181–190 of 204 posts
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Lots of people owning guns are downvoting anything that is not pro-gun.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, and follow the site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Violence still happens but the magnitude would be reduced. It's a lot harder to kill people with things that aren't guns. If it was as easy then soldiers would primarily equipped with "knife, or acid, or poison, or fists". The army chooses guns as the primary weapon are they are clearly much more effective at killing.
The army doesn't use poisons (chemical weapons) because they are so effective, and so horrible, that their use is unthinkable. Remember the outrage when Syria did use poison?
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What you're basically saying is there's a spectrum, but people just disagree over how to demarcate the spectrum. I agree, and so does the US government. Right now, automatic rifles and anything more powerful than them are illegal to privately own. That's just where a large part of the US draws the line right now: semi-automatic and below are okay, anything above is not okay. Maybe that line will move in the future, b…
FYI, fully automatic firearms are not actually illegal to privately own in the US. They are just heavily regulated. Guns that weren't registered by a 1986 cut off date are banned for private ownership, but even that is reasonably easy to work around with the appropriate Federal Firearms License. Although I don't own any fully auto guns myself, I know plenty of people who do legally own them.
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The army doesn't use poisons (chemical weapons) because they are so effective, and so horrible, that their use is unthinkable. Remember the outrage when Syria did use poison?
So you're suggesting this is the main/only reason poison isn't the primary weapon provided to infantry for most military situations? Interesting.
I'm saying that if the army shared the goal of mass shooters - to kill as many people as possible indiscriminately - guns would absolutely not be their weapon of choice; and if the army switched weapons from guns to poison, the magnitude of violence would be amplified, not reduced.
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> Having gone to the range here in the US I gotta say its not as easy as most think. You have rules amongst people who handle fire arms you must follow or get banned from a range. I don't think being banned from one particular range significantly reduces the chance someone will commit an act of gun violence. > ___ is a tool. Anybody can use a tool correctly and anybody can use a tool incorrectly. Any tool can be boug…
> And yet 20 years it hasn't devolved into authoritarianism. In fact their rates of gun violence have dropped significantly. Hasn't it been devolving into authoritarianism though? They have banned books and all sorts of things. I've read where lots of people have disagreed with the govt's new laws for censoring the internet and keeping data on people, yet the gov there still does what it wants without worry. Australi…
The US is different but not a special snowflake. The US is not Australia. The US is not the UK. The US is not Germany. The US is not..... The same reasoning means no country can learn from any other country unless they are virtually identical.
But how about Canada? Being similar to the US in many ways, why are their rates of gun violence much lower comparatively?
> I understand there may be less guns there, but from the stories I've seen about violence at bars in parts of Australia leading the gov to shut down parts of the cities earlier just shows that the strong violent abusive people are comfortable engaging in criminal behaviors including assaults and battery, they are not being controlled by gun laws.
And they have much fewer guns to use when acting on impulses, limiting the amount of harm they can cause. Do you think America is less violent? Remember when a single person killed 59 people and wounded 500+ more from a hotel room?
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So you're suggesting this is the main/only reason poison isn't the primary weapon provided to infantry for most military situations? Interesting.
Don't try to intentionally misrepresent me. You know that's not what I said. I'm saying that if the army shared the goal of mass shooters - to kill as many people as possible indiscriminately - guns would absolutely not be their weapon of choice; and if the army switched weapons from guns to poison, the magnitude of violence would be amplified, not reduced.
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> Having gone to the range here in the US I gotta say its not as easy as most think. You have rules amongst people who handle fire arms you must follow or get banned from a range. I don't think being banned from one particular range significantly reduces the chance someone will commit an act of gun violence. > ___ is a tool. Anybody can use a tool correctly and anybody can use a tool incorrectly. Any tool can be boug…
> And yet 20 years it hasn't devolved into authoritarianism. In fact their rates of gun violence have dropped significantly. Hasn't it been devolving into authoritarianism though? They have banned books and all sorts of things. I've read where lots of people have disagreed with the govt's new laws for censoring the internet and keeping data on people, yet the gov there still does what it wants without worry. Australi…
I hope you stick to the same standard next time someone says "$(Policy X) is how you end up being like Venezuela!"
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In Australia, homicide has decreased by nine percent since 1990 and armed robbery by one-third since 2001, but recorded assaults and sexual assaults have both increased steadily in the past 10 years by over 40 percent and 20 percent respectively. Crime was already decreasing in Australia before the 1996 ban, however since that time violent crime overall has increased significantly.
I'm not the author of the message, but I wonder why the downvotes? Is the message factually incorrect or you think it's irrelevant?
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Don't try to intentionally misrepresent me. You know that's not what I said. I'm saying that if the army shared the goal of mass shooters - to kill as many people as possible indiscriminately - guns would absolutely not be their weapon of choice; and if the army switched weapons from guns to poison, the magnitude of violence would be amplified, not reduced.
I was discussing what solders carry as a primary weapon but since you brought it up why don't "mass shooters" regularly use chemical weapons now instead? Could it be because they're regulated and not readily available to civilians?
Fortunately that means they use guns instead of more dangerous weapons.
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> You are a bit quieter with a knife though. A gun gives you away immedietly to all around you unless you have a silencer but those arent so easy to get in the USA (class 3 if I remember correctly). What are you trying to say with that statement? That knives should be the preferred murder weapon? That clearly isn't the case in any country where getting a gun is 'easy'. Or are murderers in the those countries idiots f…
Except that's not always true![0] Take Switzerland for example where knives rose as murder weapon of choice, and the rate of guns became lower. In fact... for a country that has so many guns, it's incredible to hear that only about 100 homicides occur per year[1]. The USA has a mental health issue, not a tooling issue. Gun safety and proper education can deter gun violence. [0]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/homicide-…
This article from the same website you linked is quite informative in my opinion:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/florida-school-shootin...