EDIT: I see my post is being downvoted. I know that it may come across as insensitive to immediately leap to the gun control debate, but frankly I'm more angry than upset by this news. How many times does it have to happen? We have a good 48 hours of emotional outpouring and then everyone forgets it ever happened.
Second mass shooting of the week. "Guns don't kill people, ..."? Please.
Where exactly do I make that assumption? You'll notice that I didn't even call for a blanket ban on guns, just that, as a nation, we could actually sit down and have a serious talk about whether people should be able to own weapons like this one for private use:
[EDIT: I regret posting the link to the rifle, there's clearly plenty of debate about it that detracts from the main topic of discussion- and we don't know any details for definite.]
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/12/justice/oregon-mall-shooting/i...
The sad reality is that most people barely heard about it, because "only" two people died.
Everyday on HN there's this drone about the next Instagram or 37 Signals. Or who will produce better email or flamewars regarding the next dominant mobile OS. Time wasted, honestly (Oh yeah, 'I figured out project management, again.')
Where's the debate on HN on how best to handle gun control in the U.S. using technology? Can this community not produce answers for those questions?
Computers are logical and deal in absolutes. People are the exact opposite. Gun control is an emotional, sometimes irrational issue, and the solutions (I suspect) lie in societal changes. Gun control doesn't need advanced technology, as far as I can see. But I'd be interested to know what ideas people have.
If we really believed in the 2nd Amendment, people would be allowed to own serious weapons of war but not be allowed to own concealable personal firearms.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/14/shooting-reported-at-co...
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CONNECTICUT_SCHOOL...
"A law enforcement official in Washington said the attacker was a 20-year-old man with ties to the school and that one of the guns was a .223-caliber rifle."
We don't know the backstory here, but usually these events are all about someone whose life is spinning out of control for any of a dozen reasons, and either nobody has a clue that anything was wrong or everyone thought that the guy was a timebomb and did nothing.
Here's a semiauto rifle with the same calibre:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Min...
Would that one be more acceptable because it has a wood stock?
Things aren't the problem. People are the problem.
As a nation, we've decided that we don't want to restrict the rights of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens merely because a few people misuse those rights. This is why politicians have generally decided not to push for more gun control - it's an election losing issue.
Incidentally, I'm confused by the point of that tweet. Here are some other .223 rifles:
http://s845.beta.photobucket.com/user/OldColdWarrior2009/med...
http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/9380/10373165_1.jpg?v=8C...
http://molot.biz/product-e/vepr223-super.jpg
For most calibers, you can find guns with many different form factors that accept bullets of that caliber. So what?
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57559179/china-school-kn...
Guess we need to control sharp objects as well? It's easy to get angry at dangerous items but in reality it's the people we need to control.
The sad truth is, oppressive regimes exist in the first place because more powerful nations benefit from it. My own country lived for 17 years under an oppressive regime backed by the gun bearing, world's freedom and democracy flagship.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKsWGuLzsWk&list=PLC4FDC3...
Was the Oklahoma-city bombing a wake-up call for "explosives control"? Was the 2009 Chengdu bus-fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Chengdu_bus_fire) a wake-up call for diesel control? Was the Osaka school massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre) a wake-up call for knife-control? Was the 2012 Toronto mall shooting a wake-up call for gun-control in Canada, which already has extremely stringent gun-laws?
It's all too easy to blame the gun in these situations, but guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives.
It's not the gun. It never was the gun. It's the person.
How many times are we going to find out someone had a history of mental issues and nothing was done? How many people are reluctant to take proper medication because they view the effects of the medication worse than what it trying to treat. We have a lot of people coming back with PTSD, we need to get better at this.
I remember OK and that was farm products (which some companies still sell at automated machines). IEDs, pipe bombs, propane canisters, Molotov cocktails are all capable of killing a lot people and are easier to build or acquire than guns.
Getting legal access to high-performance rifles similar to military weapons is pretty trivial. Easily concealable weapons like pistols usually are more difficult to get a hold of legally.
