The safest "gun" is not owning a gun. There's an abundance of studies showing that gun ownership tracks with an increase in home injury/death. The idea that having a gun protects you from home intrusion is a red herring because home intrusions almost never happen and the chance of an accident is possible every day there is a gun around. Private firearm ownership should be illegal.
p | q | p ∧ q → ¬q
--+---+-----------
T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun.
T | F | T You can be safe and not own a gun.
F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun.
F | F | T You can be unsafe and not own a gun.
@rwjwjuwjudf, logical implication is correct - logical equivalence leads to this trainwreck:
p | q | p ∧ q ↔ ¬q
--+---+-----------
T | T | F You can't be safe and own a gun.
T | F | F You can't be safe and not own a gun.
F | T | T You can be unsafe and own a gun.
F | F | F You can't be unsafe and not own a gun.
Nice analysis! I was thinking safety is a function equivalent to negation. But I agree if safety and gun ownership are separate variables.
p | safe (p) | ¬p | safe (p) ↔ ¬p
--+----------+----+--------------
T | F | F | Owning a gun is unsafely owning a gun.
F | T | T | Not owning a gun is safely owning a gun.
I think this is the original reason why it's confusing, because the sentence "not owning a gun is safely owning a gun" is highly unintuitive. There is a contradiction because safely owning it conflicts with not owning it.
edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
Safety as a negation would be an xor operation, which leads to the wacky logic. Both of you are right though, I was probably far too generous in treating @minikites's use of the word "is" as a logical implication instead of the logical equivalence that you suggested. The resulting logic leads to conclusions that both support and refute the likely intent of the original statement. So either the logic is broken or the intent is :) If only @minikites had used the word "maybe" instead of "is"... the weaker position would have been supported with a logically consistent argument.
That still leaves five words to debate about, to quote a very sly fellow "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." I'm pretty sure we could distill the argument to the point where we find ourselves debating the finer points of chaos theory.
No it's not, it is perfectly self-evident that you eliminate all risks involved in doing a thing by not doing it. I'll grant you that this is an boring and unhelpful way of minimising risk, but not an invalid one.
Home intrusions happen all the time around here not sure what part of the world you are fun. The safest car is not owning a car. The safest knife is not owning a knife. There's no such thing as gun control, you don't get to control guns. Just narcissistic ramblings.
In my ZIP we're averaging just over 1 home invasion per day for 2016. Three people have been shot and killed. In the next ZIP over a wealthy nationally-recognized clothing CEO fatally shot someone breaking into his home last month.
Home intrusions when someone is home are far lower here than in "strong gun control" jurisdictions. News reports of "shot dead by homeowner" are considered stories with happy endings.
Hard to have a discussion when data is spun & cherry picked, and cultural differences abound.
Nope. 88.8 guns per 100 people, which is not the same as 88.8%. Most people who own guns in the US own several. The actual percentage of people who own guns is lower.
That's an 2007 number. "Since Obama was elected" "100 million guns have been sold" (although the sales increases really started after 9/11), and more significantly, US production has doubled, and importation is similarly higher. I could run the numbers if anyone wanted, but it should be around 1 gun per US resident nowadays, although as others have noted, this is very unevenly distributed.
ADDED: on the other hand, the claim all the new ones are being bought by existing gun owners is fatuous, a back of the envelope calculation I made would have us existing gun owners own an average of $100K worth each, and I doubt even my father, who was born in the early '30s, every had quite that much.
Assume, given the unwillingness of many gun owners to answer the questions of nosy, anonymous people making telephone and other surveys, that at least half the nation's households have a gun. With then nationwide sweep of shall or better issue concealed carry laws, now all but 7 states, making gun ownership significantly more useful, which is particularly important to an aging population, I'd be surprised if the fraction wasn't higher.
The number of permits issued has been astounding, 300,000 in Wisconsin since the law passed in 2011, 1 million in Texas, in these states generally 5-10% of the residents have one, and ~10 states don't require a permit or very soon won't (that number is changing very rapidly right now).
making them illegal wouldn't make them go away. They would just make criminals out of people who are trying not to die. They will always be readily available until the end of humanity.
Illiterate Third world tribesmen create high tech automatic firearms in mud houses. Prisoners create low tech firearms in between anal cavity searches. Think about that.
Gun control is possible with the extinction of the human race.
