YouTube and Reddit roll out new restrictions including channel and sub bans
Youtube policy update.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7667605?hl=en
Intends to sell firearms or certain firearms accessories through direct sales (e.g., private sales by individuals) or links to sites that sell these items. These accessories include but may not be limited to accessories that enable a firearm to simulate automatic fire or convert a firearm to automatic fire (e.g., bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits), and high capacity magazines (i.e., magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds).
Provides instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories such as those listed above.
This also includes instructions on how to convert a firearm to automatic or simulated automatic firing capabilities.
Shows users how to install the above-mentioned accessories or modifications.
Reddit policy update.
https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/863xcj/new_addition_to_sitewide_rules_regarding_the_use/
We want to let you know that we have made a new addition to our content policy forbidding transactions for certain goods and services. As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including:
* Firearms, ammunition, or explosives;
* Drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances
* Paid services involving physical sexual contact;
* Stolen goods;
* Personal information;
* Falsified official documents or currency
762 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 399 ms ] threadThe finally got all the dark net, and idtheft, shoplifting subs.
Sexsells is still up, but thats a political discussion sub, not for advertising.
I know my local WA_Gun sub is purging all its trade/sell posts, since they allowed it, since all transactions are done at a dealer under law here. Gun forums are in massive purge if they allowed any swaps or sales. (More work!)
For youtube, no idea the scope of the channels banned, but looks like all legal accessories that are "Fun" are banned from youtube.
30 rounds max? Really, its still legal in many states.
BTW, Pot still seems to be legal everywhere on Youtube and Reddit, even r/WeedDeals is still up, so thats interesting rule breaker they allow.
AND now Weeddeals is banned.
The ban process is rolling on still.
Also, appears the banned subs are moving over to voat.
http://www.voat.co/v/gundeals
So much for free speech, huh?
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/03/21/59...
"The Backpage saga has galvanized lawmakers to act on bills amending Section 230 with the goal of stemming online sex trafficking. The legislation allows more state and civil lawsuits against websites related to online sex trafficking, for "knowingly assisting, supporting or facilitating" crimes.
The Senate passed the bill Wednesday, sending it to President Trump for his signature. The White House has supported the legislation."
And the most important quote:
"If the technology companies do not wake up to their responsibilities — and use the power 230 gives them — to better protect the public against sex trafficking and countries that try to hack our political system, you bet that companies can expect (this legislation) will not be the last challenge for them."
Weakening 230 means that online services are closer to needing to treat everything that crosses the platform as the kind of legal risk it would be if it were produced and published directly by the company, considering, including in the worst case of conduct that people might allege it contributed to, with the consideration of how attractive the firm is as a deep pockets piñata for lawsuits where the other side has little to lose and much (even if it is unlikely) to gain.
Which is the whole problem 230 was adopted to solve, but conduct by publishers who were found liable even with 230 in place, proving it doesn't need to be weakened to address the conduct has, nevertheless, provided a pretext for an attack on it.
Now that's an odd topic association. No idea what to think of this, but this sounds odd. Are they using the sex traffickng angle to push a second agenda?
The Reddit bans in particular banned a wide swath of behaviors that are completely legal and not in any grey area, such as selling alcohol or trading alcohol. US Section 230 has nothing to do with this.
Why on earth would they "want to" threaten their share prices and upset their shareholders?
Backpage was openly engaged in helping sex traffickers sell children for sex on their site. They edited ads to remove references to the fact that the people being offered were under age and then ran the ads.
This has nothing to do with the Backpage scum and everything to do with people shooting up schools and other people engaging in mass campaigns to ban guns.
The truest words I’ve ever heard on the gun debate is that “they don’t hate guns, they love guns, they surround themselves guns, it’s you they hate”.
Even many of the "hackers" around here seem to support regulation and censorship.
Freedom of speech != freedom to publish whatever wherever you want
They are entirely within their rights to do this. No doubt. Voat does not have as many (any?) restrictions on the content users can post. The speech is freer on their platform.
I may sound pedantic on this, but I think it's important to fight for freedoms even when they're not enshrined in law. So to grandparent's point, the bigots are often the ones who do so, as a matter of necessity. Now the gun, beer, and cigar aficionados are finding themselves in the same category as Nazis and Klansmen.
It is easy to see one of the unintended consequences of grouping cigar aficionados, home brewers, and gun enthusiasts in with the racists is that they will form common cause to fight back against the "enemy" who are trying to criminalize their hobbies.
The bill of rights comes from a belief that certain rights are self-evident and inherent to all people. In the modern mindset, we have a broader definition of "people" than the founding fathers (that is, we include people of all genders and races). Included in those rights is freedom of speech. Human rights don't simply disappear because you're communicating on a corporate-owned platform.
>Freedom of speech != freedom to publish whatever wherever you want.
Wherever you want, no... but whatever you want, yes, more or less.
The only rights protecting you and I are the rights that protect the scum that many people currently (and understandably) want to see driven off of social media and out of public discourse. They act as the canaries in the coal mine of personal liberty, and democracy depends on the capacity for the free exchange of ideas, communication and debate.
Strip away the privileges, and I wouldn't feel it necessary to impose additional obligations.
In my personal opinion, corporations chartered by a government cannot engage in acts forbidden to that government. If you want to exercise your rights as a natural person, you must be prepared to accept full responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you want to shield yourself from those consequences through a fictional entity, then follow the rassafrassin' rules.
The US government is forbidden from restricting free speech, and so its corporations should not be engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination on that portion of their private property that they have explicitly opened as a public forum. If you allow the public into your space, you have to respect their rights.
H. L. Mencken quote is applicable here, "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
edit, The one thing I'm finding I really don't like about Voat is that it requires whitelisting Javascript from google domains in order to be able to post.
If you dislike the first amendment, there are plenty of countries you can move to that don't have it.
And no, I live in this country so I think I'll be the change I want to see in the world.
It is not so much that those views are "disgusting" in metaphorical sense. It is also that they are threat to my freedom and my success in life. Talking about all that as if it would be all just about badly written literature is misleading.
It's dishonest. And they know they're being dishonest.
users like go1dfish are a good example, he is known on reddit and voat, but he is an example of someone who was forced off reddit for having the wrong thoughts. We were chased off of digg way before digg4 came out and we went to reddit where people like swartz cared about transparency and no censorship. Then we were chased off the main subs of reddit, then our subs got subverted, then shit started disappearing, and now we are on voat.
Remember that many prominent progressives and socialists are also blacklisted by the bulk of NPR/reddit types. Kucinich is a prime example, Ed Shultz is another; their crime is to tell their followers to think rationally about the situation. This is where people like me, and I guess you, find themselves.
