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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

I happened to catch a Radio 4 documentary [0] on Sunday about the government's "Prevent" strategy, which aims to find evidence of extremism in places such as schools and "nip terrorism in the bud". It featured several worrying stories (including a school calling the police because a boy was talking about a toy gun he'd been given as a present [1]).

The most worrying part was when they interviewed a senior police officer and he actually said words to the effect of:

"We are operating in a pre-criminal space."

And went on to attempt to justify retaining people's data when they have intervened in this way.

So they are now actually talking openly about pre-crime, and using people's children against them.

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08yp16m

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jan/27/bedfordshire...

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The PREVENT strategy could have been useful. But schools over-report (because that's the safest thing to do when you're compelled to report) and there doesn't seem to be sensible triage in place to filter out over-zealous referrals.

Here's an example of what the PREVENT agenda should be about: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWFC/HCJ/2016/9.html

or this case: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2016/3171.html

> The PREVENT strategy could have been useful.

No, it couldn't have been. It's a mistake to believe that any prevention strategy will work on a large scale, and the reason is you'll always get too many false positives like that [1].

It's not just an issue with schools being too eager to report. It will happen in any scenario, including inside intelligence agencies if you force them to go after any "remotely potential terrorist". There will be thousands and thousands of false positives.

[1] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f...

> thousands and thousands of false positives.

Or, for Iraqis from 2003-2007, one truly egregious one.

I have no problem, in principle, with the prevent strategy. If impressionable children are at risk of being brainwashed into a dangerous ideology, then the state should step in, just as it does with any other form of abuse.

Hasn't "pre-crime" always been a part of policing, in the form of intelligence gathering and crime prevention?

My main concern is schools, and (increasingly) the police acting irrationally and disproportionately.

I feel it is the government that are brainwashing impressionable children with dangerous ideology and I'd prefer it if the stepped out.

That's an interesting counter-argument, thanks.

But I still don't think I agree with you. The problem here is that it's left up to police to decide what is a "dangerous ideology". It's not something that you can decide in advance and make objective criteria for. The potential for police to abuse these powers (either through corruption or simply being over-zealous) is enormous. This is how you end up with a Green Party politician being added to the register of "Domestic Extremists", to give one of many examples.

How do you feel about the banning of toy weapons - including water pistols, plastic swords, bows & arrows, rubber knives?

(Personally I think it's a fine idea, but many of my thoughts are easily taken out of context.)

Next they take your car.

Why? Cars kills way more people than guns. Often not because of a need to get from a to b but because of reckless driving just for the fun of it. So - you could argue - you should not only need to have a drivers permit but a driving permit for your actual trips.

Ok. Maybe cars should be banned. Or at least restricted to people with a legitimate reason like politicians and doctors.

But do you think it will end there? If we give up cars then air traffic would be a natural next step...

You see?

This is why I defend the right to have guns, the right to modify cars, have real crypto, say almost[0] anything you want. Because it is a cheap insurance against a society that we really really want to avoid. Because the majority of people who have been killed have been killed by their own or a neigbouring country - not by their neigbours who happened to have a personal gun.

[0]: including: "I belive the person behind reitanqilds account is stupid"

Not including: "Hi guys! Lets start a fundraiser to kill <anyone>"

> Next they take your car.

But cars are useful and, on average safer, for many / the majority of people that use them. Guns are, on average, not so useful / safe. Note that I'm averaging this across the planet, not just across one small (5% of global population) country with a lot of strong opinions on the matter.

> Why? Cars kills way more people than guns.

I know it's a pithy aphorism, but in the same way that guns don't kill people, cars don't kill people either. It's a matter of mitigating the risk of misuse of one or the other (or both). And, as I say, cars have a very important benefit for a lot of people. Guns ... less so.

In any case you've missed my point.

We don't have toys that we hand out to toddlers and < 10yo's that encourage the emulation of lethal activities by means of turning a vehicle into a weapon -- but we do with plastic facsimiles of weapons. I was asking should we be discouraging the latter.

You turn that into a 'if the kiddies don't have plastic semi-automatic weapons, then we'll have to give up private transport, and then we won't be able to use commercial airlines'.

Aside: there's sufficient natural experiments out there that demonstrate the benefits of gun control compared to, say, the USA's approach. While I respect your preferences here, it's difficult to make a compelling argument.

> Guns are, on average, not so useful / safe.