Japan, for one. At the end of WWII, the US Army of Occupation took away all the guns. The Government of Japan never removed restrictions on gun ownership.
I don't think there's any removing of Japanese crime and crime control from the following 2.5 century Tokugawa military dictatorship, which had profound effects in creating modern Japanese society.
> ...the chance of an accident... Private firearm ownership should be illegal.
For their own good, right? The prisons are already full of people who violated laws enacted under that guise. Anti-2A people don't seem to be aware of the fact that pro-2A people aren't very excited at the prospect of others deciding what is in their best interest. If you are afraid of getting shot by a privately owned gun then base your argument on that, because a temperance movement mkII isn't going to fly.
he explained that it was only supposed to fire if the shooter was wearing a special wristband with a little radio frequency transmitter inside. The CEO put on the wristband and went to pull the trigger. ... And it didn't shoot. Just silence.
Those focused on ensuring guns aren't fired fail to grasp the paramount importance to buyers that guns fire with absolute reliability when they're supposed to. The understanding is that it will be used in a situation where failing to shoot will allow a bad person to destroy someone good, and failing to fire when needed is literally a terminal flaw. Alas, those pushing for "smart guns" are perceived as, if not actually, trying to disarm upstanding citizens. This is not a successful business plan.
This reminds me of the discussion of nuclear safety in the book Command and Control, where the tension of securing trigger devices is quoted as "always/never": a weapon should always work properly if intentionally deployed, but never by accident or by misuse. Same issue, different scale.
(The book is a great read and I recommend it, even if it makes you wonder how we got to 2016 as well off as we did. "Always" was always more important than "never")
EDIT: article about the book, + quote: " In fact, it is easy to design weapons so that they can never fire by accident or unauthorized use. It is equally easy to design them so that they will always fire when the order is given. But it is extraordinarily difficult to meet both criteria at once—what is known as the “always/never” problem."
That's exactly the opposite of what you want from a nuclear trigger system. I mean if you actually need to launch, it's already past the point where it's going to do anything helpful. What you need is something that everyone in the world unquestioningly believes will always work, even if that isn't entirely true.
OTOH, if it ever goes off by mistake, that not good. Not good at all.
Gun control should not be a national issue, it should remain a local one. What works for the people of urban cities will not necessarily work for rural areas. Like it or not the second amendment exists and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. While I choose not to exert my right to bear arms I should not force other people to conform to my lifestyle.
This took me a super long time to learn. I'm fairly rural and to me gun control seems bizarre. It wasn't until I talked to someone from a very dense mega-city that I had an ah-ha moment.
My biggest issue with guns is that they let one person become judge, jury and executioner without due process. Yes, you can kill someone in many other ways but guns have a tendency to deliver multiple kills with incredible ease and detachment.
I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas.
My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
Most gun use, in the form of self-defense, call it ~2.5 million times a year (that figure is now getting very long in the tooth), doesn't even involve shooting the gun, most shots fired don't hit, and most hits don't result in death.
True, true, we don't produce and buy > 12 billion rounds in the US per year to shoot each other with, sorry if I wasn't clear in constraining my remarks to only self-defense uses, which I consider to be the essential uses of guns, if you include the ability to resist/prevent the establishment of a tyrannical government.
The most notable example of that in my lifetime was the reevaluations of some liberals on the wisdom of gun control in hit's heyday after the Saturday Night Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre) where Nixon dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his Attorney General and Deputy AG resigned rather than carry out the order. We mostly Nixon supporting "gun nuts" were among other things part of the insurance that mess wouldn't go too far.
But seriously, absent a population of brown bears (e.g. the Grisly), I'm not sure it's that great of a problem. And many people simply don't care about the occasional child, jogger, etc. killed by a mountain lion, bear, whatever. But I consider myself lucky to have grown up in an area were humans are the undisputed the apex predators, not even any black bears in my part of SW Missouri. Got to watch out for snakes, though.
I realize your comment was said in good-natured jest, but I've actually had to shoot (based on behavior) several rabid wild animals over the past decade that were an immediate threat to me.
"Detached reflection is not required in the presence of an upraised knife." If someone is in fact trying to kill you, you indeed have the natural right to "judge jury & executioner" if that's what's required to survive. It is exactly that natural right by which we delegate such power to the state (when circumstances do not demand otherwise).
