Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests • Hacker News Board

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#701

Post by rsync » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

bdowling wrote: post #567

sjwright wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was being serious. I don’t have a problem with responsible gun ownership. Switzerland is a good model. The NRA loves to point at rates of Swiss gun ownership. If the USA implemented all of Switzerland’s gun laws I think you’d be okay.

If the USA implemented all of Switzerland’s gun laws, a citizen who passes a background check would be able to buy a newly-made full-automatic machine gun that is not allowed in the US outside of law enforcement or military. I’m not sure that is what you’re implying that you’d want.

"If the USA implemented all of Switzerland’s gun laws, a citizen who passes a background check would be able to buy a newly-made full-automatic machine gun that is not allowed in the US outside of law enforcement or military."

There are several things wrong with the above statement ...

First, in many (most) states of the United States, you can indeed purchase a fully automatic weapon / suppressor / grenade launcher / "destructive device" / etc. You'll have to pay a $200 transfer tax, submit to registration and fingerprinting and either get local CLEO signoff (Sheriff, Chief of Police) or purchase as a trust. Interestingly, you also sort of give up your fourth amendment rights as you grant the BATF right to check on the "device" at any time, for any reason.

Second, military (automatic) weapons in Switzerland are distributed by the Swiss Army and are kept in local possession under those auspices. A swiss cannot simply walk into a gun shop and buy an MP5 on a whim - regardless of background check.

Finally, and most importantly, Swiss gun laws were dramatically reworked in the past year as part of a general normalization of Swiss and EU regulations. There was a referendum and it passed - many aspects of Swiss gun laws that you may romanticize are now a thing of the past.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#702

Post by camgunz » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

jki275 wrote: post #681

camgunz wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the text: > A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. How do you explain "Militia" and "State"? How does 2A not refer explicitly to State militias?

Read Heller. Scalia explained in detail.

I have read Heller and found Scalia's reasoning to be... perforated at best. Here's a great excerpt (sorry, he just writes and writes and writes):

> “Security of a Free State.” The phrase “security of a free state” meant “security of a free polity,” not security of each of the several States as the dissent below argued, see 478 F. 3d, at 405, and n. 10. Joseph Story wrote in his treatise on the Constitution that “the word ‘state’ is used in various senses [and in] its most enlarged sense, it means the people composing a particular nation or community.” 1 Story §208; see also 3 id., §1890 (in reference to the Second Amendment ’s prefatory clause: “The militia is the natural defence of a free country”). It is true that the term “State” elsewhere in the Constitution refers to individual States, but the phrase “security of a free state” and close variations seem to have been terms of art in 18th-century political discourse, meaning a “ ‘free country’ ” or free polity.

TL;DR: I don't like the "State" thing, so I'm just gonna ignore it. He does the same thing for militias too, albeit in many more paragraphs so I won't quote it here. All in all it's classic Scalia: using weird old newspapers and irrelevant centuries old laws that incidentally agree with him in order to reinterpret the constitution in a way that aligns--coincidentally--with his political beliefs. The kind of thing you'd only find convincing if you don't need convincing in the first place.

And for what it's worth, the dissenters agree with me:

> The opinion the Court announces today fails to identify any new evidence supporting the view that the Amendment was intended to limit the power of Congress to regulate civilian uses of weapons. Unable to point to any such evidence, the Court stakes its holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the Amendment’s text; significantly different provisions in the 1689 English Bill of Rights, and in various 19th-century State Constitutions; postenactment commentary that was available to the Court when it decided Miller; and, ultimately, a feeble attempt to distinguish Miller that places more emphasis on the Court’s decisional process than on the reasoning in the opinion itself.

