In reading through this comment section, I think that it’s an interesting microcosm that accurately reflects broader American society. And this ostensibly more rational than average group can’t have this conversation without getting heated, so it’s no wonder that our gun laws aren’t evidence-based.
On one side, we have people that are livid that literal children are being murdered - and in schools. And on the other side we have people furious that a right bound up in the fabric of the founding of the country is under threat.
And you know what? Both these sides are right. Children are literally dying in schools. And a foundational right is under threat.
I (of course) don’t have the answer to this or even how to hash it out. In some sense, I don’t think the argument is over facts themselves, I think the disagreement is about the axioms underneath everything.
There are some that have the position that it’s not acceptable that one child die to guns. And if someone has personally lost a child to gun violence, can you blame them? Their axiom is no child can die from guns - the right to life, liberty, etc.
And on the other side, if the primary reasoning behind 2A is discouraging or actively fighting tyranny, why shouldn’t they have a fully automatic machine gun? Why not even more capable weapons than that? Their axiom is that tyranny must not take root here.
Rights are often in tension — definitely in this case. But I don’t really see productive conversations happening along these lines: both sides are too entrenched.
Of course we don't have evidence. Neither side wants good evidence. It's a battle of ideology, not facts.
The gun banners don't want it because most criminals don't have legal guns in the first place. Nothing you can do short of disarming society will have much effect on the criminals and most of them don't want to admit that's their actual objective.
The gun nuts don't want it, either, because it will show some benefits of gun regulations (for example, locking up guns around kids helps.)
I feel like it's confusing to talk about gun deaths and focus on homicides when the biggest contributor to gun deaths (in the US at least) is suicide. As far as I've seen the biggest thing to prevent suicide is delaying and eventually the feeling generally passes. Owning a gun just puts you at a higher risk of killing yourself, and the chances of using it to defend yourself are so slim it doesn't seem worth it to me
I feel it's wrong to try to prevent an adult from committing suicide by legal means. My body my choice and all that, and if you don't control your own life and body are you really free? The government should try to prevent suicides by improving peoples' lives so they'll want to stay alive.
What's the government going to do to prevent someone from feeling low when they're laid off, their wife leaves them, and takes the dog? I mean, sure, if that's worth killing yourself over then there should be legal methods to seek alternate relief (which Oregon and do Canada provide). But having a gun in that momentary low after killing a 30-rack of beer because they're so distraught seems like a great way to lose some really great people.
You must live in a nice, gentrified neighborhood where the rich white people live. My house has never been broken into either; definitely not while I'm inside, so thankfully I do too. Not everyone is so lucky, unfortunately, so I would caution against assuming that everyone lives in such a neighborhood.
That headline is horrendous — but it’s also clickbait so obviously they went with it over better ones.
Actual article point: “ doesn’t mean other gun laws don’t work — just that the research proving it doesn’t yet exist. Scientists I spoke to saw it as an “absence of evidence” problem, stemming from long-standing, intentional roadblocks in the path of gun violence research.”
Isn't this by definition a problem all new legislation is facing. We can't have good evidence whether something new works before it's tried. (and arguably even after a new policy has been introduced, it's pretty hard)
It's telling that gun ownership is so controversial that the Founding Fathers explicitly wrote in that guns were allowed...along with freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, and a bunch of restrictions on what the government could do to you.
Here people are, hundreds of years later, still trying to ban gun. Go figure.
Yes, and of course the Founding Fathers were always in agreement and always right about everything, and nothing they ever said or believed should ever be questioned. And the government that wrote the Second Amendment certainly never supported any gun control laws, restrictions or bans at all.
Never question the narrative. Keep buying guns and keep loving freedom.
Not by current (post 2008, and disagreed on much before that) supreme court interpretation, where the whole part about the free state and militia are a goal statement. Even if you take the militia thing to mean what you think it means, all free (i.e. non-slave/imprisoned) men between the ages of 17/18 and thirty-something would be part of the unorganized militia and required or encouraged to own a gun and other military equipment (like a rucksack, powder, ball, etc.), ready to form up in the case of unrest, invasion, tyranny, etc. I think it was actually 17-36, but don't quote me on that. It would be annoying for SCOTUS to deal with due to problems with women and the draft (congress, are you going to sort that out?), but in theory it could be workable.
