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Comment by WhyOhWhyQ | Hacker News Reader

Is the gun situation hopeless in America? As far as I can tell, we just need to reduce the quantity of guns. Somehow 20% of the country takes that idea as an existential threat, even though not doing so is a material threat to real people.

If it's actually a mental health crisis, then how do we solve that one? Especially with what the Republicans are doing right now?

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Because you have Republicmas idiotically saying "Guns don't kill people; people do" and then don't do anything about the people or the guns. Conservative gun owners simply accept that people must die by guns in order for them to feel safe and make us all more vulnerable because of their irrational fears. They're babies with weapons.

That's simplistic. Actually, to better understand the situation you must follow the money. Many 2nd Amendment supporters are reasonable, but unfortunately, over decades their casual support has been utilized by lobbyists whose goals do not necessarily align with many supporters. The challenge is to communicate that message in a way that reaches everyone.

We just need to reduce the number of guns. I've not met a 2nd amendment supporter who understands this basic idea. They are always convinced one of the following retorts should be the end of the conversation (they also proudly think you've never heard these cliched arguments):

- They have knife stabbings in China. (Yes. A gun is more lethal.)

- A bad guy can still get a gun. (Yes.)

- Hand guns are more dangerous than rifles. (This means let's reduce both.)

- The gun doesn't kill people. People kill people. (This means let's reduce how many people have guns.)

- Mass shootings aren't the majority of gun deaths. (Let's reduce the total gun deaths and mass shootings then.)

Come up with as many ridiculous retorts as you like. If you had reduced the total number of guns, most of the shootings could not have happened.

Don't you think the populace needs to be armed though? I think its a given that eventually the government will be intolerably corrupt and a revolution will be necessary. Nobody denies that less guns -> less shootings. The logic is that some amount of shootings are tolerable to preserve democracy, and that if our goal is to reduce mass shootings, social reforms intended to improve mental health are the correct choice.

Imagine you are in charge of a monkey enclosure. The monkeys sometimes go crazy and kill each other with rocks. You can:

A: Remove all rocks. Monkeys stay suicidally miserable but can't inflict harm as easily. Problem solved?

B: Mitigate conditions that make them suicidally miserable. Some say its impossible, but then again, just a generation ago the monkeys had rocks without frequent violence.

Why is it that only our country needs to be armed, but none of the others do? Do Germans need to be armed? Do Indians need to be armed? Maybe you could argue that Chinese people need to be armed, but every Chinese person I've met seems to like their government right now and is content with the levels of surveillance. Maybe arming the Uyghurs could have helped but somehow I doubt it.

All populations should be armed. The current democratic, liberal order in Europe is just a side effect of America's dominance, the same America that is the product of the revolution of a well armed population. Your counterpoint might be the U.K., which has arrested 12,000 people for social media posts recently.

The catch is, it only works with an enlightened, well educated population with philia and a sense of civic duty. Arming inner city Chicago has been a disaster.

That's tough to maintain that state, but we have to try, because if a population doesn't fit that description the country turns to shit and you won't want to live there. To disarm is to admit we can't be an enlightened country anymore and we won't try, and after that its just a matter of time until there is nothing special about America and its just another mediocre third world dump.

If a government were run by quakers, should the population require the same level of armament as if it were run by Attila? Perhaps by creating better governments we could reduce the need to arm populations.

I just don't see what arming citizens is going to do against a militaristic government.

Yes, because the idea is to establish an armed populace before society succumbs to tyranny, not in response to it. The central tenet is that even if a society is run by Quakers now, it won't always be, because in the absence of proper inputs societies tend to decay to their stable basal state which is despotism. When that happens, the population must be armed in order to revolt and restore a democratic system. I would even say its better to arm the populace while the government is still Quaker because that would establish the proper cultural mores surrounding gun ownership in an enlightened environment - e.g. knowing that gun ownership is a responsibility and right, connecting it with ideas of liberty and civic duty, viewing them as a last resort, learning about guns from your father and not your homie on the corner.

You need to have the population armed beforehand. Its not practical to try to dynamically adjust how armed the populace is in proportion to perceived governmental Attila-ness.

To your last point, an armed populace makes revolt feasible, and there is a spectrum here. The key is that the oligarchy will need to convince the army to stay on its side and punish the revolting populace. The more sacrifice and violence that is required, the harder it is to keep convincing them. Also, look at the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan: an armed, hostile populace is just much harder to control than an unarmed one. It dramatically increases the cost of every excursion from a military base, the number of soldiers required to subjugate an area, etc, and the grand lesson from those conflicts is that boots on the ground are still needed to control an area, and that technological solutions like drone strikes still don't scale well enough and aren't cleanly targeted enough to change that. Perhaps that will change in the future, but I actually suspect that the prevalence of consumer drones will maintain the power of the public to resist the military. Look at Ukraine and Russia; the dominant weapon system now is the consumer drone, eclipsing even artillery, which has democratizing implications for the future of the tug-of-war between societies and their governments.

Well it's been interesting talking to you. In good faith, I honestly cannot conceive of how arming the population prevents tyranny though. You give the example of Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably you're saying the tyranny was the US occupation? Weren't these groups armed not before, but as a result of first (I believe) soviet and then American occupations?

Are there examples in modern times of a stable society consisting of a heavily armed population such that as a result of this tyranny has been curbed? Americans are the most heavily armed population in the world and it seems that tyranny is measurably setting in right now. The stability seems like it was higher in the beginning of the 20th century too. The 60-70's and now are the most unstable periods I believe, and the number of guns has only increased. So I don't think the US would be a good example.

In good faith, I cannot see how arming civilians reduces tyranny in modern times, unless your model actually is Afghanistan and Iraq. In those cases it's not that all civilians are armed. There are armed groups. That's not a world I want to live in though, anyways.

