Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

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Accepting the premise that it's a good thing that the population at large can own guns, their argument is that they're thinking a few steps ahead:

If smartguns become popular, the government can then outlaw non-smartguns without too many people caring (they can still own and fire guns).

Then the smart-stuff is leveraged to "enhance" security - transferring ownership, for an example, could be made subject to a government permit, which can then be used, explicitly or implicitly - imagine a "no fly list" for guns, with the same opacity - to prevent large groups of people to own guns (well, specifically, to fire them).

Further not-very-fantastical "enhancements" could include remote-disabling of guns, initially for law enforcement use, but quickly extended to much broader use.

All this, of course, while the criminals (who are already obtaining guns illegally) keep using "dumb" guns and aren't affected by this.

These are the simple, practical reasons - there's also the ideological reason founded on the historical reason for the 2nd amendment: A government can't turn on it's own people if said people is armed. If the government can effectively control the guns of the people, that stops being a factor.

Honestly, these arguments make sense, and I don't own a gun.

I wish the public at large could understand these are largely parallel to the arguments FSF makes (at least to me, they are)

I won't hold my breath waiting for the followup news report, "GNU software is now more likely to kill you than a car is in the U.S."

edit: to make this comment more than just a dumb throw-away joke, I'll add that sometimes the consequences of an argument are as important as its assumptions/logical soundness.

If smartguns run Linux, maybe we could make that article!

Is the "keep the government in line" thing really a reason that anybody actually believes anymore? Like, if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?

> Is the "keep the government in line" thing really a reason that anybody actually believes anymore?

If they don't, they should (I'm not a gun owner or an NRA member). If you look at history, it is exceptionally rare to find a 100 year stretch where governments and militaries didn't kill more civilians than any amount of murderers. Not always domestic governments, but that only adds to the point.

> if things got so bad that the government was "turning on its own people" with weaponry, somebody really thinks some guys with guns from Wal-Mart are going to be what stops them?

I'm not going to speculate, but it might not be as one sided as you'd think. Put all the hunters in the U.S. together and you have the largest army in the world by a factor of five.

Regardless it doesn't have to be that bad. Government apathy or corruption can be enough to justify retaining the right to self defense. Consider the police work slowdown in NYC turning into a thinly veiled version of protection money. Local LEOs that ask for more money every year or 'gee I guess we will have to just let everyone out of jail'. Or consider something like that judge that sold children into private prisons. Imagine that despite protests and uproar, they sweep it under the rug and continue? History is rife with examples of people being exploited simply because they were dependent or defenseless.

Someone who has your best interests in mind won't demand that you be defenseless or dependent upon them.

There are people that believe that's already happened. The Waco & Ruby Ridge incidents of the 90s fueled the "government out to get you" mindset and started people talking about "not letting it happen again". And by talking I mean openly in mainline churches in the midwest-not gun shop boasting.

Since then it seems like federal law enforcement has taken a softer touch with their sieges. This could be simply a change in doctrine to avoid bad press but enough people believe it's more than that.

Also, these days it isn't so much about guys with guns from Wal-Mart as it is country boys that did a couple tours in IQ/AF as a 11something and their friends. <digression> That's also why the NRA is touchy about funding for studies on things--there's a perception that "the powers that be" want to diagnose everyone who served with PTSD and then use that as a reason to take away their guns. This is compounded by some despair over disarming IQ villagers so they are easy pickings for ISIS and the perception that "they were training us to do it back home". </digression>

America's inability to really win in Afghanistan and Iraq, and South American states inability to even militarily defeat drug cartel forces is ample proof that it's not that simple to just beat 'some guys with guns'.

Armed peasantry have been beating western armies since WW2, and are pulling away in terms of effectiveness.

So, yes, I believe it. Because I'm seeing it happen.

A few thousand guys in the Middle East with guns have given the U.S. government a lot of grief over the past decade. A few million people in the U.S. with guns would give them a lot more grief.

Honestly? It's not a far step away from the kind of firepower they lost to in Vietnam and Iraq.

A US government worth overthrowing by armed insurrection and that couldn't be overthrown some other way would practically by definition be willing and able to engage in some really nasty practices to put down a domestic rebellion. Like, filling-mass-graves nasty. Shooting at them wouldn't help.

Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary. A domestic rebellion wouldn't win by shooting enough people, it'd win when the tactics necessary to stop it were beyond what the government and/or military were willing to do.

Guns are much more useful when:

1) the enemy is foreign (killing enough people actually might make them go away), and/or

2) your position doesn't actually have popular support so other means are unavailable to you, and/or

3) foreign powers have the will and capacity to bomb the shit out of your country if the government goes too far in its attempts to suppress your uprising (this, or loss of military support for the government, are basically the only reasons authoritarian states fail to stop revolutions in the modern world)

>Sympathy from the armed forces and various forms of political pressure, foreign and domestic, would be far more helpful than a few deer rifles, and if you've got that your private arms aren't really necessary.