Note also that due process does follow even in the cases where a citizen becomes an "executioner", it just can't bring the killed person back to life, vs. judicial condemnations which have an appeal process before hand.
That I'm going to potentially be "judged by 12" even if I'm not "carried by 6" weighs heavily in my mind (sort of, I've never had to make such a decision in, say, 45 years of gun ownership (starting as a kid in a gun owning family when I was trusted enough) and ~17 years of carrying concealed (as noted in a previous recent related HN discussion, avoidance is the best policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429446
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I actually think it should be national, but reforms should be evidence based.
First off, gun homicides are actually down over 50% since the early 90s. There are still too many, of course.
Assault weapons bans are ineffective, since they account for 2% of crimes.
Open carry and concealed carry are emotional issues, but aren't a big contributor to guns deaths. 13M people are already permitted to concealed carry, and while it has led to more aggravated assaults with guns, it hasn't been a big increase.
Background checks and waiting periods actually do make sense. People with a restraining order shouldn't be able to get guns - research indicates that keeping guns out of their hands would reduce this category of murders by 10%.
Background checks and waiting periods actually do make sense. People with a restraining order
The former is debatable (e.g. most handgun murders aren't committed when gun stores are even open, i.e. evening and night), and as far as I know the latter, when it's domestic violence, it's the law of the land everywhere. But that's very dangerous, since it's an easy way for the non-law abiding to strip a victim of protection when they most need it, and the threshold to get a restraining order, even a permanent one, is way too low.
But a substantial fraction of those involve implicit background checks. I recently received 3 long guns of personal significance in my teens in the '70s, from my father (who I live with after "eviction by tornado" and now to help take care of him), and having started my education in all gun things starting in 1963-4 he knows my character better than just about anyone else.
The first time I bought guns was from a professional couple, and they wouldn't have done it if I and my SO hadn't convinced them we were also such, and would treat them with all due respect.
Of course, no one denies there are problems at the other end, but we are talking about a Constitutionally enumerated right in an era where all Constitutional protections are under threat (yes, even the 3rd Amendment, pervasive surveillance is exactly what quartering troops was all about way back then).
I won't predict a violent counter-revolution if the nation went to mandatory background checks, like would be certain if registration became mandatory, but that would be playing with fire.
The problem with this is that people aren't planted to the ground. Chicago has tough firearm laws but it's not that hard to drive to Indiana to buy a gun which is why Chicago has such a problem with gun violence.
Chicago doesn't have a problem with gun violence due to Indiana's gun laws. It has a problem because of drug prohibition and the black market that has sprung up to meet the needs of drug users. You need to find the root cause (why violence is occurring) instead of looking at the symptoms (how the violence is occurring).
Chicago doesn't have a problem with gun violence due to Indiana's gun laws.
Right. If Indiana's gun laws were to blame, you'd see similar levels of violent crime within Indiana, and you don't. The only places in Indiana with anything like Chicago-level violence are areas such as Gary (which is a Chicago suburb in all but name).
On the other side of the coin, nor do you see Chicago levels of violence in downstate eastern Illinois, which is just as close to Indiana.
Chicago has a violent crime rate of 884/100,000. Urbana has a violent crime rate of 338/100,000.
Blaming Indiana's gun laws is convenient rhetoric, but quite obviously wrong.
A resident of Illinois cannot legally buy a handgun in Indiana without getting it transferred to an FFL in Illinois. Straw purchasers may be another matter. Make no mistake though, Cabelas and Bass Pro Shop are located right on the border in northwest Indiana not Illinois.
It can only be a national issue. As long as the answer is "I'll just go over there and buy a gun" no meaningful gun control can possibly exist. See what's going on in Chicago currently to see this dynamic in action.
Thing is, Chicago has had a sky high crime and murder rate for a very long time, and went from no legal handgun ownership at all to it being allowed due to McDonald v. Chicago in 2010, took effect within a year or so, and now full and fairly administered shall issue in 2013.
Gun laws there are confounded by so many other factors in general crime and murder rates that I doubt much useful knowledge can be discerned until some number of years pass as the city returns to US norms of gun ownership and concealed carry.
A truly safe gun must do two things: 1) always fire when the trigger is pulled, and 2) never fire when the trigger is not pulled. So called Smart Guns are deficient on point 1 and probably always will be. How often does an iPhone decline to unlock with a fingerprint and require a passcode? That would never be acceptable in a life or death situation that requires a gun.