But importantly, this is nothing new. Justices uphold weird stuff all the time (if you want to read something particularly heinous, read Buck v. Bell, good god). And people will cite them as appeals to authority. But as someone super wise once said:

> the Court is and always has been a political institution. No Justice since John Marshall has ever known what the Founders thought, because they weren't them. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to get one over on you.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#703

Post by CWuestefeld » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #700

cwkoss wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Similarly, most people who live in rural areas also have a need for guns to protect themselves adequately - from animals as well as malicious people - as police and other state protection can be an hour or more away when they try to respond rapidly. I prefer to focus on the Black Panthers use case because there is an interesting cognitive dissonance in the modern left in that anti-racism and gun control are…

As a Canadian, I’m always confused at how safe Americans think a gun makes them when in the woods. Guns are not a good defence against many wild animals. Get some bear spray, it is dramatically more effective and will not kill somebody as easily if you accidentally shoot a person in the dark! Point taken about the civil rights marches though

In New Jersey, bear spray is also illegal (or it was when I last lived there, 6 years ago). And this is in a state that acknowledges that there's a problem with bear overpopulation.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#704

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #684

jcranmer wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In brief form: he posits that if the law were constrained only to the militia, and not the masses of people that may comprise it, then it would be quite a pointless amendment as the very government it seeks to protect individuals from could undermine it by inaction or neglect in regards to the formation of that militia. It should be noted that the Bill of Rights was originally interpreted to only limit the actions…

Perhaps the militia, as a social institution, would correct the issues we see with gun ownership in the US today. The militia is always in its construction open to everyone, whereas the gun community is seen as a kind of subculture today. The militia brings people together in a context where the underlying story about arms is not one of power, violence or even self-defence but rather one of duty, personal discipline,…

It's interesting that militia are looked at with a lot more suspicion than individual gun ownership. Buy a gun as a mentally-healthy individual with no prior criminal record, and nobody bats an eye. Get together with a few hundred of your gun-toting buddies to train together, and the FBI is probably going to come knocking, unless you're a private security contractor with an obvious profit motive.

Possibly says a lot about what the government does or does not consider a threat.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#705

Post by diminoten » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

CapricornNoble wrote: post #536

diminoten wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you've thought this through; you won't be fighting soldiers in your little quest for rebellion, you'll be fighting your neighbor, because your neighbor thinks you're a fucking dumbass who he'd rather kill than reason with, because of how little you've respected honest discourse and conversation over a long period of time. To create an American insurgency would be to threaten everyone around you, and no…

>>>There is absolutely no such thing as the "American spirit of defending yourself from tyranny", whoever told you that sold you a lie. "The means of defense against a foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." —James Madison[1] "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." —Thomas Jefferson[1] "What country before ev…

> The Revolutionary War was not a precedent, it was a single violent act by a unified people. What you're talking about is literally the opposite of unification.

You dropped this when you quoted me. I wonder why...

To think that we should resort to violence instead of using the systems in place for peaceful negotiations is insane.

Also, interesting how you only quoted slave-owning inspirations of Southern Democrats, who buried their heads in the sand, preferring to talk high mindedly in their ivory towers about the Constitution than actually fix the immense problems facing the people they purportedly wanted to help.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#706

Post by carapace » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

no_opinions wrote: post #576

loquor wrote: post #349

This might sound alarmist, but do you think China is the biggest upcoming global problem after climate change? For two reasons: 1. China has a totalitarian ruling system. They intend to realize George Orwell's 1984. 2. Present-day China essentially has no ethics. Take the US in comparison. No matter how perverse the people in power become and even if they do messed up things, the US has some founding morals and princ…

It may be helpful to differentiate Chinese people and society from its government. I view Chinese people individually, and on the whole, as very humanistic. The real question is what would China look like if its system represented the sentiment of its people? I think they like private property, inheritance not being taxed, and in general focusing on their own lives without interruption. Like anywhere else, many Chine…

> It may be helpful to differentiate Chinese people and society from its government.

Not to mention some 50M+ Chinese that don't live in China.

