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Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

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Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#261

Post by damoncali »

reader5000 wrote: post #242
wil421 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always wondered if crimes are getting more violent or if the amount of coverage we give the violent ones has increased. The closest I will get to the news is the Daily Show, because at least they poke fun at the American media for how ridiculous they can be.

The "Daily Show" is an interesting phenomenon because it's like, we're still going to feed you the corporate 24-hour news garbage, but we're going to do it satirically so that you can feel superior to all the plebes who watch this stuff "for reals".

It's also interesting that it appears to be taking itself more and more seriously as time goes by. It's a modern day ministry of propaganda. To what end, I have no idea.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#262

Post by reader5000 »

BryanB55 wrote: post #173

I'll start by saying we do not have a gun problem in this country. We have a people problem. Speaking of people problems, I started reading these comments in hope of finding a different attitude than what I have been hearing around the topic of gun control lately. To me, HackerNews has usually been a place with more educated and informed comments but I didn't really find that here. I'm still finding misinformed peopl…

These are all standard talking points. I'll just respond to one of them: let me ask you, do you and your family wear helmets when driving around in a car? No? Don't you think you and your family would be way better off wearing a helmet in the middle of a car wreck, rather than having to wait for the paramedics to arrive, who are only out for themselves in the first place? Why are you so comfortable risking death or serious injury in not wearing a helmet when you drive a car?

Ponder that then ponder your decision to walk around in a developed civilized nation with a firearm.

Also ponder the externalities you impose on innocent bystanders: the risk of accidental discharge, the risk of missing a target and hitting a bystander, the risk of unnecessarily escalating a nonviolent situation into a violent one, the risk of drawing fire in you and your family's direction, the risk of having to hesitate between running and shooting, etc etc.

Ponder further: do you wear body armor? Wouldn't that make you safer? Why don't you go outside without full body armor?

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#263

Post by rooshdi »

nitrogen wrote: post #230
citricsquid wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And does anyone really believe that criminals follow laws? Criminals do not follow the law, that much is true, however a large amount of crime is due to opportunity and removing opportunity does help reduce crime. If guns didn't exist and everything else were the same and these evil people still had intent to do harm do you really believe that they would just give up because they had no other way to harm people? If t…

Societies must make the decision whether the opportunities lost by the vast majority of law-abiding people are worth denying opportunities to the very few criminals. Is the cure more damaging than the poison? Is a gun-free society forcing its will on those who want to own guns better or worse than a society in which criminals have slightly easier access to guns by stealing them from law-abiding owners?

Yea, the pros of sem-automatic rifle regulation has to be weighed against the extent of tragedies they enable. Do the pros of another firearm really out-weigh the pain they enable?

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#264

Post by [deleted] »

mindcrime wrote: post #256
tome wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pithy response, but could you flesh it out more? In particular, are you suggesting that this organisation has any sort of substantial following? If you make your claim explicit I can disabuse you of any misconceptions you maybe carrying.

You said "never". I provided a counter-example which disproves your argument that private gun ownership for self defence is never suggested. In particular, are you suggesting that this organisation has any sort of substantial following? I have no idea, but that's hardly the point. If they had even one member, it shows that private gun ownership is, indeed, sometimes suggested.

[deleted]

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#265

Post by ycombobreaker »

whyleyc wrote: post #237
BryanB55 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you without a doubt that I do not live in fear. Carrying a gun simply lets me go about my day knowing that I am equipped to handle an unpleasant or potentially deadly situation should I have to. Where do you live that you believe you will never fall victim to a crime? Are there no bad people where you live? There are a lot of great people where I live in a very affluent and safe environment but I'm not nai…

I live in a country where less than 7 people in every 100 owns a gun and where there are less than 50 homicides per year due to firearms. You live in a country where 88 out of every 100 citizens owns a gun and with less than 5% of the world's population, you are home to roughly 35–50 per cent of the world's civilian-owned guns. [1] You have a cultural problem that other countries simply do not have - more guns do not…

Re: 88/100 citizens owning a gun, can you provide any evidence to that effect? A relatively recent Gallup poll put the rate at 1/3 with many gun owners owning multiple guns. Like you would expect out of most hobbies.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.a...