No they aren't.
Just as reddit has toxic content, but hardly anyone goes there, so will Voat have the same characteristics....but at the moment, it's not like that.
reddit was mainly a tech forum when it started, then people started making it more accessible, then more people arrived.
We need something in the US where we have free speech rights.
"As linguist Mark Liberman explained on Language Log, cuck “was extended figuratively on 4chan to reference ‘relinquished manliness’ and more abstractly ‘selling out, abandoning principles.’”"
Before edit, comment was originally: "Cuck is invented by alt-righters"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold#History_of_the_term
The alt right popularized particular terms that have racial and misogynistic undertones as insults such as cuck and soy boy.
That kind of porn. The freaks and creeps are parasites on free speech, but like parasites, hard to manage. If you open a free speech haven, they’ll be first through the door. I don’t recommmend it. I don’t know what the solution is, but it isn’t too much censorship, and it isn’t too little. I’m afraid that the reality is that as people we need to do the hard work of a balancing act, so any ideology that is too unbalanced is doomed to fail. Absolute freedom is as doomed as absolute tyranny.
https://www.startengine.com/gab-select
In b4 this thread gets locked lol.
but i suspect people actually want echo chambers these days where they never have to think about their enemies or political reality ... echo chambers for all
I have used Youtube in the past for seeing how to install gun accessories, put guns together, how to fix malfunctions, etc. Watching those videos has made me a more knowledgeable, and hence more responsible gun owner. This is an especially large blow for people who are part of niche communities, like reloading ammo for 100+ year old rifles. A lot of historical content will be lost.
The new youtube rules will also get rid of entertainment channels like Hickock45 and Demolition Ranch (the proceeds of which help subsidize the creator's other channel, Vet Ranch)
I'm also pretty disappointed in Reddit. They made a new admin account yesterday to anonymously post the new rules. I believe this is the first time that's been done for an announcement, usually they're posted by a CEO or a specific individual. /r/gundeals was a fantastic community and I don't know if anything comparable exists elsewhere online. There were lots of links posted by regular users, but when dealers posted themselves they really made an effort to engage with buyers. Crappy vendors/products were usually called out in the comments. Other than optics, I can't imagine why reddit would ban strictly law-abiding communities while allowing illegal and toxic ones to flourish.
From what I can tell, they’re the best tech giant for user privacy. They’ve fought the FBI in court to not put in a government backdoor to unlocking user’s devices. Lawyers ain’t cheap.
I'm not accusing them of misusing our data, but I do know that they have, in the past, chosen to do something that looks like they are disregarding their user's privacy in order to make a buck (https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-moving-icloud-encryption-key...).
And they can set up their systems in a way that ensures they aren't violating our privacy or trust, but they choose not to do that. That to me, is very suspicious.
I do agree that they seem like the best tech giant for user privacy, but that is a super low bar. Just because they are "the best", doesn't mean they are good at it.
Clearly, there are some features that rely on iCloud, but you can choose not to use those features and still have a functioning device.
Are you asking rhetorically? For someone who repeatedly, adamantly, and assuredly posts about Apple and security, I'd be surprised if you don't already know the answer to your question.
And I don't know the answer to that, because I haven't used an Apple product since the original iPhone. If I'm misunderstanding how they work, then, please, inform me as to what I'm missing. I'm very willing to admit I was mistaken if they don't work the way I think they do.
I try to keep up with the basics of how they work, I have my friends show me things, etc. But I in no way want to paint myself as an Apple expert.
Mail is a mail client: if you use an Apple domain, you’ll use their servers. If not, then not. And you don’t need to use the built-in mail client. If you use Apple Maps, yeah, you’re using their service. You can use Google Maps or Waze or other alternatives if you choose. GPS is a radio: it doesn’t involve any service provider other than the satellites it receives information from, same as any other GPS radio.
I don't have to be a mechanic to know when a car is broken, just like I don't have to know how all of Apple's software works to know that they don't actually value privacy. Please, prove me wrong. I'd love it if Apple actually put their money where their mouth is. Until then, I know enough about their stack to know that they don't build it in a way that ensures privacy.
> You’ve seen enough responses from people to anticipate objections.
And? I can anticipate objections as to any argument. That doesn't change the validity of either side. I don't think I get what you mean by this.
> It’s tedious and boring to see the same arguments again and again.
Once those arguments become invalid, I'll stop. If I'm saying something that isn't true, please point it out. Until then, I'll will proudly correct the lie that "Apple cares about privacy". I'm sorry that the truth is tedious to you, but there's not much that I can do about that.
> Mail is a mail client: if you use an Apple domain, you’ll use their servers. If not, then not. And you don’t need to use the built-in mail client. If you use Apple Maps, yeah, you’re using their service. You can use Google Maps or Waze or other alternatives if you choose. GPS is a radio: it doesn’t involve any service provider other than the satellites it receives information from, same as any other GPS radio.
But they could build their systems so that I don't have to go through Apple to use their app, just in the same way that email works. They choose not to. My point is that, until they design their systems so that I can use all of the standard functionality without going through their servers, they aren't taking privacy seriously.
From that, you make an absolute claim that "Apple cares about privacy" is a lie. I think a more accurate description is "Apple doesn't care about privacy as much as I want them to." The latter is a perfectly valid, understandable opinion. The former is not. Apple has sunk substantial resources into privacy; you may feel that the Secure Enclave isn't really, because it's not open, but it's wrong to deny that they've put money into developing it. That's an example of putting their money where their mouth is. Likewise refusing to assist the FBI in unlocking their phones. That cost them money (if only in legal fees), and raised the ire of some in law enforcement and the government.
You can point to decisions Apple has made to operate in China, and reasonable people can disagree about their decision there. It's fair to also hold other companies to the same criteria when doing so. It'd also be helpful to point to examples of what you think are good examples of privacy.
You also mention "I do agree that they seem like the best tech giant for user privacy, but that is a super low bar. Just because they are "the best", doesn't mean they are good at it." Can things be better? Sure. If you care about privacy and "agree they seem like the best tech giant for user privacy", do you use Apple devices? Not since the first iPhone, you say. Then, why not? Are you working to improve security on other platforms? It's understandable if you're not: security is tough, and I don't necessarily expect everyone to contribute to open source. Are you evangelizing for those platforms? That sounds like something you could be doing, along with making reasonable arguments about issues you see with Apple.
