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Comment by laverya | Hacker News Reader

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Could you please stop posting ideological battle comments (regardless of which ideology you favor) and generally stop posting in the flamewar style?

It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My apologies.

There's no grounds in the TOS to boot anything that's not a hate group as identified by the SPLC or ADL. Amazon doesn't want to get set up with a lawsuit if they boot a group outside of those bounds on either side of the aisle or if they try to change the rules to fit one group or another.

"can't stop sending money to people they don't like without cutting the entire program" would indeed be a reason to cut off the entire program, yes.

There was a big push last month from Gabbie Giffords and her PAC+501(c)*s to get Amazon to brand pro-gun charities as hate groups

Honest question: why would tech companies oppose those charities in particular?

A lot of people really, really hate guns, and some of those charities really, really love guns. (and one has the reputation among ~half the US population of really, really loving guns, and a reputation in the other half as "Negotiating Rights Away")

The people who really, really hate guns are more likely to work for tech companies than their counterparts, at least in my experience.

Also, Amazon in particular has long banned the sale of a large variety of gun components on their platform - even those that aren't regulated in any state. (bolts, barrels, handguards, stocks... oddly enough they do allow optics)

> The people who really, really hate guns are more likely to work for tech companies than their counterparts, at least in my experience.

Depends on the company, I have worked at a Defense Contractor for example, the sentiment towards guns was pro-guns despite the diverse political views of everyone there.

Gun ownership is split between party lines but not as much as people think. There is still a good chunk of Democrats that own guns (including myself).

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...

Gun ownership isn't the same thing as being anti-gun control. The majority of people, many of them gun owners and haling from both "parties", would like to see some basic restrictions on how quick and easy it is to buy a gun.

I would support good training requirements for gun control.

You can get long guns in Europe, just that there isn't a gun culture and proper training is required. That's how it should be. I staunchly and vehemently oppose California and New York state zeitgeist on "gun control". I would not support California-style restrictions on arms that cuts citizens with a thousand paper cuts and infringes upon fundamental rights. Absolutely stupid laws that are designed for appeasing out-of-touch voter base than actually preventing crime.

> easy it is to buy a gun.

This really needs to be written / said better. It is not as easy as just thinking to yourself, I want a gun, walking into a gun store, grabbing it off a shelf, swiping a card at a self-checkout machine and walking out with a new gun in hand.

This is not the case at all.

There are states with a wait period, there are background checks, there are forms that if you lie on it is considered a felony, the person selling the gun can say no at any moment, if you are being a total creep, chances are they will not sell you a gun. In some states you cannot buy certain firearms before you're 21.

Gun control is a complicated subject. I think the anti-gun / gun control crowd should really step into a gun store and learn first hand what the experience really is when buying a firearm. They don't need to buy anything, but I guarantee the person who sells the gun will be happy to answer any and all questions they have. They literally have to know the process in order to sell guns! You have to be licensed to sell guns in a gun store.

This heavily depends on what the proposed restrictions actually are - and people never seem to actually know what the current restrictions are either.

Ask for Universal Background Checks, and people say "sure". Make a national registry of firearms and criminalize loaning a rifle to a friend for a hunting trip or giving your guns to a neighbor for safekeeping while you're recovering from depression? A lot of people have now completely checked out, and it's the same damn policy. So yes, perhaps most gun owners, when polled, support "some basic restrictions on how quick and easy it is to buy a gun". But that doesn't mean they want to ban all private transfers, which is what the policy proposals always seem to be. (Guess what? Every single sale from a firearms dealer, which includes just about everyone at a gun show, requires a federal background check! And now a defacto 3+day waiting period for people under 21!)

Not to mention the absolute lunacy of "a 15 inch rifle barrel means 10 years in prison", and THAT one has been federal law for quite a few decades.

I'm not sure I would count defense contractors as "tech companies". They're a different category, even if it involves technology. (If tech includes Defense, then why not also Automotive? Or financial, medical... What isn't tech at that point?)

I mean, depends on the company, the one I worked for was solely all software for example, they took a Linux distribution and made a custom distro to be installed on whatever hardware the client chose, it was very niche and single purpose. This was our primary product, our only other alternatives were all software as well. I would highly count that as a tech company.

It's pretty broad these days. Reminds me of Uber, a ride hailing company, aka taxi service. How much of the company needs to be tech vs the service? Like Bell Labs and AT&T?

The lines are either far too broad or far too fuzzy, indeed. Why is Netflix tech and not Disney? Tesla but not Ford? Amazon but not Walmart, Apple but not Dell, or Robinhood but not UBS?

Hell if I know, but I know there's a line there in my mind.

In the case of Craigslist would you call it ecommerce? Probably not, they facilitate contact between buyer and seller, they do not process payments, its not like ebay or Amazon, Uber is a fancy Craigslist.

One of the primary strategies activists have managed to successfully deploy against those groups is through targeting advertisers. Also most tech workers are college educated which is a demographic that (increasingly) supports gun control/does not like the NRA

> Also most tech workers are college educated which is a demographic that (increasingly) supports gun control/does not like the NRA

It's less a college educated versus not and more an urban versus rural issue.

>It's less a college educated versus not and more an urban versus rural issue.

The general mistrust of academia, liberal arts and mainstream science amongst the rural populace suggests those issues overlap quite a bit.

tomato tomato

Tomato potato

You might be confusing correlation as something more substantive

the point is there's not really a way for us to tell which is the "substance". It's all just correlations and it's all just a matter of what aspect you choose to highlight

You don’t think you can isolate variables and analyze effects? For example, you can’t study the opinions of people with high education who live in rural areas?

Group A: College Educated + Urban

Group B: College Educated + Rural

Group C: No post-secondary + Urban

Group D: No post-secondary + Rural

Fairly simple analysis to do, and I suspect (as I think you do) that the trend will align with a split between A/D vs B/C not A/B vs C/D.

Now do it for all the other confounding variables. This is why social science is hard and requires a lot of statistical analysis.

I'm not making any claims one way or another. All I'm saying is knee-jerk assumptions based on a simplified mental model probably isn't a good idea unless you have the data to back it up. (Especially true on complex systems like human value systems).

they could've simply made an ethics committee and removed certain options while still giving users some choice...

We all know how those “ethics committees” go, right? It’d immediately turn into another culture war type issue where very blatant favoritism is shown to certain charities and blatant hostility to others.

What's unethical about supporting the Constitutional rights of Americans?

It all depends on how you phrase it. "Supporting the Constitutional rights of Americans" will get broader approval than "protecting the rights of Neo-Nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods", even though something is only a right when unpopular groups get it too.

If you're of the opinion that gun rights cause massive numbers of deaths in the US, then you might think supporting the NRA or any of their more extreme counterparts is unethical.

those customers were responsible for $19.6B in sales. that’s sort of a bunch of money to say “fuck you” to.

not to mention the ethical backflips you’d have to use to distinguish the SAF from the ACLU.

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