> Even the authors of the Rand report say lawmakers should still be putting policies aimed at preventing gun violence into practice now — regardless of what the science does or doesn’t say.
The biggest problem about US gun laws is that they are written in an extremely "all-or-nothing" fashion. There are a bunch of European countries where you can own modern semi-auto rifles and handguns privately, and they don't have the homicide/suicide rates of the US.
The thing is that almost every other country in the world handles private firearms ownership through a combination of:
1. Categorizing firearms on objective criteria, and grouping weapons on what is essentially a risk basis. So manual-action rifles and shotguns might be category A, semi-auto long guns with fixed magazines and revolvers might be category B, semi-auto weapons with detachable magazines might be category C, and so on.
2. Having a tiered licensing system that gates private access to firearms based on which category they fall into. In a fair number of European countries, the basic firearms license is obtainable basically as long as you're an adult citizen without a criminal history who can pass a basic psychological evaluation. The categories and licenses actually vary a ton between countries. Some are quite permissive (e.g. Czechia, Switzerland) and some are very restrictive (e.g Romania).
In the US it's totally different. There is no license for owning a firearm, there is simply legal eligibility (are you an adult, not a drug addict, not a felon, not convicted of domestic violence, etc). As a US citizen, owning firearms operates on a sort of "benefit of the doubt" system where you have the right to own them by default. That's basically the opposite of every other country.
Also, under federal law there is no legal difference between a single-shot .22 and an AR15. The only category based restriction is that handguns can't be sold to under-21s. The only weapons which are meaninfully treated differently are machine guns, "destructive devices" (explosives, launchers, and certain shotguns for some reason), silencers/suppressors, and "short-barreled" rifles & shotguns (defined as having a barrel length under 16 or 18 inches respectively). The thing is, that even these special categories of firearms do not have any advanced legal requirements for ownership beyond those of normal firearms, but they have to be registered and require additional paperwork and processing time to transfer ownership.
On the state level, there are some laws that introduce a license system, some laws that try to restrict certain categories of firearms or magazines, and other things of that nature. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that state-level gun laws are very effective in reducing gun crime. But across the US you have states with every combination of high/low crime and lax/permissive gun laws. It seems like any meaningful change will have to take place on the federal level.
I think the best thing the US could do for everyone is move to a tiered-license system for all firearms. As a part of this, we could get rid of the arbitrary NFA classifications which might help bring support from the pro-gun side. I think this is ultimately wishful thinking however, because I don't think this kind of system would be allowed under the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment.
The idea that “getting shot in the head” is a mysterious phenomenon that needs intense sociological research is so utterly fucking insane that it’s hard to breathe.
It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. The phenomena exists because the object exists and is sold in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister.
> The idea that “getting shot in the head” is a mysterious phenomenon that needs intense sociological research is so utterly fucking insane that it’s hard to breathe.
> It’s the shooters. It’s the shooters. It’s the shooters. The phenomenon exists because the criminals exist and are not imprisoned in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister.
In the uk, we realised it was the people and not the guns. We also saw that you can’t stop people being unreliable and dangerous, but we can get rid of the guns. We did, and we’re better for it.
The UK is island nation with controlled borders.
America is the size of continental Europe.
In America a rocket launcher was found near a elementary school in California.
Rocket Launchers are highly illegal.
We have a massive amount of illegal weapons coming from south of the border.
That's Obama had a big scandal called the fast and furious (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/obama-relents-in-figh...). The illegal guns they sold the cartel were coming back over the border and being used in crimes.
Possibly, but you'd need some big evidence for that, it would need to be a huge population that was hidden from the world in order to make up for the difference. Population stats are pretty hard to hide, so "disappeared" people would count towards the incarceration stats
This is also compared to every other country, so to explain the discrepancy then it would have to be something every country does more than the US
"It’s the trucks. It’s the trucks. It’s the trucks. The phenomena exists because the object exists and is sold in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister."