Similarly "they could build their systems so that I don't have to go through Apple to use their app". Are you referring to the App Store? Getting software updates through Apple? As for other software, as far as I know, there are alternatives you can use. If you've got specific examples, please do provide them. Again, people can reasonably disagree about these. For a counterpoint, by controlling the marketplace, Apple has more control over quality and security, as well as the responsibility when something goes wrong. One can reasonably argue that they prefer this over letting anyone provide apps because they're concerned about malware being loaded, that other providers won't be paying as close attention. You may reasonably disagree that that's the best way to handle it.
On the other side, Apple doesn't have an business model where they make money from user data: they make money through hardware. The way they've had a hard time providing a good ad platform is an example of this: if they were really interested in selling Apple customers to advertisers, they would have figured this out. A customer benefit of this is that Apple can take privacy seriously: they don't have a motivation to make user data accessible. The other big player here, Google, is in the business of advertising. Tha...
I don't view "Apple pretends to care about privacy as long as it is good for the bottom line" to be trolling, though I do admit I could phrase it better. Possibly "We don't know how much Apple cares about privacy, but they have taken a lot of actions that suspiciously point to them not caring about it more than they care about their bottom line. They also refuse to take actions that would prove to us that they do take privacy seriously.".
In trying to be succinct, it seems that I lost a lot of the important nuance, which I agree is important.
I would like to point to tech-giants that are pushing good security/privacy, but unfortunately, I don't know of any. I think the best I can point to might be Librem, but they don't have a functioning phone AFAIK.
> For a counterpoint, by controlling the marketplace, Apple has more control over quality and security, as well as the responsibility when something goes wrong. One can reasonably argue that they prefer this over letting anyone provide apps because they're concerned about malware being loaded, that other providers won't be paying as close attention.
I get this concern, but until they let go of that control, they are not enforcing reasonable privacy. It's a trade-off, and it's totally Apple's decision to make, but that means that they aren't doing "privacy right" if they choose the option that disregards privacy. Maybe that's better for their users, maybe not, but they have chosen the side that disregards privacy either way.
> On the other side, Apple doesn't have an business model where they make money from user data
That you know of. Unless you know something that I don't, you don't have access to see where all of their money is coming from. I agree it provides them a better incentive, but incentives don't mean anything.
I don't like comparing Apple to Google, because I find it irrelevant what Apple does. Google is an entirely different business. I dislike Google, and I believe that in many ways they are worse than Apple, but that's irrelevant to the discussion.
"Apple doesn't care about privacy as much as I want them to" doesn't accurately represent what my issue is. My issue is that the statement "At least Apple seems to care about privacy" is true, but the statement "Apple cares about privacy" is not true based on the decisions they make. They may care about it but their actions speak otherwise, and it doesn't matter what groups say, it matters what they do. Just because they "seem" to care about privacy doesn't mean that they do, and I don't want unaware users to support a company that, based on their actions, is likely lying to them.
- Open source the enclave?
- Open source the OS (be it macOS, iOS)?
- Allow you to install your own OS and software?
- Refuse to do business in China?
- Open all of their books so you can view the revenue stream?
If this is wrong or incomplete or to expansive, please do clarify, but also please be specific. I want to understand in detail what your reservations are.
Open source pretty much anything that they can, allowing me to compile and install my own os and software. And this would have to be without having to contact apple's servers in any way.
There might be more that I can't remember ATM, but I think that's the main gist of it.
By not allowing me to see how the code works, I can't know what they are doing with my data. And by designing a system where I could set up as much of the stack as possible without having to contact any central source, would ensure that everyone could use it without fear of that data being mis-handled.
My current phone is somewhat open-source (cyanogenmod), though I think Google's version of "open-source, but you totally need to rely on our stuff to get basic functionality" is fairly bullshit.
I can compile my own OS and additional software
I can put tools on my phone that severely limit it's contact with Google's servers, although I suspect that there is an underlying system that ignores those tools.
As for my computers, I use Linux. I typically run them on Thinkpads, but I've tried a few other systems as well. My next computer will be a Purism or System76 laptop.
All in all, I'm not happy with any phone that I've seen. I can't think of any that I believe has taken legitimate action to show that they care about my privacy.
As far as computer OS's, I think Linux has strongly taken action to ensure my privacy.
- Completely open hardware.
- Completely open software.
- Freedom to load any software you'd like on your device.
- Control over the data that's being sent by your device.
FYI, this thread is getting a bit out of hand, so if you'd like to continue this conversation, I don't mind, but LMK how I can contact you because I'm not likely to keep checking for responses |;)
If that's the case, then you can replace your original
> "Apple pretends to care about privacy as long as it is good for the bottom line."
with
> "If Apple truly cared about privacy, they'd allow open access to their hardware and software"
That would provide actual substance and be less flame-baity. HN strives for substantive discussion. Yes, this conversation may be a bit unwieldy, but it's length is, I'd argue, at least in part a result of your initial comment.
People have different priorities. You acknowledge you can't really know what's going on with the hardware. Acknowledging that having the option is a benefit, you also don't always fully audit or compile your on OS, so you're relying on some level of trust. You're also making a tradeoff by supporting/benefitting from an organization (Alphabet/Google) that does earn its revenue based on collecting user data (in that CyanogenMod is based on Android).
A tradeoff I've made is to go with a vendor that provides good hardware and good software while acknowledging I don't have access to the source. I can disable services on iOS that I don't want to use. You continue to bring up that we can't know that Apple isn't dealing in user data. There's no evidence that they do, and you end up arguing for Russel's Teapot when you continue to bring up this point.
I prefer this than relying on software that doesn't work as I expect it to (yes, that's a preference) and not buy further into the Google system. Android has not created a system with universally more secure hardware and software, while benefitting Google's advertising system, which relies on that user data. I understand you're likely not contributing to that directly, but that's part of the system buying Android-compatible devices supports. Clearly your priorities are different, and that's okay.
If you find anything to take away from this, I hope it's at least two things: it's important to error on the side of substance and balance as opposed to flamebait; and that reasonable people can disagree on their choices and priorities.
Cheers for surviving this long. That's it for me.
If you're jailbroken, there's always Cydia, which is a Linux-like package manager.
If you want to minimize connections to Apple, don't use Apple apps or services. Wire replaces iMessage. 2doapp replaces Notes.
As an example: Dovecot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovecot_(software)) doesn't require me to connect to their servers for anything. They have no idea what I'm doing with my data, and they've designed their software so that they can't violate my privacy.
https://www.pfsense.org/
I also don't see why it matters whether or not nobody else sells a smartphone like that. Just because everyone else is doing shady shit with their products doesn't mean Apple gets a free pass.
