Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The gun control that works: no guns

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#51

Post by Turing_Machine »

jacques_chester wrote: post #50
Turing_Machine wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes, I could also poison the food supply, start a plague or crack an ammonium tanker truck near a school. 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.

"But the statistics show that people seem to find...."

Nice weaseling.

You were wrong.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

Actually, the statistics show that governments with too much power have killed orders of magnitudes more people than have ever been killed by individuals with guns.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#52

Post by Turing_Machine »

skyhook_mockups wrote: post #33
xyzzyz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same goes for high powered fully automatic military style rifles. Zero use for hunting an animal, perfectly tailored for hunting humans. That's disturbing to me, and I wouldn't want to live in a society that vehemently fights for the right to bear these arms. > hey look ma I bought a M16 from Walmart today hur hur It's a sad thing that your opinion will soon be discredited on the basis that you do not know the…

Thanks for the correction. I'm clearly showing my ignorance when it comes to some of these issues. I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media and documentaries like Bowling for Columbine. You can substitute M16 for shotgun, and Walmart for Corner Gun Store and add in a mandatory 24 hour waiting period, which maybe doesn't make for quite as nice a sound bite, but is just as…

"I based my M16 bought at Walmart caricature on the little I've learned from news media"

Maybe you should stop believing everything (or anything) you read in the news media.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#53

Post by wildranter »

dontstealmyname wrote: post #43
wildranter wrote: post #14

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.

Yes but the horrible truth is guns have a higher mortality rate than all the other killing methods you listed. Also there is a lot more physical effort in killing someone with a knife, rocks or bearhands and it its more likely that you can fend someone off or dodgy whats being throw at you. I don't think its as easy to dodgy a bullet.

Try dodging a 100kg man armed with 5kg rock. I had to do it once while wandering the streets of a big South American country. If I had a gun I certainly would have not killed the bastard as just waving it should've solved the situation. Instead I had to keep cool, pull a Jedi mind trick, and literally run for my life. Yeah, guns kill. So rocks too.

Again, how do we stop all this killing?

Either way, I think we should start by banning cars. People kill much more people with cars than with any other tool. Maybe except for voting, but that's another matter.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#54

Post by FelixP »

apl wrote: post #26
angersock wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.

> We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot > of paperwork and money Availability of money has zero bearing on mental health and fitness to carry a weapon, so that criterion goes right out the window. What kind of paperwork is required? Does it entail thorough background checks etc.? Erecting barriers isn't sufficient; we need the appropriate type of barrier.

The short answer is that it is very hard to acquire fully-automatic weapons in the US today. Aside from the fact that anything available for sale to civilians will be both prohibitively expensive (1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive than a comparable semi-automatic weapon) and most likely an antique (only weapons manufactured before 1986 are available to civilians), the acquisition process itself is pretty arduous (e.g. FBI background investigation, signoff from head of local law enforcement, etc.). From my understanding, these weapons are almost never used to commit crimes.

The real danger are handguns - something like 3/4s of gun deaths are from handguns.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#55

Post by jacques_chester »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #51
jacques_chester wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I could also poison the food supply, start a plague or crack an ammonium tanker truck near a school. 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.

"But the statistics show that people seem to find...." Nice weaseling. You were wrong. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM Actually, the statistics show that governments with too much power have killed orders of magnitudes more people than have ever been killed by individuals with guns.

> You were wrong.

Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur. The major leading cause of gun deaths in Australia is suicide, around 300 per year from among the ~750k gun owners in this country.

I agree that totalitarian governments have been the leading cause of death in the 20th century. But it's an orthogonal point. Look around: guns do not prevent tyranny. Neither do high explosives. What counts is institutions. The United States inherited a set of institutions (cultural norms, the rule of law) from the British that went a long way to assuring economic success and a culture of freedom.

So did Australia. Our freedom has never been guaranteed by the kind of constitutional mechanisms the USA has; it has always been reliant on culture and history. The freedom of the people of the United Kingdom is not guaranteed by any written constitution; it is reliant on culture and history. And so on and so forth. Widespread gun ownership does not banish shitty governments (ask a Saudi).

We are not going to agree, and nothing I say will change your mind. Please feel free to leave another triumphal remark below this one and let's both get on with our lives.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#56

Post by Turing_Machine »

jacques_chester wrote: post #55
Turing_Machine wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But the statistics show that people seem to find...." Nice weaseling. You were wrong. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM Actually, the statistics show that governments with too much power have killed orders of magnitudes more people than have ever been killed by individuals with guns.

> You were wrong. Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur. The major leading cause of gun deaths in Australia is suicide, around 300 per year from among the ~750k gun owners in this country. I agree that totalitarian governments have been the leading cause of death in the 20th century. But it's an orthogonal point. Look around: guns do not prevent tyranny. Neither do high explosives. What counts is…

"Australia has had zero (0) gun massacres since Port Arthur."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childers_Palace_Fire

Your point?

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#57

Post by wildranter »

pingbear wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>I don't see thousands of people being raped here per day 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…

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe. —Albert Einstein

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#58

Post by EugeneOZ »

rjknight wrote: post #48
EugeneOZ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions? Who doesn't live in USA.

I assume you don't live in the USA (neither do I, in fact). 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 - botne…

And despite of so many words, I don't care about political problems of USA.

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#59

Post by benjohnson »

Disarming citizes is the frst step to genocide.

I trust my neighbor more than the governemnt we elect - just 60 years ago, America rounded up our ethnic Japanese citizens and stuck them in concentration camps. What would gave happened if the war didn't go so well for us in the Pacific?

Re: The gun control that works: no guns

#60

Post by tagada »

noonespecial wrote: post #15

America was made from violent revolution against tyranny, so as part of its 'DNA' (constitution) it includes a simple inoculation against that sort of tyranny in the future in the form of the right of private citizens to be armed. It was technology that threw the founding fathers the unforeseen curve ball. What seemed like a simple question of allowing or disallowing private weapons was really an un-enumerated, techn…

In my country, from the time we restricted (well, forbid) personla firearms (around 1940, just before the occupation) up to now, the citizen individual rights haven't stopped to decrease.
Post reply on HN