The legal environment doesn't always translate into reality. I live in a small upstate NY city where we unfortunately have lots of shootings, mostly between poor high school kids. The local drug gangs make "community guns" available in public places like parks.
I would never want to own one, but for someone like me to own a handgun for target practice, there's an onerous process. I'd be required to get training, get background checked and go through a permit application process. After that's done, it's up to a county court judge's discretion, and in this county, the answer is usually "No."
But mental illness itself has no check point. How can we ensure that people do not have untreated Schizophrenia? Mandatory checks for everyone once a year? I'm really not sure how it could be done.
By the same token, it's harder to kill a dozen people with a knife, if that's all you have to work with.
If you have to use a knife to kill someone, you are going to have to get very close to them to do it. You're going to have to be very aware of what you're doing. With a gun.. not so much.
IIRC, the talk after the shooting in Toronto was for more countermeasures against illegal guns being smuggled in from the US.
This kind of zero sum game attitude is a problem in my opinion. yes, Guns are used by people and they don't shoot by themselves. But better controls must be put in place to at least try and keep it away from crazy people. I am saying try, make it harder. If you have a toddler in the house and he starts playing with knives, would you blame it on the toddler ? No, I would say that you need to ensure that the toddler does not get his hands on the knife. Is it possible that he could still do it ? Sure. But is it harder if u hide them? Sure.
For example: think about speed bumps. Sure, we could just blame any drivers who crash into pedestrians in parking lots, but by adding speed bumps, we are reinforcing what people already know --- that speeding through parking lots can be dangerous.
Same thing with seatbelts --- you know that annoying chime that won't stop until you've buckled your seatbelt? Why do we need that? Why not simply blame any drivers who crash? Because it reminds people to do what they already know they should be doing. It reinforces safe behavior. It helps to reduce a burden on society --- the negative effects of fatal car accidents.
So I have a hard time whenever I hear someone say 'the problem isn't guns, it's the people who use them', because I think that's only part of the solution. Should people be allowed to purchase firearms "same-day" at gun shows? Should people be allowed to purchase and own as many guns and as much ammo. as they please? Is there something wrong with at least discussing possible reforms to make it more difficult for people to buy guns?
We haven't put the money into brain research to figure out if there is a test we could do. Checkpoints are the easy part. Look at all the places we test for drugs (employment, school sports). If we figured out the mythical dipstick that tells if your brain chemistry is broken, I would imagine it would come up in a lot places that drug testing does now and probably be part of peoples regular checkups. We just don't have a clue and no amount of dealing with the how will fix the problem, we need to get the courage to look at the why.
A mass of civilians aren't going to be able to stand up to a column of tanks easily, but just a hundred civilians armed with AR-15s are going to be able to stand up even to massed police forces. And if an insurgency is supported by the public at large then life is not going to be easy for the police and the military. This is the way that all guerrilla wars go, and there are many examples of successful insurgencies when they have widespread popular support, even against very well armed government forces.
The situation over here is a tragedy, because all school shootings were commited by sons of fathers who were members of a shooting clubs (and therefore had access to guns). Even though it was not politically possible to ban those clubs and weapons.
But the situation in the USA is even more a tragedy. The USA have shooting after shooting with so many dead kids, and still the political forces are not able to ban guns. Or even slightly control them. Sickening.
There's absolutely no way to prevent people from losing it, so the focus should be on minimizing the damage and finding a good process for dealing with the aftermath.
Politicians don't want to touch it because of votes. There are idiots who vote solely for whoever is against guns, or for them, or against abortion, or for it. That's what really drives every election, very select issues that they abuse to extremes. The media doesn't look for the truth any longer, because why do something new when you can just repeat the same pattern every cycle and milk the shit out of it. When a politician takes a stand, and tries to discuss something real, they are sidelined and derided by their own people. They don't want an honest debate because then they'd have nothing to pretend to argue about.
Guns aren't going anywhere, ever... Any attempt at additional control would only lead to violence. Abortion isn't going anywhere, ever... Not even the supposed anti-abortion politicians have any intent of changing those laws. People need to realize this.
