Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

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>It's the fact that the 23 people killed in school shootings in 2018 - tragic as these deaths are - have managed to take away all the attention from the over 3,000 children killed by motor vehicles that year.

Should we really be comparing the two? I mean, even as a teenage driver, you are warned about the dangers of distracted driving, DD, etc. Automobile accidents are a common occurrence and a risk that people willingly take and accept whenever they enter their car.

I’ve seen multiple stories in a night about automobile crashes on my local news and not national, which is how it should be. Auto accidents usually only affect the community it happened in, not the US as a whole. When we understand the damage—physical and mental—gun violence causes to society as a whole compared to auto accidents, it is no surprise that gun violence is a much more out-of-left-field event than an auto accident.

To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns. Hell, we don’t even have a solid public transportation system that would be able to handle all of the commuters who gave up their cars to combat the auto accident statistics.

> To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read?

I assert that this is a naked strawman. Do you think that Vision Zero and similar projects deserve such a simplistic response?

There are proven ways to reduce automobile deaths, but they require political will and action.

> To combat this, though, would you suggest we ban all motor vehicles? You see how silly that is to read? Even if it is silly to you, attempting to regulate the automotible industry would be a lot harder than putting limitations on available guns.

The main way to prevent these types of mass shootings would be to ban almost all guns. Some might say that is also “silly” to read. Politicians typically point to a specific type such as military-style semiautomatic rifles (“assault weapons”) that are scary—looking but aren’t especially deadly or even commonly used for mass shootings. This most recent mass shooting was committed with a .45 pistol.

Unlike car ownership, gun ownership is also a constitutional right here in the USA, which means you’d need a huge supermajority to repeal that portion of the constitution.

>Unlike car ownership, gun ownership is also a constitutional right here in the USA, which means you’d need a huge supermajority to repeal that portion of the constitution.

Are all type of guns and weapons legal? If there are exceptions how are those constitutional? I am not from US so I do not understand why not work in steps, make very hard to obtain guns that have high potential of killing people, don't make them illegal but make the permit of owning such a gun very hard to obtain and keep defensive guns (low caliber pistols) more easy to get but not too easy. I assume that are people making money selling guns like they are people making money selling cigarettes so there will b a lot of lobby,PR and campaigns to keep the things are they are now.

> very hard to obtain guns that have high potential of killing people

The problem is literally every gun has a “high potential of killing people” unless you are talking about a museum piece from the 18th century or something. Politicians today may act like a certain subtype of weapon, such as “assault weapons”, are especially dangerous but mass shooters are already sadly showing this isn’t the case. Both this VA beach mass shooting and the Virginia Tech mass shooting were committed using pistols.

The vast, vast majority of guns sold and owned in America would fall into the categories of: rifles, shotguns, handguns. All of them, regardless of the caliber or whether they are “semi auto” or use a different modern reloading mechanism (revolver, lever, bolt-action) are deadly weapons.

Regarding our law, the constitution requires the “right to keep and bear arms” be protected. Courts have allowed various bans around the edges of the right, but have prohibited banning any widely-used category of modern firearm: _The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of "arms" that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition--in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute--would fail constitutional muster_ ( https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/554/570.html )

I disagree that all guns have similar potential, a small pistol should have small magazine capacity so a killer would need to perform a reload , at this time someone could stop him, you can make this small , self protection guns have a long reload time by design.

Small caliber bullets have obvious smaller killing potential in my mind, please let me know if my intuition is wrong but a small bullet would have less energy, so it will have a larger drop so it won't be effective on large distance.

What is ironic is that I read here on HN an article about some type of knives that are illegal in New York, so is a bit ironic you can forbid some knives but not some guns(or at least make it harder for people to obtain them)

What I am saying is that although such speculations may even seem like common sense, they have been disproven by contact with reality. (Edit: to add, small weapons are much easier to conceal than a long gun like a rifle or shotgun, and are therefore vastly better for the majority of criminals to use. Homicides from mass shootings are relatively rare and are an example where concealing the weapon isn’t necessarily needed, so large weapons like rifles are a bit more represented there). Edit 2: I guess I would just add again, yes a .22 caliber bullet is smaller and has less impact than a rifle bullet, however, pistols and handguns do kill and are constantly used. Reloading does not take long and even revolvers have “speed loaders”. Range does not matter for the majority of these mass shootings are committed at close range.

Here is an example of “small pistols” that were in the top 10 most used guns by criminals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special

> Nonetheless, three of the top ten types of guns involved in crime (as represented by police trace requests[4]) in the US are widely considered to be Saturday night specials; as reported by the ATF in 1993, these included the Raven Arms .25 caliber, Davis P-380 .380 caliber, and Lorcin L 380 .380 caliber

I am talking about mass shootings not small ones, like the guy snipping people from a tall building window, people with more then one big weapon, this people would do less damage with a small gun. About statistics you can make them to show what you want, I assume if you extend to all the shootings not only the mass ones you get more small guns because probably there are much more small guns around.

About fast reloaders, you can have laws for those too.

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