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#266

Post by giardini »

jackalope wrote: post #140
giardini wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just want to say as an American, I am so fed up with all these gun stories." Me too. But it won't end soon. Currently every shooting in every city is a candidate for promotion to a national media campaign that is focused on gaining additional restrictions on firearms, especially at the federal level (but also state level: Colorado is at this moment passing new highly-restrictive state firearms laws). Every opportu…

No. As a society, we became numb to gun violence to the point where the media stopped reporting it on the news. The Newtown shootings reminded us that the problem is real and pervasive enough that it demands a solution. Stories of gun violence are rightly reassuming a place at the top of the hour because of the horrible, devastating tragedies that they are. This isn't about a liberal agenda in conflict with a conserv…

" You don't get to shoot through your door because someone turned the knob without ringing your doorbell and hide behind it being an act of self-defense. You don't get to prove your bravery by firing into a group of innocent students from a rival high school. You don't take psychologically troubled individuals to the firing range for therapy and teach them to be efficient killing machines. And if you own guns, you don't leave them on the kitchen table so your seven-year-old can grab it on his way to school for show-and-tell."

Each case you list includes multiple violations of existing laws. How would more laws reduce the likelihood of re-occurrence?

"This isn't political."

Nonsense, this is the purest of politics: this is literally and figuratively about power and who will hold it.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#267

Post by damoncali »

ycombobreaker wrote: post #251
damoncali wrote: post #96

Now that this has been shown to be a false alarm, we can relax with some unintentional humor from the beloved Department of Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/active_shooter_poster.pdf This is a real thing.

Interestingly, I got "Access Denied" when I click that link in my primary browser. I can copy-paste the link into another browser and load this, so I think they're actually checking my User-Agent and blocking me because it is empty. Our beloved DHS.

Well, you know. Terrorists and all.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#268

Post by reader5000 »

damoncali wrote: post #248
reader5000 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's totally irrational to seek the most obvious way to prevent recurrence of the shooting massacre of 20 children, which happens with a marked regularity. Only a New World Order could explain why people want to ban guns.

The snark is unnecessary. Gun control advocates have had these goals for decades - long before Newtown - and openly speak about them. There is no tinfoil hat, no new world order. Just a political agenda by a minority of the political spectrum that uses tragedy to their advantage without apology.

That still doesnt make any sense. It's like say in nuclear energy. There are two camps: one side says it is safe the other says it isn't. However, if evidence of more and more nuclear tragedies accumulate, one side looks more and more correct than the other. That side isn't "using" a nuclear tragedy to "further their own agenda", they are simply using it to demonstrate they are correct.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#269

Post by notdrunkatall »

tomkin wrote: post #136
splat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really true, though? The US has a large military, but it pales in comparison to the number of armed civilians. Just look at the number of hunters in this country. In Wisconsin alone there are 600,000 hunters. That would make them the ninth-largest army in the world. There are more hunters in just the four states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia than there are in the entire U.S. military…

This is a really poor argument. First, what's "tyrannical" to you? There are various degrees of "tyrannical", just as there are various degrees of terrorism. Can you expect the entire country of gun owners to react all at once? Because I have some evidence that suggests otherwise. You're hoping for some "flipped switch" type of tyranny that never happens. Even Hitler's madness took place in phases and wasn't universa…

You're arguing that because people might not suddenly decide to revolt en masse that... what, exactly? That a revolution is therefore not possible, and that we should then give up the right to bear arms?

How ironic that you would accuse him of making a really poor argument when yours is about as poor as they come. I hope no one upvoted that drivel.

Re: Person with a long rifle and body armor in the Main Group Building of MIT

#270

Post by tome »

notdrunkatall wrote: post #244
tome wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If massacres of children in school and young students in college aren't examples of few oppressing many then I don't know what is.

I left reddit to get away from those with facile arguments which relied on an appeals to emotion rather than logic and fact. Yours is one of the former. But I'll bite anyways: how many more children have died under oppressive regimes where the people were not able to defend themselves?

Mine was not an argument, more a suggestion that your argument needs clarification. Please note that while I admire your aversion to "appeals to emotion" bringing "what happens if the system collapses? ... Riots, destabilization, foreign invasion" to the discussion may violate this ideal.
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