In foreign countries without second amendment rights criminals just ram trucks into people instead. Since no guns are involved, these don't get reported as "mass shootings", not that it would bring any comfort to the victims and their families [0] [1] [2].
In all seriousness, this isn't Harry Potter where the wand "speaks" to the wizard. An inanimate object won't "convince" someone to commit a crime. Focusing on the human shooting the gun would yield much better results. But say "mental health" and watch everyone suddenly go very silent and ignore the issue. Much easier to blame the evil inanimate object!
Let’s say your child is shot to death at school. Why didn’t you arm them? Why didn’t your five year old have a handgun? Why didn’t your child know how to shoot to kill? Guns are the great equalizer, you know.
I know you're just jerking me around, but to answer your question:
An infant isn't capable of handling any weapon. At around the age of twelve, children, if accustomed to guns, are capable of defending themselves, and have done so, both in the pioneer days and currently.
But, we don't allow children to be armed in school, because not all children are emotionally mature. That's why we set age limits on legal firearm ownership.
We depend on the school staff and facilities to keep them safe and we expect that children will be civilized by their families and their schooling to respect authority. Sadly, that is not always the case, especially in the last few decades.
Using a gun in self defense is a last resort. Lawful gun owners are very reluctant to do so, because they understand the responsibility and ramifications of doing that.
I’m not jerking you around, I’m telling you point-blank that your solution to this problem is the actual problem itself. You have created a utter fucking nightmare world, and now you want to fix it with more nightmares. Fuck you. Fuck your guns. Fuck your lawful gun ownership culture. Fuck you.
> Using a gun in self defense is a last resort. Lawful gun owners are very reluctant to do so, because they understand the responsibility and ramifications of doing that.
Found the person who not only didn't read the article, but is essentially summed up by it.
Yes. It's a jumble, but it implies California is doing great. Actually, it's not. Besides, it appears that the gun murder rate is independent of gun ownership:
It doesn't say that California is doing great. It says that of all the gun laws that California has in place, only 3 have any research behind them to show that is is effective. The other laws may or may not help but the evidence is flimsy.
The point of the entire article is that people are just using simple graphs like the one you linked to without actually doing any studying and then making laws based upon some perceived correlation. California is strict with its rules but it doesn't say that it's a good thing.
You are correct, "great" is probably not the correct word - I think the article claims that California is doing the "right" thing. And, of course, the people who wrote the article know in their hearts what the right thing is, regardless of evidence.
The plot I posted shows that there isn't any correlation between gun ownership rates and the gun murder rates state by state. I haven't looked at the states behind the few outliers, but I suspect that people who do won't like what they find.
It gets even murkier when you include gun suicides, which are half the deaths, in the polemics. People will always find a way, and some states can be more depressing, e.g. winter in New Hampshire.
Edit: That 18 / 100,000 outlier seems to be bogus, I don't see it in the data table.
You do know that the “mass shootings” are almost always done in locations where citizens with legal pistols are not allowed to carry them, i.e. gun-free zones? And when there are armed citizens present, the shooters are usually quickly stopped?
How dare you play coy and cute? The entire fantasy and brand promise of guns is that you (white) will be able to confront nonwhites with deadly force. It’s all vile racism on top, on bottom, and in the interior. Fuck right off with this dogwhistle bullshit.
Oh hey look, it's the bad faith green account. We've all been waiting for you to show up. It wouldn't be a political thread on Hacker News without you.
Guns are not complex devices. Making them illegal does not make them go away. People are not hard to kill and if you want to do a lot of damage it’s hard to beat a can of gasoline or a U-haul. Find something else to cry about.
That’s neither here nor there. Legislation certainly can change the amount of guns available. Compare Canada or Australia which too had similar gun cultures prior to legislation.