It seems quite clear to me. No-one cares about users, they care about customers. Apple care about their customers. Google care about their customers. Facebook care about their customers.
I am an Apple customer. I am a Google user. I am a Facebook user. See the difference? So do they.
I just don't like that they try to give the feeling of being "pro-privacy", when their actions speak otherwise. I find it very deceptive.
I would love it if Apple did build privacy oriented systems. I would be their biggest supporter, and I would spend mountains of money on their products. And I do think they would make good money from it from everyone. But until they do design their systems correctly, all we have evidence of is that they can make money by deceiving their users.
I do, and it is. I don't think I get what you mean. Just because a lot of groups choose to lie about their intentions means that it's OK that Apple does the same?
If their goals shift, forced by their intent, you drop them. I can't see any other way to pragmatically get along or make progress in life.
Fact: We don't know what they do with our data
Fact: They refuse to show us what they do with our data, even though they could
Fact: They have taken actions that, while I obviously don't have direct evidence of this, looks extremely like they are handing over control of other people's data to someone else, who is known to be abusive with it
Fact: They can design their system in a way that avoids all of this, yet they continually choose not to
All of this points in one direction, and there's very little evidence pointing in the other direction. It seems pretty obvious to me that their pro-privacy standpoint is all just smoke and mirrors. I'm sure they care to some extent, but they clearly value money over their user's privacy.
If I say that I care about my health, but I eat terrible quality foods, don't exercise, and ignore people who try to encourage me to be healthier, then it it obvious that I don't care about my health, despite what I say.
I don't care why Apple's interests are aligned with mine, as long as they are. When it comes to corporations, dealing with one whose bottom line is aligned with my interest is exactly what I want.
Also, Apple is not 'pretending' to care about privacy. While they have had some embarrassing bugs, they do put privacy as a high priority. Many speculate that Apple is behind in the assistant category because of privacy concerns.
Agreed! I have no problem with that either, and I think it's great when it happens!
> Also, Apple is not 'pretending' to care about privacy. While they have had some embarrassing bugs, they do put privacy as a high priority. Many speculate that Apple is behind in the assistant category because of privacy concerns.
Just because you don't like the fact that they are pretending, doesn't make it untrue. I'm sure that to a certain degree they do care about privacy, but when push comes to shove, they choose money over privacy. They have the ability to design systems with privacy inherent in them, yet they choose not to.
Apples ecosystem is a gilded ghetto
Remembering that macOS bug with empty password root access, I'd say that Apple security QC had degraded a lot.
1. This incredibly obscure bug (in the sense that I'm surprised someone was able to find this) was found relatively quickly
2. After it was found a fix was developed and tested quickly
3. Once that fix passed QA my devices received a software update over the air and the problem was solved. One of the big problem with other mobile OSs is that the OS updates are often going through the carrier or device manufacturer and it takes time or you don't get it at all.
I don't expect a device that's perfectly secure. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of undiscovered vulnerabilities on the device I'm using to type this to you right now. But that's not the whole picture on security.
Genuine question.
Of course you should never use firmware from Chinese company, but it's true for 98% of other Android devices too and LineageOS + microG work great on these phones.
Like, e.g., last year my SO was changing phones, and we didn't have much budget left, so we went with then-recommended Huawei P8 Lite. Almost good enough, except it seems to have its Bluetooth stack broken in a very specific way that renders her Pebble almost useless. Oh, and every other day, it randomly drains battery very fast. It's those kinds of things you generally don't have to deal with when you go with higher-end devices.
Also when it's $160 device I don't need to worry about randomly died battery because I can always get new phone.
I thought that would be a big deal when I purchased my iPhone 8, but using the AirPods, I've never once felt the urge to plug in wired headphones. Wireless headphones really are better.
If you still need something from the playstore there is the "yalp-store" app, which grabs apk with a fake account from google.
For me I see it as a step toward people being more anti-gun ownership. Societies evolve and social views change. Our views on marijuana, smoking, etc. have changed over the decades. I hope I am now seeing the beginning of the end of acceptance of gun ownership.
While we are on opposite sides of this issue I encourage you to continue to stand up for your rights and fight for what you believe in. Let Reddit and Youtube know you are upset about this. Be active and vigilant. I will too.
Edit: Additionally, what do you want done about all of the currently legal guns that exist in this country when this ban goes into effect?
It's not going to be easy.
source: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/02/02/bump-stock-massachuset...
This is an absurd comment. The parent stated that four units were returned state-wide. Asserting the ability to manually decommission them attempts to give the appearance of undermining the parent’s statement without actually addressing the issue.
I don’t think anyone here, even you, likely believes that even a majority of these were destroyed by the owners, let alone all but four.
Is your argument that you believe most/all law abiding citizens that currently own guns will willing destroy/turn over their guns of new laws pass against ownership?
Looking at reports on Australia it seems the effectiveness on turning in guns was anywhere from 40-80 percent. Effectiveness for prohibited guns was at 70%, so ~30% went from law abiding to not law abiding.
Page 11 of 36 is most of the stats for this: http://faculty.publicpolicy.umd.edu/sites/default/files/reut...
Your argument seems to be focused on semantics, which is fine, except you’re missing the point of this statement.
There’s very much a difference in disobeying a natural law like murder and an arbitrary, reactionary, and most of all, unconstitutional, law that’s designed to limit freedom and achieve nothing.
Civil disobedience is amoral. In fact, when the law in question is unjust or unconstitutional to disobey it is a virtue.
definition of words matter, word choice matters to avoid confusion it may cause.
if the original argument is that mostly good/moral people are the gun owners, i wouldn't know where to start on how they got that data, and came to that interpretation as both words are relative.
Major sources of gun violence are no different than in any other developed country, which unfortunately is in a big part fueled by the global failed drug prohibition, and committed with very much illegal firearms.
UK, for example, despite its strictest gun control, has much of the same problems, committed with more primitive tools, only leaving you to bleed out slower, but ending up just as dead (stab wounds are often more lethal than handgun calibers).
The surplus or deficit of guns does not affect the number of people already predisposed to capital crime. The law, unsurprisingly, only affects those that are willing to abide by it. Left defenseless, suspect by default and at mercy of the King.
Clearly, by the way of deduction, legally owned guns must then be in the hands of good & responsible people, for the most part. That, btw, includes 22% of Democrat voters (to 35% Republicans).
I don’t actually think that guns magically make people good or responsible (though they make other people more polite).
It’s likely just a correlation having to do with how firearm owners autoselect, based on range of personality traits and other criteria (like gender).
The statement “401(k) owners are on average good people” is probably equally true, though we don’t collect any data to disprove it, as far as I know.
