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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

The US government denied science before when it came gun control, birth control, abortion and cannabis, so this is just the next step backwards.

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Which "science" has been denied about gun control? The question of gun rights is a moral one not scientific.

The morality of guns is affected by their impact. If nobody every died from a gun who would if anyone owned one? But the US congress specifically barred federal collection of data on gun deaths so that no factual conclusions could be drawn.

Do you have a citation for that? I've not heard of this and I follow the issue relatively closely. I also find gun death stats pretty widely available and broken down to pretty small geographical areas from various governmental (not necessarily just federal though) and non-governmental organizations.

I do remember having read that a lot of law enforcement agencies don't collect, or collect in a way that makes it hard to tabulate shootings by officers- but a) I don't have a cite for that, it was a while ago, and b) that's also up to individual enforcement agencies, not federal.

Umm, it's not a secret or obscure law that bars the CDC from studying gun impact:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996)

- The Congressman Who Restricted Gun Violence Research Has Regrets: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jay-dickey-gun-violence-...

- The ban has supposedly been lifted: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/...

- Some more history: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.as...

- some background: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-gun-re...

And I love this entry on a blog site (Forbes): Why The Centers For Disease Control Should Not Receive Gun Research Funding: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/12/why-the-ce...

The reasoning? "There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control. "

The most glaring example is Congress taking away funding from the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence (I think they still do some reports based on data collected by others but not their own original research). While gun crimes get some attention, particularly mass shootings, accidents and suicides account for most gun deaths and injuries.

https://www.sciencealert.com/review-of-130-studies-finds-pow...

You can have gun rights and gun control you know..

Those are a lot of different topics that you are attempting to wedge into the same point of view. Even though it should be allowed, abortion is an issue of social morality. So is gun control. Yes, you can draw statistics about these things but I'd be hesitant to call it science and I would be even more hesitant to say that protecting our rights to own weapons is a step backwards.

Denying us the freedom to bear arms (as our governing leaders and peacekeepers do) and further diminishing the power of the citizen to keep his government in check is the step backwards, my friend. We may yet see another revolt in America if things continue to get worse. I don't think we will see anything like that in, say, the UK. And revolt was an inalienable right handed to us by our thoughtful forefathers who knew the government would continue to encroach on its citizens to the point of becoming a threat to them, by its very nature.

You don't need guns to revolt. You need motivation, organization and persistence. Of all likely scenarios, the one where the people defeat the government because of the guns in their nightstands seems the most unlikely. A coordinated strike for several days would be much more effective. A revolt with guns will most likely result in seperate states of America, because gun bearing parties will try to fill up the vacuum. Not a good scenario at all.

[citation needed]

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