Without wishing to comment on what is or isn't feasible now or in the future, I'd approach the technical requirements similarly to self-driving cars. They simply need to crash less often than a human driver. They don't need to be completely infallible, though for emotional reasons they need to crash significantly less often than humans.
Similarly, a gun would need to have a failure rate somewhere in the order of 1% of the typical misfire rate. E.g., if a particular gun & ammunition pairing misfires 1 time out of 1,000 then the security system must fail no more than 1 in 100,000 times or thereabouts.
At that point, any misfire due to the security system would be indistinguishable from a misfire that would have happened anyway.
A 1% increase in misfires would not equate to a 1% increase in unintentional deaths, but a viable safety system would significantly decrease them. In fact, it might be possible to mathematically derive a much higher break-even point, but I daresay that would not work out well politically.
I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old.
John Moses Browning was the Leonardo da Vinci of gun design. In addition to the M1911, several of his other designs are still in production, and indeed, in active duty use by various militaries.
I carry my SW1911 90% of the time these days. I occasionally switch out for a Hi-Power (another Browning design!) or a Glock 31.
The Hi-Power is honestly a more practical gun, but the trigger is harder to make decent, since Browning was working around his own patent that he'd sold. My 1911's trigger is the best I've ever seen, bar none.
Where did you find that on the page? It says there are 88.8 firearms per 100 people, it does not say 88 people out of 100 own guns. If you make such trivial mistakes when analyzing data how can you trust your own judgement on the important policy issues?
I believe that people should not participate in a discussion on critical issues if unable to completely comprehend relevant information, for whatever reasons, be it lack of general knowledge, or poor language skills, or something else.
Also, they asked if they were interpreting that correctly. If you're not American, you probably don't have an intuitive sense for how common guns are. Best I can find about 30% of households have a gun. There also seems to be a pretty wide disparity about where those households are. Mother Jones, so maybe not an ubiased source of information: http://www.motherjones.com/files/gun-ownership-map-updated.p...
In the graphic it's worded as "88.8 per 100 people" which can easily be mistaken for 88.8% because it doesn't state that it's 88.8 firearms, not 88.8 people.
Part of the reason people get so paranoid about the government pulling sudden mandates on guns in regards to one thing or another in the news is that, well, it's not paranoia. Federal, state, and city legislatures have pulled a lot of stupid moves in regards to gun regulation, like regulating aesthetic features instead of capability, creating gun owner lists that absolutely-definitely-won't-get-used-for-anything-nefarious (and then using them to confiscate guns without compensation and when the law changes), etc.
I support gun control in general, but even on a purely financial level (e.g. "I paid $X for these guns and the government might suddenly destroy their value) there are plenty of reasons for people to argue against it.
And very specifically, if "smart" handgun technology is developed, sale of all others will become illegal in New Jersey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Childproof_Handgun_... Of course "a seven-member commission [would] determine whether personalized handguns qualify for use by State and local law enforcement officers", all these sorts of laws have such exceptions.
And such as been proposed in California and Maryland. It's not "paranoia" when they are explicitly "out to get you".
Something similar has already happened with "microstamping", a neigh-mythical technology that would imprint the gun's serial number on all ejected casings. California has a roster of "safe" handguns which are all that may be sold by dealers in the state. However, they haven't allowed any manufacturer to add a new semiautomatic handgun without microstamping technology, which practically means that there are no new pistols being added to the list. Once the old ones fall off the list, that'll be it - it will be impossible to buy a semiautomatic handgun from a dealer in California.
There are many jurisdictions with laws that say "after the first (sometimes clarified as commercially viable) smart gun comes to market, all guns sold must be smart guns within X years time". The idea that smart guns threaten gun rights is not imaginary in many places. Unfortunate, given that people should be free to choose whether they want a regular gun, smart gun, or no gun whatsoever.
This article notes that Colt had fallen on "Hard Times". This is an understatement.
In the mid eighties, Colt was doing great, making hundreds of thousands of rifle for the US military. Then a five year labor strike brought the end of all military contracts as Colt replacement workers were unable to make properly functioning guns.
Colt decided to focus on the civilian market, and brought out a new high tech handgun that was so unreliable that it was eventually recalled.