Nevertheless, there’s some comfort in the fact that of the 370 million guns in United States, all but very few will more likely be used to save lives, rather than take them.
A grand experiment in freedom & liberty, nothing alike anywhere else in the world.
That's based on a false dichotomy; many won't be used at all, and many of the rest will be used for entertainment, not to save or take lives. And some will be used for multiole purposes (often simultaneously), potentially including both saving and taking lives. (A criminal who fatslly shoots a cop to make his escape from arrest on a capital offense, is, after all, both saving and taking a life, as is the cop who, being slightly faster in the same situation, fatally shoots the criminal first.)
I think the number of firearms in US is quite remarkable, considering the fact that in my home country, Poland, only a single person in hundred owns a firearm.
If gun control was in any way effective at reducing crime, it should be very easy to demonstrate, with such significant differences in saturation.
The 2nd Amendment is oddly worded. It does speak of a well regulated militia. I'm not a lawyer or a legal expert but it seems to me that banning the ownership of guns except for members of the militia should be constitutional. I could be wrong. It also seems to me that for those who tend toward original intent interpretations (majority of current Supreme Court) would agree that the founders only saw it fit that people be able to own guns with similar firepower and lethality as muskets. So I could see a law saying that we can own guns but they are quite limited in comparison to what is currently legal to own.
There are far more people in the country now versus 250 years ago. The population density is far greater. We are much more of an urban society. In such circumstances I see no necessity for allowing gun ownership. I don't think the propensity to assholeness has increased but by virtue of having far more people now than in the past the number of assholes has greatly increased. It's best that the lethality of devices we can carry be very much curtailed than what it currently is.
You'd be wrong there. The Supreme Court agrees that the founders saw fit that people are armed with weapons similar to those used by the military, with certain restrictions.
According to Wikipedia:
In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence" and limited the scope of the Second Amendment's protections to the federal government.[11] In United States v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment did not protect weapon types not having a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia".[12][13]
As I stated, I have no expertise in this matter. If it requires a repeal then that is what I would favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...
Leave that nonsense at Reddit.
I used to... I still find it interesting how the “collective right” angle is pushed post Heller and MacDonald with the obviousness that’s always been there of “can you read the rest of the right past the first few words?”
If the constitution is a document that explains the natural rights of citizens, and is restrictions on the government (which it is)... Then saying A well-regulated militia being necessity to a free state - would imply that government is obligated to train and supply ammo - any requirements for this to be part of your rights would be null considering the next words are "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The right is not there for everyone. It's only applicable inasmuch as you are part of the militia, and can be restricted if you're not.
Regulating the militia (just like saying what e.g. is due process) is up to the law, and can be arbitrarily restrictive as long as the overall right of the American people to form an armed militia is not infringed. For example, prohibiting hunting would be just fine.
The reasoning is not tired. It’s how I interpret the text. Fortunately for your position my interpretation doesn’t matter since I’m not on the Supreme Court. Indeed, even decades after Roe v Wade people still argue against the reasoning used in that ruling and desire change.
It’s not nonsense to advocate for one's position just because there is a Supreme Court ruling against that position.
Sorry, well-regulated means well trained and in good working order.
Militia - is you and I, and anyone else of able body that can fight for defense of self and country.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. - that's the part you apparently didn't read. Of all the bill of rights, they all apply to people directly - except of course 2A where you say "people" is collective inexplicably.
Hey, I'm not arguing. Keep using arguments that very old, very tired, well defeated by logic and precedent. It makes my job as someone who cares about civil rights easier.
I’m claim neither to be well educated or knowledgeable. I do claim that when I read that amendment it seems to give the government broad powers of regulation over gun ownership.
As I’ve said through these posts, fight for your rights. Be vigilant. We are on opposite sides but open debate and discussion is good for a democracy. Maybe my view will prevail in the coming decades. Maybe not. Societies evolve and views change. Only by people of like mind to you being willing to advocate for your rights will my position be prevented from becoming normative.
I highly recommend that you either stop holding these ill-informed opinions by your own admission or stop prefixing your every post with the same disclaimer.
However, just like you, my lack of expertise does not preclude me from having an opinion and stating those opinions. Since there are experts who agree with me that the 2nd amendment gives the government powers of regulation it's hard to credibly claim that my position is ill informed. Even if my reasons are ill-informed why should I stop from engaging in conversation? That's the best way to learn.
I've not denigrated anyone or suggested that anyone was ill-informed or otherwise try to diminish those who disagree with me. I'm not so full of myself that the act of dissent from my position causes me to lash out or attempt to quash said dissent. In fact the contrary is true. Several times in these threads I've said to those with whom I disagree that they should fight for their rights and remain vigilant.
Stand up for your beliefs. I will stand up for mine. I hope someday that gun ownership will be viewed with horror by the general populace. My position will not win out if well reasoned individuals who disagree with me remain vigilant and proactive.
Keep fighting the good fight!
They also had no vision of the Internet.
So, obviously, the First Amendment only applies to quill pens and manually-operated printing presses. Right?
"The statement of the 2nd Amendment begins with, "A well regulated militia...""
If the First Amendment had read "A well-educated legislature being essential to the governance of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed" you would argue, what? That only well-educated people should have books? That only the legislature should have books?
No, you wouldn't. Neither would anyone else, because that would be a contrived and nonsensical interpretation of the language.
There is much that the writers of the constitution didn’t foresee. I think it’s ridiculous, in many cases, to try to seek what they originally intended. Society is far more complex now than it was then. I mentioned their views for the self described originalists. These people tend to have a very broad interpretation to what the second amendment means but narrowly interpret other parts of the Constitution.
The 2nd amendment has had many cases before the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until 2008 with Heller that it was interpreted to mean an actual right to own guns. As far as I understand the history of the legal interpretation if the second amendment. It appears the modern interpretation is out of sync with what the founders intended.
At the time of drafting, the founders hadn't yet encountered the Pawnee vs. Cheyenne/Lakota style of total warfare, and had barely even invented hit-and-run tactics. As such, it would have been prudent to amend the amendment at least once in the last 230 years. I'd prefer that laws banning chemical, nuclear, radiological, and biological weapons would have constitutional backing, that torture and other war crimes be banned explicitly, and there be some concession for denying deadly munitions to antisocial maniacs and bellicose outlaws.
Reinterpretation is not the proper channel towards rational arms policy, or to resolve any other problem with the document not anticipating societal progress. Amendment is the prescribed remedy. There have been calls in the past to convene an Article 5 Amendments Convention, as it is the only way to propose an amendment when the Congress won't, but we've never actually had one. Perhaps it is time?