The answer is probably more guns, not less. Any number of armed school personnel could have lessened this nightmare. If you're tasked with protecting children, shouldn't you be prepared for a gun fight?
However, the idiocy of the tweet, designed only to spread FUD, the mindless retweets and ignorant comments, really piss me off. A few people have pointed out that .223 is a calibur, or 'shell size', and one of the mindless retweeters said she thinks shell size is gun specific.
i mean WTF... such epic ignorance...
Pardon me, but I grew up in a country where 'oppressive regime' was not far off at all, and where brutal murders happened in my neighborhood all the time. I knew my Dad didn't own a gun and it scared me to death. So how dare you belittle my beliefs in the need for armed civilians. Disagree with them, by all means, but do you really think I'm arguing children should be murdered en masse?
What you're proposing is, in my opinion, that same thing as arguing that the government should regulate or perhaps even ban internet access because of all the child pornography. Screw civil liberties, think of the children!
edit: Also, I would argue that confiscating laptops at airports will save as many lives as trying to ban guns in the US at this point.
I agree, using technology to understand brain chemistry and further mental health research is a step forward.
Regardless of ones position on guns, it's almost universal that not nearly enough who need mental health care get it. And, our national attitude is still one of "Therapy is for crazy people!" - yeah, just like "the ER is a viable form of preventative healthcare" and "you only go to the mechanic when your car is on fire".
I'm a libertarian but in practice I'm not sure of a solution that isn't more government involvement.
So what if it's the person? How can you find those people and stop them from getting guns? All the people who knew the shooter in the Oregon mall shooting a couple days ago said that he showed no signs of being anything other than a kind and friendly person. He showed only a marginal interest in guns. But that could describe hundreds of millions of Americans. You would never be able to find the ones that might do this and make sure they don't get guns.
Support for gun control is extremely shallow, a lot of people are for it if asked a yes/no question but the activist population of people who would change their vote, volunteer time, or donate money is tiny.
Similarly, is taking a crazy person's gun away going to stop them trying to kill people? Probably not, but it'll be much harder for them to kill anyone.
EDIT: That article you linked to discusses a 3d printed lower receiver. That part of the rifle does not have the barrel and chamber. The part of the ar with the barrel and chamber is called the upper.
You can't ensure that every single person that has a mental disability gets treatment, but as a society we do not support easy access to mental health treatment. Mental health services, like physical health services, are pay to play and that provides a huge barrier for people with mental disability, esp. since some amount of those people will have a very hard time affording such treatment and/or medication. Consider also that folks with mental disability tend to have less robust support networks of family of friends and that mental health care has stigma attached to it for most of the US population.
The best option is to reduce the difficult of getting mental health care treatment as much as possible: universal health care, public awareness campaigns to fight against social stigma, and more robust social services.
It's not the gun.
Guns are tools, they aren't the problem. We need to be better at being able to detect these individuals who are likely to go on these rampages. But more than that we need to have a society that is better able to defend itself. If even 1 in 20 or fewer teachers at a school were people who were responsible and trained and carried guns for self-defense then these sorts of attacks would be far less common. Because the attacks would be ended sooner by armed citizens acting in defense. And because then schools and other places would no longer be defenseless. The reason why these crazy people go to schools to commit mayhem is because they know that they aren't going to be stopped. They know that it's just going to be unarmed teachers and defenseless children. If that stopped being the case, if there started to be more of a risk to the shooter in these situations then maybe these sorts of shootings would be less common.
We've spent the last half century in the developed world progressively making ourselves more and more defenseless and less and less empowered, on the premise that doing so also disempowers the bad guys. The rage killers, the school shooters, the terrorists, etc. But the exact opposite has come to pass. We've disempowered the individual and made ourselves defenseless and even more vulnerable to these monsters.
No, not everyone should own a gun, or be allowed to own a gun. But if we started to cultivate more of a culture of self-reliance and personal responsibility, and if we started increasingly empowering individuals to take care of their own self-defense by becoming more aware, more trained, more prepared, and to carry weapons if they so choose then maybe we'll actually end up with a safer society.