Then Colt's CEO said that he was in favor of a all gun purchasers having to register federally and purchase a federal permit and training. This did not go over well. (*understatement)
His replacement, seeing that the military would not buy Colt guns and that civilians would not buy Colt guns, decided to focus on police sales.
Unfortunately making a new smart gun required ability in the two things that Colt was not good at - making reliable guns and designing new guns.
It was not just the disastrous demo that killed the smart gun - the prototype smart guns were not even able to be fired without permanent destroying the mechanism. Also, there was a delay from between when the gun was grabbed by the officer and when it could be fired. And of course, the fact that it didn't always unlock to fire even in the best possible circumstances.
Interestingly enough, police handguns have moved even farther away from the smart pistol idea. Today it's a rare department now days that does not use Glocks or M&Ps, both of which are far simpler than the average police handgun of the nineties.
There's a bit more to it than that; whatever the reasons (I forget), Colt lost the M16 contract to FNH in 1988 (but continued to make them for civilians, and in many years/all recent years/decades? at a high level of quality), and but essentially got it back in 1994 when the Army switched to the M4 carbine (the Marines stuck with their long barrel and therefore more effective M16s). Now they've lost M4 manufacturing exclusivity and for a while all contracts, and only recently won one of the new M4 full auto only, no 3 round burst variation contracts, presumably because they're desperate enough to bid really, really low.
On top of all the other problems, the company is now run by financial vultures who are bleeding it dry.
And, yeah, their flirtation with gun control did not go over well, I would never buy one from them after that, although their relative lack of quality in the category I might have otherwise (M1911s, which they were the original manufacturers of back in 1911) is the biggest reason.
Back when seat belt laws where being introduced more than a few people complained that sometimes a person will die in a car accident because of the seat belt. Saner heads prevailed because the overall statistics showed much fewer deaths and injuries occur when using seat belts vs not using seat belts.
To me insisting on a 0% failure rate for a smart gun is very reminiscent of the mandatory seat belt arguments. Sure... sometimes a gun will fail and the owner end up injured/dead and that's pretty awful. However, if the overall the number of deaths and injuries has been reduced then those tragedies will have been "worth it".
It is irrational to insist on a 0% failure rate.
It is also probably irrational to insist on the same failure rate as existing guns. The correct measure is the deaths/injury rate.
Unfortunately the US doesn't seem to want to tackle the problem of gun deaths/injuries in any sort of scientific manner. There needs to be accurate and reliable data on gun ownership, gun usage (scared someone off), gun deaths, gun injuries. Solid data is the foundation of good policy... and preventing the gathering of good data is pretty telling.
And far too many vested interests are more than willing to mislead people. Specifically, the NRA's constant "confiscate our guns" rhetoric i pretty unconscionable... but folks seem to blithely accept this sort of misrepresentation.
Such calls for sensible data analysis followed immediately by wanton bashing of the NRA and gun owners is making it very difficult to have a sensible discussion on the subject in this country.
Or Senator Diane Feinstein, who represents a lot of HN readers), telling "Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" in a 60 Minutes interview.
And let me assure that, using registration lists, guns have been confiscated in the US, e.g. SKSs in California after the government decided they were "assault weapons" after all (OK, you were allowed to move them out of state, but...).
I would also expect that of other states where mere gun ownership is an explicitly granted by the state privilege to particular individuals, e.g. Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey off the top of my head.
And California has created a unit to do the same to people they think are prohibited. Most recent horror story was about a nurse who'd voluntarily checked herself into a mental ward because of a medication screwup (i.e. it was self-limiting) and her husband's guns were confiscated: http://bearingarms.com/california-returns-confiscated-guns-t...
I'm not even sure in Crazy California a voluntary admission is a disbarring event, it isn't Federally or of any state I'm aware of, as this case shows it shouldn't be.
And note medication screwups/unwanted mental side effects happen all the time, a former SO got frank suicidal ideation when switched to a standard normally well tolerated anti-depressant (she just stopped taking the drug and was careful while it worked its way out of her system).
And many drugs can cause mania, as I can personally attest (hypomania in my case, and my "you're impaired" flag kept me from doing anything stupid including spending money needlessly (well, beyond buying a power supply as a kit when they're so cheap and easy in the form of wall-warts) until the problem was realized). Many that are not normally psychoactive, I've read systemic steroids like prednisone often do this.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThe safest way to sky-dive is not to sky-dive.