Surely the founding fathers were aware of this and knew that the second amendment would allow citizens to have weapons that were more deadly than the standard military firearm at the time. In fact, this trend even continued well into the Vietnam war. It was really only in the past 50 or so years that the military has eclipsed the citizens in terms of standard issue firepower.
So no, the founding fathers were not aware of the M-16 and AK-47[0], but they also had more than muskets and bayonets, and were perfectly content to have a citizenry that outgunned the military.
[0] - I should note that the M-16 and AK-47 are essentially illegal in the US at this point, along with any weapons of similar firepower, so that point seems moot anyway. The only people able to acquire them are incredibly rich collectors.
Leaving aside gun laws, we've long since completely abandoned the premise of the second amendment on a far more fundamental level with our professional militaries and paramilitary police forces.
Short barrel shotguns were extremely common in world war 1 trench warfare, and that’s what Miller was charged with. Too bad he was dead before the supreme court heard that case.
Miller is especially bad case law too, he was dead by the time it was heard and essentially no one even argued that side of the case - it was a total sham.
The definition of militia is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
There are two "militias", the national guard, and the unorganized militia...
When I read the Federalist papers, I interrupted it as Hamilton and Jay were trying to describe a defense strategy of the country, which included internal, and external threats. When I read it, I got the feeling they both were very much against the state of affairs we have today. They advocated for a small professional army, and a large reserve of men if needed.
I personally feel this is the right model, today our DoD budget is 600 BILLION dollars! Every social service other first world countries have, we can't afford. That is directly a result of our military spending. If we spent less getting into conflicts we probably don't need to be involved in (I still do not understand what the national interest in Afghanistan and Iraq is), and we had a very large reserve of men. We could maintain the defense readiness we have today, but also have publically funded education, healthcare etc.
I do concede that the requirements of training are much different though. A model like Switzerland's militia might be preferable. In their model, each citizen has 1 year of conscripted service. It's spread out a bit but is an adequate amount of time to train someone properly. It also provides a method for "weeding" out individuals who should not be a part of this reserve. Their gun laws are also far more strict. Gun ownership is more of a privilege there. I don't know how much of that we can do here, but I think it's a good example of how to build a militia in modern times.
The US spends a lot on its military, but it's only about 15% of central government spending. When you look at spending as a percentage of GDP, we (3.3%) are not that far off from European powers like France (2.3%) or the UK (1.9%) whose defense we essentially subsidize through NATO. We just have a much larger economy so that 3.3% turns out to be a really big number.
There's no obvious (to me) fiscal reason why our social services have to be so poor, so I have to assume we just suck at allocating the money (possibly intentional).
By your numbers, there's a 1% difference. On the scale of the GDP, that is a HUGE number. I think looking at the absolute numbers matters. Free higher education for everyone would cost $75 billion (according to Bernie Sanders). Trump asked for an additional $116 billion dollars for defense. I don't see the logic in arguing if we can afford $600 billion, and another $116 billion, while at the same time arguing $75 billion is impossible and would bankrupt the country. We're clearly making priorities.
> Free higher education for everyone would cost $75 billion.
this I find hard to believe. the US government estimated that ~20 million students would be enrolled in college/university in fall 2017. assuming enrollment would not increase if college were free, that $75 billion works out to about $3750 per student. this substantially undercuts even in-state tuition at the average community college, which already receives significant funding from the government.
although I pushed back on that particular claim by Sanders, I still maintain that we have an allocation problem, not a money problem. according to 2012 data[2] the US government spends almost exactly the same percentage of its GDP on education as the UK, and we are in the high range of money spent per student in primary and secondary education[3].
i'm no expert, but this doesn't look like the kind of thing where you can just throw money at it and expect it to work. we should figure out how to use the money we already have to produce more similar outcomes to those in Western Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Additionally, what is your plan to deal with the potential for violent, armed resistance to this ban, and in what facilities would you put all of the violators of this ban?
How would something like that possibly be carried out?
Simply make it illegal and it goes away!
Should we DRM 3D printers (DMLS@home is coming) to a walled garden of things? The 2nd Amendment is not separable from general purpose computing. Who needs "assult crypto" anyway?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...
Average national response time is 10 minutes, even in cities the median is 5min, but can be as high as 30min for some remote areas.
In certain situations there may be no police response at all, as was the case in 1992 Los Angeles riots or practically any major natural disaster.
The ‘let the police do it’ argument would only logically work with incredibly pervasive and invasive surveillance technology and/or police robots (https://goo.gl/wpMV8).
Even so, 2nd amendment would be even more relevant to balance the killer robots.
This more or less describes the Parkland shooting.
You put much faith in the Government, and I put it in the individual.
What happens when your police force is turned against you, becomes incompetent, gets lazy, or just doesn't show up?
It's idealistic. Life is a struggle for the individual, no matter how much we'd like to forget it or offload our worries.
Drug laws for example does not really work, since some people self medicate no matter if there is a death sentence. Others don't care since they probably wont get caught.
While other laws kind of does work, people can rationally choose to follow them because the concequences of doing so are the "best" available option.
It's the punishment that is the deterrent.
Why should law abiding gun owners be punished again?
Adding punitive laws is not a deterrent. Enforcing those laws is. We don't enforce many guns laws, then you come in yelling about adding more laws.
The logical conclusion isn't that laws have no meaning if they're broken, it's that they have no meaning if they aren't enforced, and we're not.
Parkland could have been avoided in at least 6 different ways. So tell me how your new-laws that make illegal things illegal-er would stop people with no criminal record from being bad.
Parkland could have been avoided in a 7th way too. Without access to guns it wouldn’t have been as lethal.
We know the places that have more guns don’t have more crime, we can’t call correlation to that, but we do know adding guns doesn’t increase crime - because that’s been true since the high crime peak of the early 1990s where crime has been falling with guns skyrocketing.
It’s painfully childish to claim that it’s some surprise that where guns are that there is more gun-crime. Something can’t be abused where it doesn’t exist - the joke is that people look at gun-crime compared to overall crime.
Rape rates in Australia are 40-45% higher than the USA. If you’re a rapist, it’s much safer to “work” in Oz, does the rapist getting shot in the USA contribute to “gun-crime”? On paper, yes.
You should be able to easily show that rural USA with it's murder rate on part with Europe is definitely not the place where all our guns are... oh wait...
My claim is that the mass murder rate, the rate at which we have mass killings in the U.S. would go down if buying/selling guns were illegal.