I've been shooting guns since I was 10 years old, and I've been carrying a pocket knife since middle school. I take these things vary seriously. I maintain my certifications and training in first-aid and CPR. I have well stocked first aid kits in my home, car, and backpack (when I ride the bus or bike), including things like hemostatic compounds. I also have a concealed carry permit (which means that my info and fingerprints are on file with local law enforcement) and own firearms. If you make a law which limits my capability to defend myself or others then you are not making society more safe. And almost any gun-control law is going to preferentially disempower good people like myself while having much less impact on the bad guys who don't care about living within the law.
Edit: the concentration on guns as an item which "enables violence" is no more sensible than the TSA's concentration on liquids or nail clippers. It's just another form of security theater.
Modern society seems to be good at creating situations where people feel powerless or like lashing out. The offender obviously makes an awful choice, but maybe we should think about how to make things so that society isn't so brutal?
I say that gun control is the "easy" answer because it is a response to a specific event. That doesn't mean that I think that gun control is "bad". I'm just saying that the underlying issue that leads people to do awful things has other negative (but not as horrific) effects too.
As an unrelated illustration, the 14 year old inner city kid walking around with a gun or knife feels miserable and powerless. The weapon makes him feel empowered, but in a negative way -- if he grows up that way, that's going to leave him vulnerable to substance abuse and that mindset will be passed on to his kids and his social circle too.
What about security technology? Maybe if the school had smaller, less expensive and less obtrusive metal detectors? Improved inter classroom comm systems for coordinating lockdowns? Cheap, integrated access systems ensuring only qualified personnel and students access the campus?
On the margin, all these could improve the situation without the need for lofty dreams of a societal paradigm shift or pouring hours into a solution that is already exhibiting diminishing marginal returns.
Any number of armed school personnel could have made this situation WORSE by firing into a wild crowd in an attempt to attack the shooter, whom they might not even identify correctly in the first place.
Keep in mind that school personnel are NOT tasked with protecting children from violent assault threats. They are tasked with education and a kind of child care for 7-8 hours a day. School systems already have tremendous difficult providing support for larger scale issues that fall outside of those realms, and we shouldn't expect that arming school staff would make for anything other than a climate in which those weapons will be used against students. We already have enough problems with making school systems more like prisons, arming the staff is not a solution to fixing that.
edit: In case it wasn't clear, I don't actually believe the South African government was doing what it claimed - but believe when I tell you we had no idea just how bad the government was until after it was all over. My point was that safeguards aren't always what you think they are, and they they won't always be there. You can't decide to give citizens rights only when the government decides they need them.
this is such a bad argument. of course its true that the person is responsible, but that's not an argument against gun control.
we can't just lock up everyone that could possibly go on a shooting spree, but we sure can make it harder for a person to go on shooting sprees. make it harder for people to get guns!
> Guns exist, that can't be stopped any more than preventing alcohol from existing
great, but if access to guns was restricted, it would be harder for crazy people from going on shooting sprees.
nobody thinks that all access to guns can be eliminated, but its pretty reasonable to say that if it were hard to get guns, fewer shooting sprees would happen.
> guns are just tools, as are knives, and diesel fuel, and even explosives
this comparison is so clearly bad:
the tradeoffs for society are obvious in each of these cases. knives are pretty dangerous, but they don't really enable someone to rampage through an elementary school to kill 27 people. diesel fuel is pretty dangerous, but it's also really useful to society. i'm pretty sure we already have controls on who has access to explosives.
The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.
(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)
Ultimately it's impossible to be knowledgeable of the bad intentions of every single warped individual on the planet. And some of those folks will have the capability of harming people, perhaps many people. Look at 9/11 as an example of how a handful of well trained and highly motivated individuals armed with only box cutters were able to take control of jumbo jets and ram them into buildings and kill thousands. That's an extreme example but it's worth remembering, because there are many, many examples of similar situations. Look at the unabomber, for example. A brilliant loner who was able to fashion bombs from household materials in a shack in the middle of nowhere and kill several people. Or look at all of the other bombers throughout history. You can't legislate away the ability to build bombs, they're already illegal, but anyone with enough knowledge and a little money can make them and kill people. The same goes for arson, which kills hundreds of people every year.