The safest way to have sex is not to have sex (I like the last one the most as it is touted by various groups).
That logic is absolutely broken.
If you mean that foregoing experiences for safety's sake isn't your cup of tea, that's one thing; but claiming it's logically broken is simply false.
edit: I think we can legitimately fix the confusing sentence to read "not owning a gun is safely not owning a gun".
Hard to have a discussion when data is spun & cherry picked, and cultural differences abound.
This isn't true. A classic example of confirmation bias. Obviously the pro-gun people say the exact opposite: that every gun study shows the opposite.
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/
Is that right? If so, USA is in a much worse state than I thought so.
ADDED: on the other hand, the claim all the new ones are being bought by existing gun owners is fatuous, a back of the envelope calculation I made would have us existing gun owners own an average of $100K worth each, and I doubt even my father, who was born in the early '30s, every had quite that much.
Assume, given the unwillingness of many gun owners to answer the questions of nosy, anonymous people making telephone and other surveys, that at least half the nation's households have a gun. With then nationwide sweep of shall or better issue concealed carry laws, now all but 7 states, making gun ownership significantly more useful, which is particularly important to an aging population, I'd be surprised if the fraction wasn't higher.
The number of permits issued has been astounding, 300,000 in Wisconsin since the law passed in 2011, 1 million in Texas, in these states generally 5-10% of the residents have one, and ~10 states don't require a permit or very soon won't (that number is changing very rapidly right now).
Illiterate Third world tribesmen create high tech automatic firearms in mud houses. Prisoners create low tech firearms in between anal cavity searches. Think about that.
Gun control is possible with the extinction of the human race.
The funny thing is, many non-US countries don't have "readily available" guns everywhere you go.
In 2013, 12 people in Japan were killed by guns.
I don't think there's any removing of Japanese crime and crime control from the following 2.5 century Tokugawa military dictatorship, which had profound effects in creating modern Japanese society.
During the prior 400 years, the various Japanese governments used gun and sword confiscation to enable crimes ranging from brutal to genocidal.
For their own good, right? The prisons are already full of people who violated laws enacted under that guise. Anti-2A people don't seem to be aware of the fact that pro-2A people aren't very excited at the prospect of others deciding what is in their best interest. If you are afraid of getting shot by a privately owned gun then base your argument on that, because a temperance movement mkII isn't going to fly.
Making beer or spirits at least generally requires you to leave the store.
Those focused on ensuring guns aren't fired fail to grasp the paramount importance to buyers that guns fire with absolute reliability when they're supposed to. The understanding is that it will be used in a situation where failing to shoot will allow a bad person to destroy someone good, and failing to fire when needed is literally a terminal flaw. Alas, those pushing for "smart guns" are perceived as, if not actually, trying to disarm upstanding citizens. This is not a successful business plan.
(The book is a great read and I recommend it, even if it makes you wonder how we got to 2016 as well off as we did. "Always" was always more important than "never")
EDIT: article about the book, + quote: " In fact, it is easy to design weapons so that they can never fire by accident or unauthorized use. It is equally easy to design them so that they will always fire when the order is given. But it is extraordinarily difficult to meet both criteria at once—what is known as the “always/never” problem."
from http://www.thenation.com/article/eric-schlosser-and-illusion...
That's exactly the opposite of what you want from a nuclear trigger system. I mean if you actually need to launch, it's already past the point where it's going to do anything helpful. What you need is something that everyone in the world unquestioningly believes will always work, even if that isn't entirely true.
OTOH, if it ever goes off by mistake, that not good. Not good at all.
I do understand that rural areas are going to need a level of protection from wild animals that might not be required in urban areas.
My suggestion for how to solve gun violence is to put together an "Apollo moonshot" project to develop a non-lethal weapon as effective at stopping as a lethal one. Phasers on stun is my dream. Once you can stop a person without harming them you can then take a tobacco industry marketing campaign to make owning a lethal weapon unacceptable in civil society. Rifles and relevant lethal weapons should still be available outside of urban areas unless non-lethal alternatives would work.
If you don't understand your opponent, how can you ever hope to reason with him?
The most notable example of that in my lifetime was the reevaluations of some liberals on the wisdom of gun control in hit's heyday after the Saturday Night Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre) where Nixon dismissed the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his Attorney General and Deputy AG resigned rather than carry out the order. We mostly Nixon supporting "gun nuts" were among other things part of the insurance that mess wouldn't go too far.
