handle such weapons, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

If I say yes, are we going to start building high speed rail?

People are hit by trains all the time.

Approximately zero deaths from road dangers is a valid goal, without having to pretend it's impossible.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

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