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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

Maybe... but two big differences.

First: I live in the UK. I've never wanted to kill someone. If I could legally buy a handgun and use it on a shooting range I would. Let's say someday I, for some reason, become a psycho and want to kill people. Right now I don't have anything like a gun to use, best I could come up with is a kitchen knife. Under US gun law, I'd have a glock, even though when I purchased it I had no intention of using it illegally.

Second: Imagine a psycho in a country where you can't own guns. He could buy a gun on the black market - hell, you can even do that online with bitcoins now - but a.) this creates a waiting time between when he wants to do it and when he can do it, during which he might change my mind and b.) there's a chance he might get caught while buying it - if it's legal to own and carry a gun, then he a killer isn't breaking a law until he starts killing, so a smaller chance of preventing him.

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Each time I'm amazed by the lack of imagination of imaginary killers. "I don't have a gun... well better take my kitchen knife then!" Really? REALLY?

Take your car and ram into people. You will probably be able to kill the same amount (or even more).

And while you're in your car, contrary to simply using a gun, you can't be stopped by someone else having a gun. Anyone wanting to stop you in a timely manner would have to sacrifice himself by driving into you.

It's easy to point the gun, because its sole purpose is to cause harm (be it in defence or offence), but if someone wants to kill, he can do with or without a firearm.

Give person A a gun and person B a car and I suspect I know which one would manage to kill more people.

edit: Assuming they were both trying to kill as many people as possible.

There's also explosives, home-made or otherwise, and more mundane "domestic terrorism" that goes after food (I mean, grocery stores just put out all the food on easy-access display..), city water supplies, electricity, gas lines... It's fortunate that there are very few real psychotics who want to cause a lot of damage, and also that of those few only a few again are intelligent or imaginative. People have a good reason to suspect a lack of imagination of imaginary killers: real ones don't seem to have much of one.

What intrigues me currently about Holmes is that his residence was booby trapped sufficiently that federal experts had to get involved, so he's more capable than the average spree killer. Yet he alerted the authorities about them, he didn't let them "figure it out" with the death of some cops. I don't see any sort of twisted logic in that. But I initially approach this topic with a gamer's "high score" mentality such that even Brevik's count seems small, the behaviors of killers are thus constantly perplexing from that angle.

I often think exactly the same thing about terrorists. What kind of half arsed nutbag thinks "I know, I'll strap some explosives to my underpants and get on a plane. That ought to do it!" ?? If you wanted to do serious damage in a reasonably guaranteed way (i.e. not having to get past strict security checks), why not just walk in to a crowded arrivals hall and detonate yourself there? Same goes for large railway stations, shopping smalls etc. I mean, it doesn't take much imagination.

Either we're very lucky that most terrorists are completely incompetent or the terrorist threat itself is hugely overblown. I think it's the latter.

The ones that get me are the ones where we're strictly not allowed to do something yet it seems that if it was actually dangerous terrorists would be doing it. The most oft-talked about example being using a phone on a flight, another being a flame in a petrol station - if that was dangerous, surely terrorists could target 10s of them with no preparation other than recruitment?

Thing is, few seem to choose anything else if they have ready access to firearms. We commemorate Utøya massacre here today, and it is apparent that Breivik focused on explosives and firearms (both are not trivially obtainable in Norway).

The reason for that is obvious, guns, just as you say, are devices specifically designed to kill efficiently. Yes one could kill with a car, a knife, a golf club, a sharply pointed stick etc but there must be something about firearms that makes military, law enforcement, criminals and libertarians stick to them.

>Take your car and ram into people. You will probably be able to kill the same amount (or even more).

Priscilla Joyce Ford

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/day-terror-came-downtown/cont...

“It looked as though someone had gone through the streets with a lawnmower, mowing people down,” a woman from Canada who’d witnessed the massacre from the Onslow Hotel-Casino tells the Gazette. “It looked like a battlefield—there were bodies all over the place.”

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