And while we're at it, we can use it as an opportunity to crack down on minorities we don't like, and maybe do some good old selective enforcement, genius.
So you highlight how gun control has been used as an oppressive tool in the past. What are we do to when only our corrupt government is allowed to have guns?
And what about something like Vietnam? Who won that one?
And even if you're right, that the US government is just that big and bad. What if half the military defects and joins the revolt?
People have the right to defend themselves, and must be trusted to do so. Otherwise you get something like England. Say the wrong thing and you go to jail. The 2nd Amendment keeps the government in check. Eventually, given enough time, it will need checking.
Vietnam wasn't on US soil, home-base would be infinitely cheaper.
> And even if you're right, that the US government is just that big and bad. What if half the military defects and joins the revolt?
The higher up they are the more nonexistant that chance gets, and the higher up you are the more likely it is that you have a kill-switch to any devices that can be used against the nation.
> People have the right to defend themselves, and must be trusted to do so. Otherwise you get something like England. Say the wrong thing and you go to jail. The 2nd Amendment keeps the government in check. Eventually, given enough time, it will need checking.
Actually, you have the US. People have been arrested for bible burning, [1] promoting Communistic views, [2] Japanese Internment Camps, [3] and more. It's absolutely anti-democratic, but the 2A supporters never will speak against these practices.
[0] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150715-killer-robots-the-s...
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/23/bible-burning-incident-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
Your argument is that people shouldn't have guns because we probably couldn't beat the government. I'll take my fighting chance. It's better to die free.
But really, that is just a weak strawman. The US government/military is MANY orders of magnitude more powerful than the British vs the colonists. The US military could nuke every single state capital in a few minutes, for example. If you take the argument to it's logical conclusion, we should have legal access to weapons equivalent to that of the military, which we already definitely do not.
I am just pointing out that an untrained populace armed with even military-style assault weapons is really just laughable if your enemy is the largest military that has ever existed with technology and weapons that could annihilate humanity. I just don't agree that it is productive to use that as an excuse against thoughtful regulation in the face of the actual, currently occuring epidemic of gun violence (accidents, suicides, school shootings, domestic violence, gang violence, etc) where people are really losing their lives.
Tell that to the Nazis. They were the military superpower of their time.
Except for the nuclear option every armed enemy can tie up >10 soldiers if they are going to try to keep people alive for slave labour/selective genocide/etc.
Edit: my point is that the Nazis had a giant technological advantage as well as a giant army and even powerful allies and still they were vulnerable to all kinds of sting operations.
Edit2: a little more context.
The fight against nazi was ultimately won by armies, not by "untrained populace".
All in all, this is really odd example.
Yep. That is my point.
> The fight against nazi was ultimately won by armies, not by "untrained populace".
Also true. But local groups (and of course SOE operations) helped tying up their resources so they couldn't help on the eastern front or start the invasion of Britain.
From Wikipedia[0]: The following afternoon, on 8 May, ... At this time there were no fewer than 400,000 German troops in Norway, which had a population of barely three million.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Norway
I'm against loss of human life too, that's why I'm pro-2nd Amendment. People can defend themselves. People can fight off tyranny. Given enough time, people will need to do that again.
You say most people would support a tyrant, which may not be true but let's go with that. Given that, why wouldn't you want the opposition to that tyrrany to have guns? Your take seems defeatist. You want to just try to live peacefully as tyranny spreads?
You really should take a moment to listen to Heller(2008).
Even if that isn't the case, all those weapons are on the ground or in port at some point. Meaning an attack with small arms to get in there and preemptively blow them up will work. These weapons also have to be maintained meaning they need a base. You have millions of citizens with weapons and a military that's a much smaller fraction of that, with bases that have a much smaller fraction of personnel. The base is going to be overrun. There is also the chance of military personnel defecting, so that some of these weapons never get fired.
Chemical and biological weapons are a really bad idea. The problem is a civil war isn't going to be geographically defined in this case. There is no polarization along something like a Mason-Dixon line. You will end up killing people that don't revolt, which will probably make them rethink their not revolting. How would you feel if your family and friends were killed in an attack, and they weren't on the rebel side?
The other problem is even if you increase the military's size to win the civil war, you have the second problem of the very people that you could grab immediately to fight are probably going to be a majority of people who have been opposed to gun ownership, don't have weapons and don't know how to use them. It will take time to become proficient and the other side has both the weapons and training.
Even with advanced military tech, the numbers game combined with a guerrilla approach, and the fact these are civilians and it would be hard to identify civilian combatants from non-combatants, will make it a losing battle. We already haven't done well in Afghanistan or Iraq for similar reasons, and despite the enemy being technologically inferior, we have never been able to secure those regions.
The Nazis had quite a lot of soldiers tied up in already occupied countries because of sting operations.
Edit: remove stupid snark
To some extent, I actually imagine it'd be safer for the average citizen.
* * *
From a more protectionist standpoint, you could say that an AR-15 or an AK-47 will allow you to stand up against your government. This isn't really realistic, however - no civillian weapon, especially not a semi-automatic rifle, will reliably take care of a tank, fighter jet, drone or military robot. [0]
[0] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150715-killer-robots-the-s...
It gives you some leverage however if you need to get some ingredients for your IEDs.
A few guns might make the difference between efficient large scale killings like Auschwitz and a case where a large number of civilians get away and hide until the international community can come and help.
Oh wait.
That sounds like justification for taking people's guns from them.
"Oh but I need this 1000 round per minute gun for pest control in my apartment! I'll murder people to protect my right to have it."??
Thank you for helping me to underline for you how little you understand the situation.
The whole thread is reference to the parent saying people would rise up in armed revolt if the law was changed to tighten gun controls.
Assuming the national guard weren't sent in then as I understand it regular police would be charged with arresting those who refused to follow the legislation.
To me the meaning of that is clear - if the law is changed people will shoot (at) those who oppose them.
In this hypothetical case that would be police attempting to arrest them for unlawfully keeping controlled firearms.
You appear to be saying if tighter gun controls were enacted your family members who are policemen would leave their jobs in order to shoot anyone attempting to confiscate their controlled weapons? Do you think that's a reasonable position? Kill your own countrymen now in order to protect your right to more efficiently kill others in some intangible imaginary future scenario?
But should such a dire scenario occur, I have always wondered how these small arms would fare against UAVs. The trouble is that we have precedent in this country that in a large-scale rebellion, it is taken out of law enforcement's hands and put into the military's hands.
Anything to support this? It's very sad to imagine that not being allowed automatic weapons at home, say, would turn LEOs in to outlaws. Do they perceive an actual threat? Do they not care about all the school massacres?