I wonder if this would create a risk asymmetry between people breaking the law and people obeying the law.
How do people living in rural areas with strong gun control even survive?
But seriously, absent a population of brown bears (e.g. the Grisly), I'm not sure it's that great of a problem. And many people simply don't care about the occasional child, jogger, etc. killed by a mountain lion, bear, whatever. But I consider myself lucky to have grown up in an area were humans are the undisputed the apex predators, not even any black bears in my part of SW Missouri. Got to watch out for snakes, though.
Expect that thing to be fired indiscriminately and very often by people who want to commit crimes or pull pranks, but aren't hard enough to kill.
We'd see many orders of magnitude more crimes like burglary and carjacking committed if that weapon existed.
That I'm going to potentially be "judged by 12" even if I'm not "carried by 6" weighs heavily in my mind (sort of, I've never had to make such a decision in, say, 45 years of gun ownership (starting as a kid in a gun owning family when I was trusted enough) and ~17 years of carrying concealed (as noted in a previous recent related HN discussion, avoidance is the best policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11429446
First off, gun homicides are actually down over 50% since the early 90s. There are still too many, of course.
Assault weapons bans are ineffective, since they account for 2% of crimes.
Open carry and concealed carry are emotional issues, but aren't a big contributor to guns deaths. 13M people are already permitted to concealed carry, and while it has led to more aggravated assaults with guns, it hasn't been a big increase.
Background checks and waiting periods actually do make sense. People with a restraining order shouldn't be able to get guns - research indicates that keeping guns out of their hands would reduce this category of murders by 10%.
Most of this is cribbed from Nicholas Kristof:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/some-inconv...
The former is debatable (e.g. most handgun murders aren't committed when gun stores are even open, i.e. evening and night), and as far as I know the latter, when it's domestic violence, it's the law of the land everywhere. But that's very dangerous, since it's an easy way for the non-law abiding to strip a victim of protection when they most need it, and the threshold to get a restraining order, even a permanent one, is way too low.
The first time I bought guns was from a professional couple, and they wouldn't have done it if I and my SO hadn't convinced them we were also such, and would treat them with all due respect.
Of course, no one denies there are problems at the other end, but we are talking about a Constitutionally enumerated right in an era where all Constitutional protections are under threat (yes, even the 3rd Amendment, pervasive surveillance is exactly what quartering troops was all about way back then).
I won't predict a violent counter-revolution if the nation went to mandatory background checks, like would be certain if registration became mandatory, but that would be playing with fire.
Right. If Indiana's gun laws were to blame, you'd see similar levels of violent crime within Indiana, and you don't. The only places in Indiana with anything like Chicago-level violence are areas such as Gary (which is a Chicago suburb in all but name).
On the other side of the coin, nor do you see Chicago levels of violence in downstate eastern Illinois, which is just as close to Indiana.
Chicago has a violent crime rate of 884/100,000. Urbana has a violent crime rate of 338/100,000.
Blaming Indiana's gun laws is convenient rhetoric, but quite obviously wrong.
Not particularly any more, see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464325
Gun laws there are confounded by so many other factors in general crime and murder rates that I doubt much useful knowledge can be discerned until some number of years pass as the city returns to US norms of gun ownership and concealed carry.
Similarly, a gun would need to have a failure rate somewhere in the order of 1% of the typical misfire rate. E.g., if a particular gun & ammunition pairing misfires 1 time out of 1,000 then the security system must fail no more than 1 in 100,000 times or thereabouts.
At that point, any misfire due to the security system would be indistinguishable from a misfire that would have happened anyway.
A 1% increase in misfires would not equate to a 1% increase in unintentional deaths, but a viable safety system would significantly decrease them. In fact, it might be possible to mathematically derive a much higher break-even point, but I daresay that would not work out well politically.
I carry a 1911, which is a design more than a century old. I've fired that gun around 15,000 times without a single failure of any kind.
John Moses Browning was the Leonardo da Vinci of gun design. In addition to the M1911, several of his other designs are still in production, and indeed, in active duty use by various militaries.
I carry my SW1911 90% of the time these days. I occasionally switch out for a Hi-Power (another Browning design!) or a Glock 31.
