Hacker News Reader

> would take the same tack on reporting terrorist incidents. Wouldn't it make sense to say we shouldn't report on them, given that attitude?

I had a muslim coworker recently self-radicalize with online ISIS videos and attempt to carry out a truck attack against national harbor. It didn't make it out of local news because the FBI nabbed him a few hours before the attack was to take place.

I think that's a good thing. If the media blew it up, no doubt it would have inspired others to try the same.

If the media published that the FBI was highly effective and stopped a terrorist before they could do anything useful? Why is that inspiring?

doubt

The biggest puzzle to me is how a lot of Americans I talk to that equate 2A with 'freedom'. I have seriously had conversations with some people who believe that we are _less_ free here in Australia that them in the US because we do not have the right to bear arms.

I think that definition of 'freedom' has just become so conflated or twisted of late that it really needs to be decoupled from the overall culture and re-examined.

Today I read tweets from pundits and politicians advocating for armed guards to be at every 'peaceful gathering' in order to ensure safety in the US. I grew up in an authoritarian S/E Asian country where there were policemen or soldiers on literally every street corner with an automatic weapon slung around their front and with one hand close to the trigger. This is the very antithesis of 'freedom' to me.

> I have seriously had conversations with some people who believe that we are _less_ free here in Australia that them in the US because we do not have the right to bear arms.

You seem to be conflating "freedom" with "safety". Often they're correlated, but in this case they conflict.

Under what definition of freedom does having less right to defend yourself make you more free?

I understand how you might see the tradeoff as worth it - some safety purchased at a cost of freedom. But expanding the list of things that you're not allowed to do doesn't seem like it could possibly be interpreted as expanding freedom. Same argument for drug or alcohol prohibition, religious restrictions, etc.

We absolutely have the right to defend ourselves here in Australia. With guns even, no less.

I used to own several (bolt action, 5 shot internal magazine capacity) rifles because I used to competition shoot. I sold them off years ago because I stopped competing and just didn't need them lying around the house, rusting. There you go - freedom to own guns or not.

I could probably also get a handgun if I wanted, but I would need to renew my licence and pass strenuous background checks and prove to the police that I store it safely, AND I have to be a continual member of a gun club and shoot regularly with others so they can assess my gun handling skills (and I guess also my mental state) on a regular basis.

What I absolutely CANNOT do is to go and buy a semi automatic gun with a magazine capacity to slaughter an entire school room full of kids without having to reload. What the heck would _any_ civilian in a peaceful country want/need such a weapon? On the flipside, it also means I am free to enjoy the fact that my kids can go to school every day with a less than .001% chance that some maniac will walk into their classroom and mow them down.

To close off this post, and to end that illusion of "I can protect my family with a gun" hero storyline - About 3 years ago we had someone break into our house in the middle of the night. I was woken up by the sound of my son yelling at someone to get the fk out of his room so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a small wooden baton that I keep under our bed.

When I threw open our bedroom door, I saw a shadowy figure run past it in the dark corridor. To this day, I am glad I grabbed the baton instead of an (imagined, non existent) loaded gun, because my first instinct was let fly at the fleeing figure, only to realise a few seconds later that it was my own son, giving chase to the intruder who was fleeing ahead of him. I could have killed my own son if I had a gun in my hand in that split second of rage and confusion.

Later, we found out that the police nabbed the intruder, who turned out to be a 15 year old boy that lived a couple of streets away. Had I shot HIM, I would have had to live with the thought that I had killed someone's child. I cannot do that. I prefer to live with the _freedom_ of not having the guilt of taking someone else's life on my conscience.

You talked a lot about why you think guns are not necessary in a peaceful society. Of course, this isn't why people think that citizens should be allowed to have them. The reason is to resist organized violence, which can arise over time or without warning. It's not just about stopping burglars.

However the more critical problem with what you wrote is that it doesn't actually attempt to disprove anything I said. You simply reiterated a bunch of arguments against gun ownership.

You didn't actually say why adding to the list of things you're not allowed to do here makes you more free. And I think that's because it's definitionally impossible to demonstrate.

Would you say that alcohol prohibition 'expands freedom' because it reduces drunk driving deaths?

The definition of freedom is being allowed to do things. It doesn't mean being allowed to do only good things, or things which are good in some particular person's opinion. It means I can do something that you would rather I did not do. That's freedom. Freedom to do what others want you to do is not freedom.

At what point do you draw the line though? If your intent with the second amendment is to, as it says, stop a potentially tyrannical government, then do you also have the freedom to buy hand grenades? How about shoulder mounted surface to air missiles to stop those pesky government F-16s? Some drones with Hellfire rounds? An M1-Abrahams to drive down to the corner store in case an uprising should start when you are out getting the milk?

Are your neighbours free to mine the road outside your house in case insurgents should drive up some day? How about them buying some uranium and building a small detonator in their garage? Or perhaps brewing some toxic cocktail of poison gas in the local primary school science lab?

Any of the above can be classed as a weapon to deter others, never mind the unintended consequence of accidental (or deliberate) discharging of any of them killing multiple innocent people. If you cannot purchase any of the above at a local dealership, then are you really free, when your government can outgun you at any point in time?

I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening.

I got rid of my guns when we had kids. The very very tiny chance that I would need to use a gun against an intruder was outweighed by the even larger chance that one of my kids may have found my rifles and thought of them as play toys. Or the even larger chance that someone could burgle our house when we were not there and take them. I was free to choose what I wanted to do, and I still do not feel any less protected or safe in my own home, or while walking down the street, or when sending my kids to school, or when visiting a bar or attending a concert... or doing pretty much anything that a 'free' American is actually dead scared to do in their own country today.

