Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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A couple of notes, in addition to, as others pointed out, you've got to call law enforcement in the first place to get the ball rolling, and as noted elsewhere you shouldn't do that unless you're willing to accept any result including you and yours getting killed by the police:

We don't do "permanent loss of your right to own firearms" without someone being committed or the like, or being convicted of any felony (a bit silly given how many things have been felonized now) or a domestic violence misdemeanor.

My home state of Missouri is like California in having both serious urban and rural areas, and per the law (http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/stathtml/57100000301.HTML) this sounds like a "Class D" felony, modulo case law I haven't checked that might not count the initial accident as "Discharges or shoots a firearm into a dwelling house...." vs. doing it deliberately at closer range.

But if it did, it would be about as serious as you desire, although I note "immediate arrest" for the first incident doesn't sound like it would necessarily be in the cards, given the potential difficulty of proving the crime. I.e. you can't allow the hammer to come down so precipitously for an action the complainant might himself have caused, i.e. make the hole in whatever fashion and then claim a particular neighbor did it at long range without your witnessing it.

> call law enforcement [...] you shouldn't do that unless you're willing to accept any result including you and yours getting killed by the police

Then I, in turn, am fascinated about that other particular fact of your country.

Maybe his/her experience in the US is so very different than mine, but I feel like he/she's grossly over exaggerating. I've lived in 4 cities in the midwest and west coast and would not hesitate to call the police for that reason.

Seriously! I've lived in beautiful suburban family neighborhoods, idyllic rural areas, and a dangerous inner-city neighborhood where two friends of mine were robbed at gunpoint in our backyard and in none of those cases would I have been worried about calling the police.

That is an over-exaggeration to the point of complete absurdity. Pretty much only people who spend way too much time following news of police shootings, and only pay attention to the initial exaggerated reports, would even consider that to be reasonable.

If that was a reasonable fear, then there would be tens of thousands of police shootings every single day. Every single cop would have to shoot somebody a couple of times a week, versus in reality where most will never fire a gun in anger in their entire career, and will probably be off for weeks after a shooting even if it was squeaky clean.

In reality, driving a car to work is many times more dangerous than pretty much anything else you could ever do, yet most of the US does it every day without a second thought. Maybe try applying some rational skepticism to the news?

In my comment that got this going, I said: "you shouldn't do that unless you're willing to accept any result including you and yours getting killed by the police"

Getting shot, let alone killed, is a very unlikely outcome (although a lot more likely for your dogs, if you have any), but there are so many bad outcomes calling the police should still be avoided.

You might want to read Arrest-Proof Yourself: An Ex-Cop Reveals How Easy It Is for Anyone to Get Arrested, How Even a Single Arrest Could Ruin Your Life, and What to Do If the Police Get in Your Face; I did after a cop in my fairly small home city played a game of chicken with his car and my body. Best guess, as suggested by the book, is that he was trying to generate arrest and charge statistics; the book's thesis is that with the sharp downturn in crime, what I call the police-judicial complex needs a steady diet of "the clueless" to run through the system, else there would be widespread layoffs.

Pedestrians are uncommon here, and I guess he thought I might be an easy mark, the moment he saw me he jerked his steering wheel towards me and kept the new heading. Having learned to be a pedestrian in the Boston area, the sort of thing I'm pretty sure is not true for most of the other pedestrians in the city, I could tell his car and side mirror would miss me by a foot, less for the mirror, and successfully stared him down (probably makes a difference that while not part of the official South, this bit of SW Missouri is part of the cultural south, and my mom is Cajun).

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