In my view the solution is not to try to disempower the entire populace by taking away guns and hoping that this disempowers the bad guys enough to make it that much harder for them to kill. I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others. I think it's also worth concentrating on social and cultural changes which make our society more accepting and hopefully make the creation of these violent individuals less common, but that's a much harder problem to tackle.
Actually, I see 9/11 as an example of TLAs refusing to share information when doing that could have easily stopped the hijackers long before they could do anything. I also see it as something the US brought upon itself with its dependence on oil and constant meddling in the Middle East. So I don't think it's a very good analogy for mass shootings by (usually insane, or at least disturbed) white US citizens.
And just because you can't stop all crime doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any crime. There are simple steps that can be taken. For example, the sales of guns at gun shows needs to be stopped immediately. Ex-felons should not be able to get guns. There are a lot of holes in gun control law that could be easily closed if it weren't for people like you making it political suicide for any politician to even suggest that we need stricter gun control laws.
> I think that the better solution is to empower responsible individuals to act in their own self-defense and in the defense of others.
How would you propose to "empower" elementary school children? How about people in a mall or movie theater were the possession of firearms is not allowed?
Then we just have an order of magnitude more of that kind of person than Western Europe. If it's not the guns, then Americans are just worse people, statistically speaking, than our more civilized neighbors around the world.
_At least _ two seriously wounded.
"Guns don't kill people..."
A classic anti-technology strawman. It is like saying "Computers only use numbers, you can't do graphics or text with them".
At the very lowest level computers are entirely logical, but you can program one to deal with uncertainties and probabilities.
In fact that argument isn't quite relevant, unless you are arguing against the computers making the policy decisions, which I think was never under consideration.
Computers/technology can certainly be a strong tool to assist gun control.
One idea completely off the top of my head would be to data-mine as much info as possible about past shooting/shooters and then use this to help guide granting (or not) of gun licenses. With Bayesian this-and-that, the computer could give a number "estimated 0.000001% chance of serial killing" and refer the application to the appropriate person (e.g. a detailed analysis for people "at risk" (large probability), or a quicker check for "safer" people).
But you are right, no reason to resort to this.
I call BS on this. In such a situation there's a lot of confusion and panic about what is exactly happening. It's not like everyone knows how many shooters there are and how they look like. Someone pulling out a gun can easily mistaken to be an attacher and could be attacked himself by someone else trying to be good samaritan while himself being mistook for an attacker by the original good samaritan resulting in chaos. This is not like the movies where everyone knows who the bad and good guys are.
What parallel absurdity?
A number's meaning is entirely arbitrary and dependent on the context: a bit-string that is a pattern for a firearm in program A might be a perfectly valid music file in program B.
Firearm is a piece of metal that had to be precision shaped to throw small pellets of metal at very high speeds.
(I'll agree that 3D printing muddies the waters though.)
So everyone who wants a gun will do whatever they need to get it? No one who wants a gun will be deterred by any possible prevention measures?
Measures such as background checks, safety class requirements, mental health checks, restrictions on high-capacity or high-throughput weapons, higher taxes, manufacturer and supply chain oversight, spying on domestic traffickers, or closing the gun show loophole?
The problem is how we treat mental illness. It's so stigmatized that people feel extreme shame and a sense that they just have to want to be better.
Every single person should be able to walk into a doctor's office, be screened and treated for their illness without the stigma that we attach to it. "Why should I have to pay for it?" This is one, among many, of the reasons. Will it eliminate these incidents? Nope but the result will still be a better society.
But yes, I agree that guns are only a tool, and that the underlying cause is psychological and/or cultural. No matter what we do with guns, it won't prevent future incidences; I just don't see how people can view a situation like this and think "oh, if the teachers had guns, everything would be all right."
> I definitely was insinuating that, along with lots of other things. So everyone who wants a gun will do whatever they need to get it? Measures such as background checks, safety class requirements, mental health checks, restrictions on high-capacity or high-throughput weapons, higher taxes, manufacturer and supply chain oversight, spying on domestic traffickers, or closing the gun show loophole?