Discussion about heavier weapons is interesting and worthwhile; there is a line there. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about guns right now. If the line of policy ever gets past guns we can all have a debate about hand grenades and RPGs.

Howver, again, you are slipping sideways off the topic we're discussing. You're discussing what good policy is towards weapons. That's not what we're debating. This thread is about what it means to be free.

If you could buy an RPG launcher, you would undoubtedly be more free than if you could not. This is by definition. It doens't mean you'd be safer, or better, or that this is good policy. It just means you'd be more free.

"I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening."

This definition matches the word 'safe', not the word 'free'. (If you disagree, I wonder what your definition of 'safe' would be that differs from this?)

As a technical point of fact, Americans can buy tanks, missiles, hand grenades, and most any other conventional weapon if they wish, there is no prohibition under Federal law and an existing process for doing so. In practice, it is a hassle and weapons are extremely expensive so only a handful of wealthy collectors ever dabble in it.

You are correct, you'd definitely lose the freedom to own a gun that fires 10 rounds a second, to defend your home. In Australia you'd just have to make do with the freedom to own a bolt-action.

On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.

Freedom would expand.

Three massive pieces of wrongness in this post.

First, people in America can't own guns that fire '10 rounds a second' without a class 3 firearms license, which is very rare. Such guns are basically never used in mass shootings.

Second, depending on who you need to defend your home from, you may want such a gun. For example, if government or government sanctioned groups are a threat. An example of this is the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Is not just about burglars, it's about gas chambers and political threats. Always has been.

Finally, redefining safety as freedom is a truly absurd abuse of language which wipes out a critical distinction that has been heavily discussed for a long time. If this is what it takes for you to make your point make sense, your point doesn't make sense.

Just admit it. You want more safety. You're willing to give up freedom (or rather, sacrifice the freedom of others) to get it. No need to play ridiculous semantic games to pretend there are no tradeoffs here.

Again, you are very correct. There's always tradeoffs where freedom is concerned. For example, you may be free to bring a gun into your home for defence, but the tradeoff is that you and your family are 3x freer to die from gunshot wounds as a result.

Also very cool and correct of you to support the restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade.

You're correct to say safety isn't freedom. However, being alive definitely contributes to freedom. Gun safety and being alive are correlated :) Remember, trigger discipline!

America is definitely an outlier in terms of gun deaths. I don't know much about the situation in South Africa, but it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men.

Also interesting that you'd consider government sanctioned groups as a threat. Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so? Why do you think so little of our troops?

"you may be free to bring a gun into your home for defence, but the tradeoff is that you and your family are 3x freer to die from gunshot wounds as a result."

Do I need to say this? Correlation does not equal causation.

"restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade"

I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.

"it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men."

I wasn't talking about 'gun violence', I was talking about political violence; those African killers are not necessarily using guns. You didn't understand me, clearly, but nice to immediately slip in a racism accusation there.

Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.

"Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?"

The rest of what you're saying seems to be some kind of rhetorical trick; speak plainly if you have a point to make.

I don't have any guns and I never said I was American, but I appreciate the stereotyping and assumptions. Clearly, imagining me as a truck-driving beer-swilling hillbilly, or whatever racist steretotype you prefer, makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying, because you clearly didn't engage with any of it.

> Do I need to say this? Correlation does not equal causation.

It has been backed up by numerous studies which control for that sort of thing.

> I never stated any such support, and that is not the definition of an assault rifle, it's the definition of an automatic weapon.

Awesome, reasonable gun control for all! Don't even need a handgun, really.

You: > I was talking about political violence

Me: > political violence in America

> Of course it's perpetrated by whites; they're almost 80% of the population.

White men are around 35%, so it's weird that this very vocal and pearl-clutching portion of the population commits so many murders per capita.

> speak plainly if you have a point to make

Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?

> makes it easier to not think about what I'm saying

What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?

>White men are around 35%, so it's weird that this very vocal and pearl-clutching portion of the population commits so many murders per capita.

Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).

In America, whites commit less murders than their population percentage. This is true overall, and amongst men only.

You seem to support holding suspicion of entire identity groups on the basis of crime statistics. If so, you must really hate young black men; they're 4% of the population and commit >50% of American murders. Do you? If not, why the obsessive focus on 'white men'?

>Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so?

I asked you to make your point and you insist again on rhetorical questions with some kind of implied but unspoken point behind them. But sure, I'll answer: Given that I'm not American and I don't own any guns, it's kind of a bizarre question. If they were ordered to invade my country, I think they would. But that'd be a very different world.

>What have you specifically said that you think I'm not thinking about?

Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.

> Men commit more murders than women (in all places and times).

I know, 90-95% in fact! Which makes it interesting that so often people focus on racial issues, like the plight of white south african farmers, when there's a wayyyy larger correlation with violence of all kinds, and gender. An individual gun owner's reason for owning a gun may focus on some abstract interracial political violence, when they're much more likely to be murderer by a young, poor, man.

> Redefining safety as freedom is absurd.

If some level of safety is required in order to live, freedom is contingent on safety. When you're dead you can't own any guns.

How do you feel like "mental illness" argument holds up between AU and US?

I think most people's fears are around unhinged homeless than random shooters.

I feel like if America has a mental illness problem, surely it would be addressed by providing more mental health services perhaps cough universally to the populace somehow. But, it's all rhetoric. If claims there was a mental illness problem were in good faith, we'd see American action on mental health.

"Mental illness" is just a convenient way to dismiss any notion of doing anything about gun violence. It's misdirection. Because, as you point out, we're not going to actually do anything about mental illness. Indeed, half the Congress and all of the Administration is trying to reduce access to health care, which would include mental health care.