Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

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> As far as this case goes, guns should only be used in self-defense when there's an immediate danger. Not punitively. This guy's life wasn't immediately being threatened and he deserves to have the book thrown at him.

I had agreed when I read your comment before I read the article. But after reading the article it feels like this is missing the mark. We're bumping up against the equivalent of gang stalking / stochastic terrorism here - someone being harassed through digital channels and put in a mental state where they're fearing for their life in the physical world.

A similar case of the phenomenon happened in NY a while back [0] with someone being killed for driving up to the wrong house at night, with the shooter presumably having been pumped full of general fearmongering by mass media. But the stark difference in that case it was the shooter's own media diet creating insular paranoia whereas here it was personally-targeted digital communications making the shooter feel threatened by the person ostensibly acting as an agent of those threatening him.

This is a tragic situation for sure, but falling back to applying fundamentalist judgement to emergent behavior is a mistake.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis

I'm not withoit any sympathy for the man. But if you choose to have a handgun you have to be 100% responsible for its use. I've owned guns when I've lived in rural areas, but I don't own one in Silicon Valley because I think the risk outweighs the benefit.

I own (inherited) guns and live in a rural area, but taking a safety class made me realize I'm simply not the kind of person who will ever want to carry in public or preemptively escalate a situation with a firearm. So I think we're coming from a generally similar nuanced "centrist" background.

But what does "100% responsible for its use" even mean, modulo mens rea? If instead of an Uber courier, this had been someone knowingly working for a local gang who acted physically threatening, we would be viewing the shooting as a lot more justified, right?

I'd say that the shooter's perception was halfway to this, despite how we can Monday morning quarterback that the shooter should have perceived the human being they were aiming at was cowering and backing away. Human perception is terribly biased towards confirming what we think we should see.

Taking a step back, I'm not trying to excuse the shooter here, especially in any kind of fully-exonerating manner. But rather I'd like to avoid the situation being wrapped up and tied off in a neat little bag of "personal responsibility" where an 83 year-old gets "21 years" [0], and we ignore the more fundamental issues that created such a tragic situation in the first place.

Rather it's the surveillance industry's digital intermediation that makes it possible for the victim to be both perceived as an aggressive threat, while ultimately just being a regular peaceful person doing basic job after basic job (while shouldering an extreme amount of long-tail risk!)

(Also there should probably be some age limit at which there starts to be a recurring competence examination for firearms, like there should be for driving, or having signature authority on a bank account for that matter. But uh, good luck with that!)

[0] IRS life expectancy is 9 years, outside of prison.

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