I feel we're riding a knife's edge and there's a hurricane brewing in the gulf of absurdity.
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Incidentally, I feel like this is why it is so hard to actually learn from history. You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
More posts debating the justification for killing 11 people in a boat in the Caribbean who did not pose an imminent threat.
HN rules do not prevent any of these discussions.
But here we have a individual who advocated those killings.
Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.
On HN it's perfectly fine to justify all this violence, to argue that the violence is regrettable but necessary, but any equivalent discussion about this one individual is somehow beyond the pale.
I'm an outside observer, but isn't that the point of the right to bear arms in your constitution? I don't think the people who wrote it were naive enough to not understand guns could be used for evil purposes, so inherently they supported the price of the deaths of innocents as a trade off for the benefits of guns, right?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
There’s endless legal debate how this should be interpreted, but it’s not obvious that there was an assumption that there would be mass individual gun ownership.
The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.
On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.
Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history
My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.