41–50 of 84 posts
Not sure how people miss this - the largest groups of murders in human history are governments by a long shot - events that typically take place some time after guns are confiscated. Ultimately, the right to bare arms is about a last resort against tyrannical government.
If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact. People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that. They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane. Temp…
The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so mentally satisfying to people who have no experience with guns. People who live in safe neighborhoods where crime is uncommon. People who have never been faced with life or death situations where having a gun could save someone's life, or save them from being raped, or robbed. But when the math becomes a more complex question of potentially trading off rape, or even homicide vs. potentially reducing one kind of mass homicide then the answers aren't quite so pat and easy are they?
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this killing? Because, that's the point. Right? People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this killing? Because, that's the point. Right? People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.
I am, by most measures, a strong man.
But given a rock or a knife, I would not, within 2 minutes, be able to kill 20 people and injure 12 in a crowded cafe in Port Arthur, before going on to kill another 12 people and injuring 3 within the following hour.
Neither could I, with a rock or a knife, visit Utøya and kill 69 people and wound 110 within one hour.
These acts are physically beyond me. I suspect they are physically beyond anybody.
The only other way for me to kill so many people would be to use high explosives. And guess what? High explosives are regulated out the fricking wazoo.
If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact. People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that. They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane. Temp…
Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any idea of how many crimes guns stop every year? How many rapes, how many robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day. The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so me…
How does that work in the rest of the world then? I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day, so clearly something else must be stopping those rapes.
Really, guns are toys. Get over it.
The chances of you facing a life-or-death situation where a gun will help you are ridiculously overblown.
We're not trading off homicide vs one kind of mass homicide, that just brings things to the attention of a larger audience. The real trade off is citizens murdering other citizens with guns versus them not being able to do so or to do so easily. Sure there will be criminals with guns, they're not going to magically disappear. But there will be far less of them.
If you combine average people with lots of guns and then say 'people are the problem, not guns', you're missing out on an important fact. People are not a constant. They're not #defines, they may be sane today, insane tomorrow and sane the day after that. They are impulsive, prone to error and there are a thousand circumstances in life where otherwise perfectly normal people do things that we later label insane. Temp…
Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any idea of how many crimes guns stop every year? How many rapes, how many robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day. The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so me…
The article linked has the right conclusion. Banning guns works. The US saw something like 12,000 gun related homicides in 2008. The UK, with a 6th of the population, saw 39. Adjusting for population, that's over 50 times fewer deaths.
The grim truth is that banning guns in the US probably wouldn't do much. The UKs low gun crime is a result of a hundred years of high levels of control. It would take decades for any gun ban to impact on gun levels. However, statistics does show that if there's very few guns available, there is very little gun crime.
Rather than call something naive because you don't like it, why don't you provide statistics that support your argument? Do you have any idea how many crimes guns stop every year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we going to play this game? How dare you call guns toys. Do you have any idea of how many crimes guns stop every year? How many rapes, how many robberies, how many homicides? This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day. The naive math of no guns = no gun crime is so easy, and so me…
> This is not a small thing, some estimates put the number of rapes per day stopped due to the potential victim being armed or thought to be armed at more than a thousand. Per day. How does that work in the rest of the world then? I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day , so clearly something else must be stopping those rapes. Really, guns are toys. Get over it. The chances of you facing a life-or-de…
Because no one reports on it. No one reports on the impoverished of India killing each other when someone cuts in line at the water pump in the morning. No one reports on the gang murders in Eastern Europe that happen everyday. Rape goes on all the time. Just because the West has NGOs and charities dedicated to women's issues and run campaigns and just because they have statistics (such as they are) showing that rape incidence might go down, that doesn't mean that rape doesn't happen on a massive scale on a daily basis.
Seriously, how ignorant can a person be?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discussing whether or not technology (guns, in this case) can be considered morally neutral? Whether freedom to own and operate any technology of your choice is a fundamental right? What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?
> What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions? Who doesn't live in USA.
However, the gun debate has a number of parallels with topics that hackers obviously do care about, irrespective of geography. It wasn't all that long ago that cryptography was considered to be a "weapon" which should be regulated. I would not be surprised to see attempts at classifying some pieces of software as "weapons" at some point in the future - botnets, say, or certain "security" tools. In the fairly near future we can expect debates about synthetic biology, 3D printing and "cyberwarfare", and we'll reach for our existing legal traditions as the means to resolve them.
For hackers to offer meaningful input to these debates, we need to understand how other difficult problems have been resolved. If someone tries to frame "botnet control" as being "like gun control", we really need to understand how and why gun control works, or doesn't work, and how and why the analogy can be applied or refuted.
The future is almost certainly going to involve legal disputes over what we are allowed to do with the technology that we create, own and operate. Some of this technology will be dangerous. In the wrong hands, plenty of technology already is! If you advocate gun control, you need to have a clear understanding of why guns are different from cars, even though cars can kill people too. If you argue against gun control, your arguments may be useful to those who argue against cryptography control, or synbio control. 3D printing could attack some of the fundamental premises of gun control (that it's possible to control the physical flow of weapons and ammunition in a modern society) and the attempt to re-assert control could undermine a number of basic freedoms if done incorrectly. At this moment, I'm not even sure what the 'correct' regulation of 3D printing would look like, but we need to have an answer soon, before someone comes along with a much worse answer and tries to impose it. Sooner or later, someone is going to kill someone with a 3D-printed weapon, and if we don't have good, well-researched and discussed answers to how we deal with this, we'll end up with bad, poorly-researched laws.
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this killing? Because, that's the point. Right? People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.
Guns greatly amplify the power to act out a killing urge. That is, after all, their purpose. I am, by most measures, a strong man. But given a rock or a knife, I would not, within 2 minutes , be able to kill 20 people and injure 12 in a crowded cafe in Port Arthur, before going on to kill another 12 people and injuring 3 within the following hour. Neither could I, with a rock or a knife, visit Utøya and kill 69 peopl…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_Fire
Nonsense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guns greatly amplify the power to act out a killing urge. That is, after all, their purpose. I am, by most measures, a strong man. But given a rock or a knife, I would not, within 2 minutes , be able to kill 20 people and injure 12 in a crowded cafe in Port Arthur, before going on to kill another 12 people and injuring 3 within the following hour. Neither could I, with a rock or a knife, visit Utøya and kill 69 peopl…
"The only other way for me to kill so many people would be to use high explosives." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_Fire Nonsense.
But the statistics show that people seem to find that using devices ergonomically designed for maximum killing efficiency much more attractive when they decide to entertain their particular psychopathology.