ESR on gun rights in 2010 “No hacker should have any trouble understanding this” | Hacker News Reader

ESR on gun rights in 2010 “No hacker should have any trouble understanding this”

catb.org

2 pointsgnarbarian5 comments

It's not about hackers in general. This is a provincial American phenomenon, and mostly prevalent in the fly-over country. (I said mostly. Of course you can find it in the coasts too).

Nothing universal (Belgian hackers could not care less, for example) or that interesting about it.

I'm not saying it's stupid because it's an american phenomenon. I'm saying it's not universal and "logical" as presented, but a particular national folly / hobby that he tries to rationalize.

(And those others he cites are doing the same, starting from all-american assumptions and argument)

If you could be a little more specific regarding the problems you see with the argument/perspective we might be able to have a discussion.

Heres my perspective on how the issues are related:

I've never met a hacker who believes a particular line of code should be illegal. This is because code is just a tool which can be put to any number of uses. Even blatantly malicious and infectious code should be legal in and of itself because we can learn from it and put that knowledge to use. You know our adversaries are doing the same. Using that code in a way that causes harm is what should be illegal. Writing the virus or a proof of concept for an exploit is how we become more resilient. This same line of reasoning applies to firearms.

Unlike code, which is infinitely malleable, firearms have an inherent use. Pointing to people with them and/or shooting them.

Whether it's for protection or attack, I don't particularly care.

In both cases the acceptance of firearms raises the bar for tolerance of violence and makes both protection and attack more violent, ending up in a more violent society.

When you make it OK to have firearms for "protection", you also make it OK, if not a necessity, for assaulters to carry firearms in their attacks too. Conversely, in places were private firearms are not tolerated, not even attackers (robbers etc) use firearms (with rare exceptions).

Of course it's not that the first (firearms for protection) causes the second (firearms for attacks) -- it's the underlying distrurbance in how society sees violence that causes both.

I think the author's statement was too strident, but I think I understood immediately what he meant.

I was born in Oklahoma (what some might consider flyover country headquarters), and raised from an early age to use guns. One idea my family and I repeatedly discussed was that gun ownership was an essential safeguard against government overreach, an essential part of keeping power in the hands of the people. Without it, we said, government might voluntarily restrain itself, but there would be little to actually prevent it from doing whatever it wanted.

Putting aside whether that is actually true or not, the parallels with the open source movement are really obvious to me.

Yep, guns are tools which are a form of technology. You may put them to use for good or evil and it is the willful action to use them in bad ways which should be the illegal part.

The same goes for code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com