Actually, having closely studied the dissolution of a modern European country (the former Yugoslavia) and seen the fallout from up close, it's not that simple (at least not always).

What happened in that case was that although the Yugoslav government [1] retained control of most of the heavy weaponry (artillery, tanks), and although the succeeding republics (Croatia and Bosnia) were initially limited to small arms belonging to local militia and hunters, the republics did have an abundance of active and retired officers with loyalty to their ethnic homelands who were quick to raise and lead battalions of troops into the field [2].

Those troops then went on to capture some heavy arms from the Yugoslav army, and scored lots of small arms, and eventually heavy arms and aircraft, from overseas allies.

Eventually, after lots of brutal warfare, ethnic cleansing, and in Bosnia, genocide, the republics did gain their independence from Yugoslavia (with significant help from the U.S. and other countries).

What was key in this case were the experienced military leaders who quickly assumed charge in the succeeding republics.

I suspect a worst-case, nightmare U.S. scenario would look much the same, with experienced military leaders taking control of ad hoc forces in their respective states and/or regions, and then fighting with small arms until they were able to capture heavy arms, receive outside help, or were defeated/captured.

1. Essentially, Serbia and Montenegro, plus ethnic Serbs elsewhere

2. Slovenia's succession was a different story than that of Bosnia and Croatia, for a variety of geographical, cultural, and historical reasons.

Nonetheless, it isn't going to reach the point of the government dropping atom bombs on their own country. The US has forests, cities, and mountains; good partisan country. Heavy weapons aren't effective in these terrains. Even the actual Nazis were held at bay for weeks and months by armed urban uprisings.

The more realistic scenarios don't actually involve the military itself turning against the people. It's far more likely that police will overstep their bounds a little and try to go house to house, and one reason they don't do that, outside of exceptional circumstances that the public will back them up on, is the fact that doing so is actively dangerous.

Yes. "Guys with guns from Wal-Mart" could wreak havoc against a larger, better-equipped, and better-trained army. History is abound with examples.

Yes, there's little doubt that a rural population that has grown up using guns and hunting can wreak havoc on a larger, conventional force using guerrilla warfare tactics. History abounds with examples of this.

As for "guys with guns from Wal-Mart" in the US, let's not forget that we have tens of thousands of experienced returned officers and NCOs, who are very knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and who identify very strongly with that rural population base here in the US.

It's not about winning so much as about making your loss costly enough for the other party to deter the conflict in the first place.

So are you saying you think they stand a better chance at defending themselves from the oppressive government without the guns?

I guess I'm saying, by the time guns are actually involved, I think they have 0% chance either way.

Look at how the resistance in Iraq stymied the US army for months/years.

Also, look at the Nazi invasion of the Island of Crete. A ton of local farmers with gun took a huge toll on the Nazi paratroopers.

The simpler objection is that smartgun technology - being a brand new thing - is likely to be expensive and complicated, which makes the guns that use it expensive and complicated. Forcing people to install it anyway is like a tax - it makes gun ownership more painful and expensive. If you care that lower-income people should be able afford guns for personal defense and that guns should be easy to use, you ought to oppose smartgun mandates as a matter of reflex. At least until the technology in question actually exists so we can see just how expensive and complicated it turns out to be, and probably well past that point.

Another practical reason where pro-gun vs. anti-gun traditionally do not see eye-to-eye is proximity/availability of police forces.

In the city, where most people are anti-gun, the police are often very close by, and rhetoric often talks about how guns are not needed because of the police.

In the country, where most people are pro-gun, the police can easily be very far away. I have co-workers who live at least an hour from the closest police station. Naturally, rhetoric covers the fact that the police very likely cannot help you.

This is just a variation of the slippery slope argument except this slope doesn't seem very slippery to me. Gun rights have been getting stronger in the US not weaker, courts in recent years have decided that the 2nd amendment is an individual right and that it is incorporated against the states.

I don't see how a libertarian, as many gun advocates but certainly not all, can make a rational argument for preventing a private company from selling smart-guns to individuals.

It isn't a slippery slope, it is already reality. The New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law outlaws the sale of non-smart guns once a smart gun becomes available for sale anywhere in the US.

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

I don't think anyone is trying to ban smart-guns. What they're trying to stop is regulation requiring guns to be smart.

Maybe not through legal means but the one gun store that tried to actually sell a smart gun got death threats.

Numerous other countries have substantially curtailed the right to own guns, so it's no large stretch of the imagination.

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