Ask HN: What can a hacker do about gun violence? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can a hacker do about gun violence?

6 pointsconcordia10 comments

The recent news about shootings makes me wonder whether there is anything I can do to help the situation. Maybe it's naive to think that we can use the web to mitigate this problem. But this is a smart group - someone's got to have some ideas for how we can improve our society with the tools we have. Would anyone like to throw out some suggestions that some of us could work on?

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You're asking a loaded question by conflating violence and possession and/or use of firearms, as if the firearms are part of the motivation for the violence.

Violence decreases with less unwanted births, a higher general level of education, and the evenly-applied rule (and understanding) of law. Put your time and money to work on those fronts and you will see a material decrease in violence.

If you live in a place with high gun-ownership, you aren't going to effect change by trying to ban the guns. Advocating firearms safety education would be a good place to start, and believe it or not the NRA is probably your best hope for bringing a culture of firearms safety into your community.

Freakonomics is a great read.

It's bizarre from the outside to here non-americans take availability of weapons as a non-factor.

There's plenty of room to argue about rights or the difficulty of actually reducing access to weapons. Saying that low hanging fruit is really gun safety, hotlines, preventative mental health etc. etc. etc.

BTW, I come form a country that probably has one of the highest rate of adults who can use & have access to an automatic rifle in the world. There aren't many incidents of this kind. I know that availability isn't everything.

Most killings are not conducted by the super resourceful, premeditated unstoppable type of people.

Gun owners are more at risk for suicides than homicides (by quite a large margin). The media covers these, although in reality they happen far less than we would think (see recency effect).

You're right. Of the 30,000 or so people per year who die from gunfire in the U.S, a large proportion is from suicide - especially in white males over-40, as this nytimes graphic illustrates (gray is homicide, pink is suicide):

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/21/weekinreview/20...

So if hackers should work on anything, maybe it would be some form of help for white males to get through their mid-life crisis.

Sorry, but I really need to see some data backing this claim up, as well as the causality you're implying.

I think hackers need to hack a new social response to mass shooting incidents. Currently there is saturation news coverage of such incidents, and much speculation of what "drove" the shooter to kill many people, often just before the shooter kills himself. Maybe video game designers need to build in scenes in the games where a mass murderer has survivors desecrate his grave and curse him as a cowardly loser, rather than seeming to glorify mass violence. Maybe news media coverage of such incidents needs to be more subdued. (I've read that news outlets are encouraged NOT to report suicide clusters, to avoid triggering copy-cat clusters of suicides in other places.) Lots of people own guns and never use them in any harmful way, and a sufficiently crazy person can use a car or a common household chemical to kill multiple people. There needs to be a social consensus that (this will sound very harsh) the murder-suicide perpetrator should just eliminate the middleman and kill himself without harming innocent bystanders. The more mass murder can be held up to shame and disgust rather than amazement, the better.

I believe the problem has to do with anger. The kind of deep-seated anger that festers and drives people to do things they would not normally do. So how do you reduce that anger? It's simple. The best way is maintain a relationship with the Holy Spirit. Doing so will allow healing to take place which will lessen that anger. There might be other ways such as exercise, yoga, meditation etc, but these are not nearly as effective as maintaining that relationship. This can be done by going to church, being a good person, minimizing things that drive the spirit away such as pornography. I know this may not be a popular viewpoint amongst people who prefer not to believe in God but for the vast majority of the world's population, this is sound and effective advice.

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