To be fair, I don't think many people are killed by toy guns. One thing I'll never forget from the land of Orwell is this from 15 years ago (virtually to the day, ironically enough):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2168430.stm

    Three 12-year-old children were arrested
    by five police officers who then fingerprinted
    them and took DNA samples, after the youngsters
    were seen playing with a toy gun.

And equally, that wasn't my point -- I am not suggesting toy guns are responsible for many deaths (though there are stories of people using fake guns and being shot by the police 'in good faith').

It's the normalising of 'playing with guns' by handing over toy guns to children that I suspect is something a healthier society could happily eschew without losing much in the way of civil liberties.

In Australia accurate replicas are illegal IIRC - toy weapons are necessarily brightly coloured, to reduce the risk of being mistaken as a real weapon.

I actually somewhat agree when it comes to toy guns.

At the same time: if we go down this path then we should also ban action movies and descritions of war in literature (I grew up without tv and just read about it as a kid an I was as obsessed with war and fight against the Germans (i.e. nazis) as anyone where I came from.)

To borrow a phrase from you: it's the normalization of criminalization of things tuat worry me.

> We don't have toys that we hand out to toddlers and < 10yo's that encourage the emulation of lethal activities by means of turning a vehicle into a weapon

You obviously never played with your toy cars properly as a child...

>But cars are useful and, on average safer, for many / the majority of people that use them. Guns are, on average, not so useful / safe. Note that I'm averaging this across the planet, not just across one small (5% of global population) country with a lot of strong opinions on the matter.

Do you have the numbers to back that up?

> Do you have the numbers to back that up?

Seriously?

Do you mean car .vs. gun, or gun harm/death differentials between countries with (broadly) different attitudes towards gun ownership and use?

The latter is pretty easy to find numbers. Wikipedia [1] (sort by last column) for countries by fire-arm death, or [2] estimated number of guns (ownership) per capita. Comparing gun deaths around the world, humanosphere[3] has some nice stats (from 2016-06) dispelling the 'other countries without so many guns just use knives' argument. Actually, that article has some hugely sobering comparisons with some highly risky parts of the planet. CBS posted an article in 2016-02 [4] comparing gun deaths in the USA with other countries - quoting a study published in the AMA earlier in the year.

If you mean the former - that's a trickier thing to evaluate. Less people have access to a gun than a car, for starters, and most people use a car much more often than they use a gun. Cars are designed to transport people and goods - guns are designed to cause damage - so defining 'accidental use' of both is an interesting question. A bit of quick googling comes up with some numbers, suggesting guns are now - in absolute terms - the cause of death for more USA citizens than cars ... but naturally there's some dispute about how those numbers are determined, and some strong interest in not comparing those stats to other countries.

On the other hand, if you think gun ownership should be legal, popular, loosely regulated, and enshrined in law, then you're probably well prepared to disregard any argument to the contrary. Any 'but people die from car accidents' rebuttal <sic> is pretty disingenuous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c... [3] http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2016/06/visualizing-gun-... [4] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-u-s-gun-deaths-compare-to-ot...

>If you mean the former - that's a trickier thing to evaluate. Less people have access to a gun than a car, for starters, and most people use a car much more often than they use a gun. Cars are designed to transport people and goods - guns are designed to cause damage - so defining 'accidental use' of both is an interesting question. A bit of quick googling comes up with some numbers, suggesting guns are now - in absolute terms - the cause of death for more USA citizens than cars ... but naturally there's some dispute about how those numbers are determined, and some strong interest in not comparing those stats to other countries.

I'm interested in both car accidents vs gun accidents and car accidents vs all gun related deaths, especially in countries with sane gun (e.g. well thought out, not let's ban everything) regulation that aren't the US.

Here's some stats that I've found just now:

Switzerland: gun related deaths per 100k people: 3.01, with 3.3 being the traffic accidents number.[1][2]

Czech Republic: gun related: 1.8, traffic accidents: 6.1.[3][2]

1 - http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/switzerland

2 - http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/czech-republic

3 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> ... especially in countries with sane gun (e.g. well thought out, not let's ban everything) regulation that aren't the US.

Sanity is in the eye of the permit-holder, I suspect.

Most countries seem to rarely change their gun laws, having inherited them from various historical events (or fears of possible events).

In Australia we had a major gun law change back in the 1990's in response to a lunatic shooting several dozen people - but I don't know offhand of any other societies that have successfully re-considered their laws and attitudes towards gun ownership.

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