Yes, the tyranny in Iraq was the US occupation, though I am merely using it as an example that an armed, civilian populace can resist military control, not commenting on the morality of the occupation.

FWIW, Iraq was already well armed before the occupation, and looting of state arsenals in the chaos of the invasion amplified this. Afghanistan was a similar situation but armed networks were already organized moreso before the US occupation.

I don't think there are examples in very modern times of an enlightened, armed populace revolting against tyranny. The most recent I can think of is the Irish war of independence. They had low gun ownership, but correctly recognized the attainment of arms as of utmost importance, and it was through arms that they obtained liberty. I also still think that the American revolution is a fair example because the fundamental dynamic is still relevant. The Algerian war of independence comes to mind as well, which was more recent, though they were neither enlightened nor well-armed at the outset. Generally an enlightened society will produce a democracy which will take centuries to decay to the point of warranting revolt, and we are still in the first generation of these.

To your point about the US, merely having an armed populace does not gradually move society away from tyranny. The mental model myself and the founding fathers have is that even in the case of an armed populace, democratic institutions eventually decay to the point that the government is corrupt, despotic and intolerable. Its just entropy, as happens to our bodies. The population then revolts, and installs a democratic government, which then starts to decay again, and the cycle repeats. The fact that America is moving in a bad direction is confirmation of this tendency to decay, and not in any way antithetical to my stance. Eventually the decay surpasses a threshold which triggers the guns to come into play and reset the system.

And its been interesting talking to you too.

This list is spot on, and the biggest fuel on the fire is the problem of huge financial incentives. I can assure you there are some supporters out there who do understand. Some who do not understand have certainly been fed talking points by entities who may or may not care about the intent of the 2nd Amendment exactly, but definitely do care about making money.

The thing I think about is that, as far as the two major parties are concerned, they both support denying Americans the right to bear arms, and they both support gun control. The difference is that one party won't admit to it, making any debate difficult or impossible.

On the flip side, I feel like the two parties see things differently: One party is mostly about prevention, while the other side is predominantly about punishment.

> If it's actually a mental health crisis,

That's the scapegoat. It's an easy scapegoat because it blames others. And others are easy to hate. They aren't us. "They" are others. Yes, mental health is an issue, but it's not so much higher than in other nations to explain the much higher rate. It's a scapegoat because it's easy to say, "Wow, no normal person would do that, so they must be crazy." That sounds reasonable if you don't think about it for a moment.

I think it's a scapegoat, but I want to give the scapegoaters a chance to show their asses, and I mean show whatever study they've got to see if there's anything there.

the guns don't even seem to work for their supposed primary purpose

uninvited and unwanted federal troops are roaming around cities against the wishes of state governors

so seems the US has the worst of both worlds: unqualified morons owning assault weapons, plus the tyranny

Since 1791, the right to be armed has been considered a fundamental human right in the US, on the same level as freedom of speech and religion. You're fighting an uphill battle by trying to argue we should take away people's fundamental human rights in the name of public safety. To many, it's essentially no different from if you were trying to argue we should take away people's rights to free speech because some people use that right to promote violence.

Whether you think that makes the gun situation "hopeless" depends on whether you think there are other ways to reduce violence without taking away the rights of law abiding citizens.

The more fundamental human right is the right to not be blasted by an angry teenager who's been reading crazy things on the internet. In the hierarchy of human rights, that once has precedence.

So we should take away people's rights to "read crazy things on the internet" then, right? Because the right to not be killed is more important.

Do you see the problem with that sort of thinking?

You can misread what I wrote and argue against all that strawman all day if you like.

You haven't even represented the true content of the 2nd amendment so there's nothing to talk about here. The 2nd amendment is about militias, not "give everyone and their toddler access to massive fire power at all times".

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Tell me where that says guns should be available to deranged person who wants one. Everyone should get a hand gun, a rifle, and a shotgun, and make it double.

I didn't misread, you're missing the point. I'm saying your argument for infringing on the second amendment is equally valid for infringing on the first. (Which is to say, not very valid at all.)

You did misread my post. My argument does not say that at all, and I cannot see how it possibly could. My argument is that reducing the number of guns would reduce the number of gun deaths.

That's simply not true. That's a very modern interpretation of the second amendment.

The /NRA/ lobbied for some of the first gun control laws in SanFran, because the Black Panthers were open carrying. Even in the days of the 'wild west' there were plenty of towns and cities with enforced gun control ordinances.

Just as we have anti-defamation laws despite freedom of speech being a constitutionally protected right, you can have gun control laws despite carrying guns being a constitutionally protected right. I don't think that makes what I said untrue. Such laws (in both cases) are kept on a very short leash, both from a legal and a cultural perspective.

Presumably these shootings are done with the guns of parents/friends? How else is it possible for a school kid to get access to firearms so easily?

I think the solution is to make it difficult for underage kids (U21's) to access guns so easily. And maybe start fostering some healthy habits and relationships by starting with the young.

In countries with rational gun laws the owner is held fully responsible for everything their guns do, until they declare it stolen/lost. And then an inquest is held to determine if the owner was negligent in allowing the firearm to be lost/stolen in the first place. Subsequently, guns are either kept on the person of the owner (in the case of a handgun), or they are locked away in a Proper Safe (not a filing cabinet that's painted black ffs).

>If it's actually a mental health crisis

If?

The institution you use to socialize your youth results in some attempting to murder their co-participants.

Even if you took away the guns so they couldn't follow-through, why are your schools fucking up child rearing so badly in the first place?

Okay how do you want to solve that? If it's by making the schools better I'm all for it. Why is it that the people who love guns vote to defund the schools though?

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