You can help control/prevent, yes, but I'm strongly in the camp that if there's a will, there's a way.
(EDIT: listening to CNN in the background, Dr. Drew Pinsky said something along the lines of what we have here.)
The gun lobby has money, which is available from bodies like gun manufacturers. There is no equivalent on the other side- there are no anti-gun manufacturers to give money.
As far as arming teachers, it's not a perfect solution, nor is it going to "make everything alright". When you have people like this who end up being so bent on destruction and violence things are not going to be alright, it's a matter of degrees. However, there have been several incidents of teachers and civilians putting a stop to mass shootings, likely saving many lives. These often don't get as much news coverage precisely because the body count is lower and thus the events are less newsworthy. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
Note that I am not advocating getting rid of all guns. But we need to have an honest discussion about them, and that starts with being truthful with ourselves about their very nature.
People are understandably upset about what happened and emotions are getting the best of people. I guess today isn't a good day for rationale debate.
Overwhelmingly guns are owned and used by peaceful, law-abiding civilians. That they can be misused does not mean we should punish those who have done no wrong.
And the idea that we can live in a simple world where we can divorce ourselves from violence, death, responsibility, and from tools of lethal force is simply naive. Pacifism is a luxury of those who have never experienced the threat of violence. In the real world there are violent men with bad intentions and being able to forestall such men by using lethal force can save lives, your own life and the lives of others. You can either turn away from that truth or foist it off on the responsibility of others or you can face it directly. But you can't make it simply go away.
Do all of that, and anyone who tries to buy a gun without a license can safely be assumed to be up to no good. You don't even need to license firearms themselves, which is unpopular.. just the owner themselves.
Most of these nutters are buying their guns legally. Hell, I bet a lot of them buy their guns not even fully realizing what they will eventually do with them.
Illegal sale/ownership of guns is just an issue for the police to handle. I don't think there is much progress to be made on that front.
I live in a country(Lebanon) that went through a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Guns are a fact of life here, they are very easy to get and lots of people have them. And yet nobody has ever gone into a school and shot children and parents that I know of.
We've had bombings, assassinations, terrorism, and even a war now and then. If it's violent, we've had it. But not this. Are Lebanese people better people? Hell no. But our societies tend to be more closely knit and more traditional. That has many many drawbacks but it also means that people very rarely get to such extremes in terms of mental well-being(to the point where they could do something like this) without being noticed.
I'm not saying traditional societies are the answer, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, it's not just a choice between "bad people" or "too many guns". Reality is much more nuanced than that.
The point is the efficiency. The magnification of force is so great with guns compared to other weapons as to render the comparison moot. If I had a weapon that could instantly vaporize a person of choice with the push of a button, this tool would rightly be condemned far and wide. Yet the same tool could be used in a purely defensive manner. We all subconsciously understand the importance of considering the magnitude of force magnification.
I completely agree with your second paragraph. I am far from a pacifist. The point is that these conversations seriously lack nuance, each side takes points to the absolute extreme as a tactic to validate their side. There is much nuance in the middle that needs to be considered. Acknowledging the nature of guns is a starting point.
Knives are simply much slower and less efficient for the task, especially against forewarned opponents (e.g. most of the potential victims in many mass-killing situations, and potential defenders), and it's vastly more likely the attacker will be stopped quickly even if he manages to kill a few people.
I'm just not buying it. Even with their massively over-inflated budget and their guilt-elimination drones there is no way the DoD could maintain an armed occupation of America. They are having a hell of a time doing it in a country less than one-tenth the size with less than one-tenth the people, filled with people who have been thoroughly dehumanized by popular media, people with far fewer connections to the outside world, and people for whom the soldiers have no tribal connections.
Thinking they would do better occupying America than Afghanistan is a really strange form of patriotic hubris.
(Lest you get the wrong impression, I support gun control and think that worrying about the possibility of Americans having to fight the American army is incredibly silly.)