Sure it doesn’t get rid of all guns. No one is claiming that it would but that’s an unreasonable bar that’s only set by critics. Even countries with strict gun control still have guns. However gun deaths are more rare because the penalty associated with even holding a gun illicitly are quite high, so in practice the number of guns floating around is lower and their use is really constrained (mainly because the cost of acquiring a gun is higher). Sure, the US has way more private gun ownership than other countries when they took steps towards effective legislation. It’ll take longer for any meaningful legislation to take effect, and only if it’s a national thing to mitigate cross-border transport. And SCOTUSes current ideological bent and strange 2nd amendment interpretation further complicates things at all levels. For what it’s worth the 2nd amendment seems to only ever have been interpreted about national regulations of formal state militias (eg the state’s National guard, police, etc). The reinterpretation in Heller to mean protection of private ownership is both recent (2008) and quite strange. A significantly worse decision than whatever Roe got wrong in legal theory and one that had strict social harm vs Roe which actually at least had positive social outcomes.
You are willfully misinterpreting 2a. Police and national guard are not militias. 'The people' does not mean the state. This is not a recent interpretation. The bill of rights outlines citizen's rights not the state. Obviously the state can have weapons. If you are a US citizen you have some learning to do.
Uh, what? The National Guard most definitely IS the militia. Did you miss the Militia Act of 1792? A whole four years after the 2nd became the law of the land, they formalized the militia into what became the National Guard. You can argue about the militia clause in the 2nd being prefatory, but you really have nothing to stand on when you say the National Guard is not the militia.
Please educate me then cause I could be mistaken. Why was Heller so monumental if the 2nd amendment hadn’t traditionally meant that it applied to state’s rights to armed forces separate from that of the federal?
Up until recently, the "collective right" interpretation was the law of the land. The "individual right" interpretation was argued about but was less than twenty years since became accepted.
Guns are a lot more deadly than other weapons. They are also easy and quick to use. It is pretty common for people to fight and then one pulls out gun and shoots and kills the other. You can kill with knife or improvised weapon but have to mean it. You also have to get close; drive-by shootings are pretty common around here.
You don't have to make them go away, just reduce the numbers so they don't get used in everyday murders. Most murders are crimes of passion and the difference between pulling out gun and having to find weapon will stop most of them.
Britain still has a few illegal handguns, they get used in crimes, but their murder rate is much lower. A good indication that ease-of-killing matters is that murders with shotguns and long guns are pretty rare.
The single most-common weapon used is a handgun, around 4x as common as knives. But the Supreme Court has unambiguously ruled on the constitutionality of handgun bans and refusal to grant handgun licenses. And even under the most expansive gun control position that the Second Amendment only protects guns that existed in 1789... well... pistols were invented in the late 1500s.
Yes. Correct. Also yours is a a bullshit interpretation of a bullshit constitutional amendment that should be amended out. Also you’re not always the best judge of your behavior, which is a natural consequence of the fact that there’s more than one person inhabiting this planet.
I never expressed an interpretation of the 2nd amendment. Clearly you jumped to conclusions about that, as you did my ability to judge my mental state. I'd be perfectly happy to form a militia with some of my comrades, and have the right to bear arms restricted to that context, so long as the government likewise recognized that the right to bear arms has nothing at all to do with personal defense, and thus justifications around "civilians don't need X weapon because it's a weapon of war" don't stand muster.
I'm sure your wife sleeps tight knowing if someone breaks in the only thing protecting her sanctity is your begging. Sounds like you're more concerned with killing yourself than protecting.
Laws circumscribing the behavior of 330 million people should not be made on the basis of lurid rape fantasies that center you as a righteous hero and you personally should not have a gun.
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On one side, we have people that are livid that literal children are being murdered - and in schools. And on the other side we have people furious that a right bound up in the fabric of the founding of the country is under threat.
And you know what? Both these sides are right. Children are literally dying in schools. And a foundational right is under threat.
I (of course) don’t have the answer to this or even how to hash it out. In some sense, I don’t think the argument is over facts themselves, I think the disagreement is about the axioms underneath everything.
There are some that have the position that it’s not acceptable that one child die to guns. And if someone has personally lost a child to gun violence, can you blame them? Their axiom is no child can die from guns - the right to life, liberty, etc.
And on the other side, if the primary reasoning behind 2A is discouraging or actively fighting tyranny, why shouldn’t they have a fully automatic machine gun? Why not even more capable weapons than that? Their axiom is that tyranny must not take root here.
Rights are often in tension — definitely in this case. But I don’t really see productive conversations happening along these lines: both sides are too entrenched.