The Hi-Power is honestly a more practical gun, but the trigger is harder to make decent, since Browning was working around his own patent that he'd sold. My 1911's trigger is the best I've ever seen, bar none.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11464135 and marked it off-topic.
I support gun control in general, but even on a purely financial level (e.g. "I paid $X for these guns and the government might suddenly destroy their value) there are plenty of reasons for people to argue against it.
And such as been proposed in California and Maryland. It's not "paranoia" when they are explicitly "out to get you".
In the mid eighties, Colt was doing great, making hundreds of thousands of rifle for the US military. Then a five year labor strike brought the end of all military contracts as Colt replacement workers were unable to make properly functioning guns.
Colt decided to focus on the civilian market, and brought out a new high tech handgun that was so unreliable that it was eventually recalled.
Then Colt's CEO said that he was in favor of a all gun purchasers having to register federally and purchase a federal permit and training. This did not go over well. (*understatement)
His replacement, seeing that the military would not buy Colt guns and that civilians would not buy Colt guns, decided to focus on police sales.
Unfortunately making a new smart gun required ability in the two things that Colt was not good at - making reliable guns and designing new guns.
It was not just the disastrous demo that killed the smart gun - the prototype smart guns were not even able to be fired without permanent destroying the mechanism. Also, there was a delay from between when the gun was grabbed by the officer and when it could be fired. And of course, the fact that it didn't always unlock to fire even in the best possible circumstances.
Interestingly enough, police handguns have moved even farther away from the smart pistol idea. Today it's a rare department now days that does not use Glocks or M&Ps, both of which are far simpler than the average police handgun of the nineties.
On top of all the other problems, the company is now run by financial vultures who are bleeding it dry.
And, yeah, their flirtation with gun control did not go over well, I would never buy one from them after that, although their relative lack of quality in the category I might have otherwise (M1911s, which they were the original manufacturers of back in 1911) is the biggest reason.
To me insisting on a 0% failure rate for a smart gun is very reminiscent of the mandatory seat belt arguments. Sure... sometimes a gun will fail and the owner end up injured/dead and that's pretty awful. However, if the overall the number of deaths and injuries has been reduced then those tragedies will have been "worth it".
It is irrational to insist on a 0% failure rate.
It is also probably irrational to insist on the same failure rate as existing guns. The correct measure is the deaths/injury rate.
Unfortunately the US doesn't seem to want to tackle the problem of gun deaths/injuries in any sort of scientific manner. There needs to be accurate and reliable data on gun ownership, gun usage (scared someone off), gun deaths, gun injuries. Solid data is the foundation of good policy... and preventing the gathering of good data is pretty telling.
And far too many vested interests are more than willing to mislead people. Specifically, the NRA's constant "confiscate our guns" rhetoric i pretty unconscionable... but folks seem to blithely accept this sort of misrepresentation.
The NRA does attempt to mislead folks on a regular basis... this is well documented.
As for your specific claim about confiscation, how about this tag I was reminded of on a blog that's in my early morning rotation: http://blog.joehuffman.org/category/gun-rights/no-one-wants-...
Or Senator Diane Feinstein, who represents a lot of HN readers), telling "Mr. and Mrs. America turn 'em all in" in a 60 Minutes interview.
And let me assure that, using registration lists, guns have been confiscated in the US, e.g. SKSs in California after the government decided they were "assault weapons" after all (OK, you were allowed to move them out of state, but...).
And California has created a unit to do the same to people they think are prohibited. Most recent horror story was about a nurse who'd voluntarily checked herself into a mental ward because of a medication screwup (i.e. it was self-limiting) and her husband's guns were confiscated: http://bearingarms.com/california-returns-confiscated-guns-t...
I'm not even sure in Crazy California a voluntary admission is a disbarring event, it isn't Federally or of any state I'm aware of, as this case shows it shouldn't be.
And note medication screwups/unwanted mental side effects happen all the time, a former SO got frank suicidal ideation when switched to a standard normally well tolerated anti-depressant (she just stopped taking the drug and was careful while it worked its way out of her system).
And many drugs can cause mania, as I can personally attest (hypomania in my case, and my "you're impaired" flag kept me from doing anything stupid including spending money needlessly (well, beyond buying a power supply as a kit when they're so cheap and easy in the form of wall-warts) until the problem was realized). Many that are not normally psychoactive, I've read systemic steroids like prednisone often do this.