Cars are more dangerous than guns and should be banned immediately. | Hacker News Reader

Cars are more dangerous than guns and should be banned immediately.

heritage.org

11 pointsamichail33 comments

Cars are banned in most places. They're only allowed in roads and parking lots, and even then with severe restrictions. Start driving your car on the sidewalk or across someone's front yard and you'll be rapidy arrested.

Cars are dangerous with those rules already in place. Should we ban cars from more places such as city centers?

Yes, of course. That would be a nice start.

"Start driving your car on the sidewalk or across someone's front yard and you'll be rapidy arrested."

Not if you're good. n00b.

I'm very strongly pro-gun, but I don't want to see political articles on Hacker News. Take it to reddit.

I second that. I've blocked Reddit (even programming.reddit) because it's a productivity killer for me. Coming here still feels work-related and gives me a tremendous motivation boost, and I'd like News.YC to stay that way.

The danger of something is not the only factor in banning it. It's the danger : utility ratio. Cars are dangerous, but their utility is very high. Guns are also extremely dangerous, and their only utility is their danger - they are made to kill people (and protect, as a side effect). We ban guns because we consider their utility low compared to their danger (replacing them with police and a civil society).

This kind of posts just make me laugh, can someone really compare cars and guns?

I don't have the numbers but I'm pretty sure that heart attacks kills more people than cars and guns together, should we ban Mc Donalds?

or hearts? ;-)

Amichall, are you a troll? I mean this in the nicest possible way, but when I look at your submission record, you either don't think things through before posting, or you're deliberately trolling.

He seems to be like a troll in the sense that he likes to stir up controversy, but I don't think he has the same bad intentions as a troll. The hallmark of a troll is to engage people in long, acrimonious back-and-forths that push the thread to the right side of the page.

This post doesn't belong on this service - can anyone delete it?

The editors mark content they really don't want here as "dead", which means you don't see it unless you have the "showdead" option turned on in your profile. I don't think they ever delete posts.

What we need are robot cars and robot guns. Folks are working on both :) cars: http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp

guns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMkV8E2re9U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQf0Q0JEdtE

Far more appropriate for this site! I'm fairly impressed with this homemade automated sentry gun myself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al-4_1kUBLc

Yah, I've had a number of email threads with Aaron Rasmussen, the guy behind that system. Smart guy, now working on a startup call US Mechatronics http://www.usmechatronics.com

I love that it was "just" a summer project and I love that he tested on his brother.

They also did a pretty cool Wii controled samurai sword slashing robot arm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qEotHQgUsg

What we need is the iCleanSweep to eliminate home invaders and clean the floors.

the iBigDog helps eliminate home invaders while making your floor dirty. Is that close?

The danger of something must be balanced with its utility. Cars are (sadly) unavoidable.

The "externalities" (CO2, traffic) are less extreme - at least on a per-unit basis, than threatening someone, or actually shooting them. We have the means, if not the will to make some attempts at calculating and taxing them. I wonder what those sorts of calculations would look like if you calculated a value for each person killed by guns in a given year and spread that out over their sales in a tax of some kind. Hrm. Anyway, yeah, cars are useful, guns I can and do live without.

Your comparison is invalid because you're comparing externalities from legal use of cars to externalities from illegal use of guns. Compare the externalities of legal use of cars (pollution, traffic, some crashes) to legal use of guns (pollution from lead and propellants, some accidental shootings) and illegal use of cars (crashes due to DUI, reckless driving, racing) to illegal use of guns (assault, murder).

Ok, so throw them all in there and see what comes out, it would be interesting.

Oops... I saw your other post about it not belonging here. I agree, let's drop it.

And I'm even more guilty for continuing it after posting that.

Dropped.

I've avoided driving a car for my whole entire life and so did everybody else for thousands of years before they were invented.

Cars aren't designed to kill. Guns are.

That said, take it to Reddit.

Great answer.

Guns are designed to propel bullets quickly and accurately. This is used for whatever people want to use it for, including sport, murder, and saving lives.

and I'm sure the gun industry earns billions of dollars each year just from people who loves sports!

why do you focus on sports instead of self defense?

I don't have a gun, in fact I believe that having a gun for self defense may increase your possibilities of getting killed, let me explain it.

Where I come from people are not trying to kill you, they are trying to steal your wallet or something, and if someone points a gun on me, i would prefer to give that person my wallet than to take out a gun.

Its just my opinion and I don't want to take the risk of someone shooting me because I pulled out a gun.

let me explain it.

And let me explain pi:

Pi is exactly THREE.

Actually, there's no "you" or "me" explaining it. The math behind the question is complicated and most people instantly fall into the mistake of pretending it is simple.

http://www.google.com/search?q=more+guns+less+crime

From Amazon's review,

In retrospect, it perhaps should not have been surprising that increasing the number of civilians with guns would reduce crime rates. The possibility of armed victims reduces the expected benefits and increases the expected costs of criminal activity.

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

It is in fact a complicated question, let me say that you are focusing only in US statistics.

That assumption may not work in other countries.

I am not anti-gun or anti-hunting. But "sport" usually means killing things (unless you're talking clay pigeons), and so does saving lives. Injuring at least. They are designed to propel bullets quickly and accurately so that the bullets can strike living things. Shooting cans isn't the intended purpose (although it can be a lot of fun).

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