> Overseas Chinese (traditional Chinese: 海外華人/海外中國人; simplified Chinese: 海外华人/海外中国人; pinyin: Hǎiwài Huárén/Hǎiwài Zhōngguórén) are people of ethnic Chinese birth or descent who reside outside the territories of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Although a vast majority are Han Chinese, the group represents virtually all ethnic groups in China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese

Chinese culture is much bigger, older, and grander than the CCP.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#707

Post by nkurz » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

0xADADA wrote: post #693

nvahalik wrote: post #18

> Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator This is why we have the second amendment. And the constitution as the thing to which office-holders swear allegiance to rather than to "the party" or "the president".

Police shoot & kill unarmed people in the United States every. fucking. day. 2019: Jeremy Connolly, Wallace Wilder, Bobby Ray Moore, Raymond Lewis Williams, Channara Tom Pheap, Dennis Carolino, Chad Michael Breinholt, Riley Eugene Peay, Michael Tuck, James Crowe, Amari Malone, Michael Lopez, Jared R. Nelson, Schaston Theodore Lamarr Hodge, Mike Parsley, Uzzle Jerome, Rashad Cunningham, Jovany Mercado-Bedolla, Jamie F…

Your formatting makes it look like you are giving examples of unarmed people who are shot by the police, but your list doesn't reflect this. Here's what I found looking at the first three names:

Jeremy Connolly: Armed with a knife. "The KBI says police shot Connolly after they found his 71-year-old grandmother, Linda Kromer, stabbed to death inside his home in the 2000 block of Harold Avenue. Officers heard noises in the basement and found Connolly in a bedroom with the door closed. He was armed with a knife." https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Man-dies-from-injuries-in-...

Wallace Wilder: Probably not armed. "Wallace Wilder died Wednesday afternoon after being shot at his Gordo apartment in Pickens County. He had long ago been diagnosed as a bipolar schizophrenic and even was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity in a Tuscaloosa County killing in the 1980s..." https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2019/08/man-killed-by-ala...

Bobby Ray Moore: Armed with a gun. "Authorities have identified a man they say was killed after pointing a loaded gun at San Joaquin sheriff's deputies in Stockton." https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/stockton/man-shot-a...

While we do have a terrible problem in the US with police shootings, it's unhelpful when misleading claims like this are made. Where did you get this list of names? Did the source claim that all were unarmed?

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#708

Post by 24gttghh » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #79

onion2k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing the original Americans did when protesting the massively better trained and armed British Army. Get saved by the French? ducks

It‘a kind of ironic, the French were so focused on screwing over the British, that they nearly bankrupted themselves and raised a generation of freedom fighting officers. Both eventually led to food shortages and revolution.

>they nearly bankrupted themselves

They did bankrupt themselves. The Crown treasury was completely empty in 1788.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#709

Post by justaguyhere » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

Saw some of the videos and reports, it is awful. One thing I don't understand - these cops are also from HK, correct? The protestors are fighting for the cops rights too, correct? If that is true, what is going on in the mind of a cop who is beating an unarmed protestor?

Or are these cops from mainland China?

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#710

Post by CharlesColeman » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #698

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear states don't attack other nuclear states for a reason. NYC, LA, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Huston, Dallas are all potential targets if the US declares war. Most of the US army would be going to war with no home to go back to.

If China did a nuclear attack, the US Army wouldn't be involved at all in any war. They'd sit back while the US Air Force and Navy completely nuked China. There wouldn't be an invasion because there'd be nothing left to invade at that point, so no army would be needed. Remember, the US's nuclear arsenal is far, far larger than China's. Such a conflict would be devastating to the US (and to many other places due to fa…

>>>> But, the idea of the US “stomping out” the PRC (or even somehow “just” rejecting it from Hong Kong) and installing its own preferred government is downright insane.

> Remember, the US's nuclear arsenal is far, far larger than China's. Such a conflict would be devastating to the US (and to many other places due to fallout), but China would cease to exist.

And if the US's war aim was to liberate the Chinese people from dictatorship, it would have failed miserably in that case, having destroyed them instead.