Are this large proportion of armed personnel in rebellion against the bump stock rulings that I understand were enacted recently?
This is different from outlawing or more tightly controlling certain classes of weapons, which seems to be what you're talking about. I think not being able to easily purchase fully automatic weapons or crazier stuff like rocket propelled grenades, stingers, 20mm cannons, etc is something a minority of gun enthusiasts grumble about but pretty much everyone basically accepts. Nobody that I know of is revolting about that, cops/feds have no problem enforcing it, etc.
Tighter gun controls requires taking guns away from people (or people giving up their guns willingly).
I think banning bump stocks, which are just a crude workaround of the longstanding automatic gun restrictions, are something we'll probably see without mass revolt or officers refusing to enforce.
But for fun, I'll try to address the question. I live in a conservative state and do some work with public health policy, working with local politicians and have friends in LEO and military. Here are the common arguments/viewpoints (I am not endorsing them):
- The biggest proportion of gun deaths are suicides, so focusing on random massacres or inner-city violence, which are tiny blips on the mortality radar, is not a productive or a good-faith basis for banning guns.
- There is a (somewhat justified IMO) fear of a slippery-slope approach to gun regulation. It is not controversial or speculative to say there is a large contingent on the left that would like to totally ban them if it were possible.
- Guns are very limited in the damage they can do. A bomb in a high-school assembly could do a lot more damage than the most well-prepared shooter, and with much less risk to the perpetrator. At best, guns are not the most dangerous thing to be focused on and at worst, banning them could push psychopaths into more dangerous alternatives.
LEOs and military folks lean conservative. That means they tend to generally distrust or even fear the very government they work for. LEOs in particular are well acquainted with the damage guns do on a daily basis but frequently do not see banning them as a solution because:
- It is impractical
- The people killing each other with them are for the most part poor or (by definition) criminals, so no one cares about them
- The original intention of the 2nd Amendment was to protect the people from the government that, again, they distrust and fear, so even if banning guns would save lives, which they would dispute, it is a worthwhile cost to pay to protect against tyranny.
- There is a viewpoint that gun control actually increases violent crime, and therefore deaths, because guns serve as a deterrent. I have been in an extremely long-running debate with a local politician about whether this is the case.
As a result of all these arguments, I think a serious effort to confiscate guns would make many, many people in conservative states, including LEOs and military, very highly irritated. Irritated enough to rebel? I have no idea.
Again, I am not endorsing most of this, but there is one argument that resonates with me from a public health perspective. Gun homicide is an extremely rare cause of death. I personally feel that it would be orders of magnitude more helpful if the left would channel its energy into increasing funding for your friendly neighborhood National Institutes of Health.
To the rest of us, that sounds like the violence threatened by a terrorist group--and maybe you shoot policemen, maybe you shoot your neighbors, I dunno, I'm not the one talking about keeping my guns around to be able to shoot my fellow citizens.
A semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15 is unlikely to surpass 100 rounds per minute.
The collective noun for people who will kill rather than obey the law is "terrorists".
One of the conditions for peace in Northern Ireland was that political groups had to disarm in order to enter politics, because you can't do politics with people who are threatening to murder you. That's not a democracy.
Killing in response to being disarmed is probably one of the most "American" things its citizens could do.
No. It isn't.
Terrorist: a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
You understanding seems to have the subject inverted. It is unlawful for the US government to infringe on the rights of its citizens outlined in the constitution. Such an act by the government would immediately invalidate its authority and any attempt to assert that illegitimate authority would be immediately considered an act of war against the American people. So, from that point on any action taken against the illegitimate government by the American people would in fact be in pursuit of restoring the law.
>One of the conditions for peace in Northern Ireland was that political groups had to disarm in order to enter politics, because you can't do politics with people who are threatening to murder you. That's not a democracy.
Right, that was surrender.
In America, the authority of the law is derived from the people, not the other way around.
It is not just a democracy, it is a well defended one.
I do wonder if American resistance to sensible gun control will cause a flip straight over into hard restrictions, but it's difficult to see what the trigger event for that would be. Left-wing paramilitaries? (right-wing paramilitaries are seemingly tolerated!)
If anything those numbers show that there is at the very least no correlation between numbers of guns and crime, and may well indicate more guns means less crime. Since the US constitution protects ownership with the "shall not be infringed" clause and the stats show there's little downsides why stomp on people's rights?
http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun...
So there is a legal framework to add/remove amendments from the US Constitution, they are amendments after all, they were not there originally (I think 3 years after).
I personally would _never_ willingly turn mine in--they're for my and my family's protection and have saved my life before. I am certain many gun owners feels this way as well. Trying to enforce such a rule would be difficult, if not impossible.
Doing minimal research on prohibition since I had no context into what triggered it: "Prohibition also united progressives and revivalists. The temperance movement had popularized the belief that alcohol was the major cause of most personal and social problems and prohibition was seen as the solution to the nation's poverty, crime, violence, and other ills." [0]
You could replace alcohol with firearms and the part about removing them being "solution to the nation's poverty, crime, violence, and other ills". I bet there are a lot of people that would believe that prohibiting firearms would help solve those issues.
Just because laws are not easy to enforce doesn't mean they can't happen. There are still counties in some states that are 'dry'.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...
That's why we have principles and constitutional rights. So that our rights aren't taken away on a whim of societal change.
I'm from NY and I've never owned a gun and I probably will never do so. But even I would be against repealing the 2nd amendment.
The fact that people here are so openly talking about repealing the 2nd amendment and taking away more of our rights is really concerning. And it's self-defeating. It'll only make americans more wary of losing our 2nd amendment rights and increase gun sales.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2007/07-290
I didn't say it was unconstitutional. The constitution makes it very difficult to repeal for a reason.
It's why only 1 amendment has ever been repealed and that amendment was written nearly 150 years after the founding of the country.
I'm fairly certain that the 1st and 2nd amendment are pretty much untouchable.
But I wish you the best in trying to get it repealed. The more you try to get it repealed, the more people will support the 2nd amendment and remind people that we actually have rights that we need to protect lest it be taken from us.
It does not stretch my imagination to see people being fed up with it being legal to own firearms with the lethality that is currently allowable. I may be wrong. Fight for your rights. Be vigilant. I will continue to advocate for repealing the right to own guns. I may never see my vision come to fruition.
So people can have guns as long as they're in a "well-regulated militia"? Do we want all gun owners to be in self-governed militias? I don't follow this line of thought.
I’m no expert on the legalities and legal interpretations of the 2nd amendment but it seems to me a case could be made that well regulated gives the government broad regulatory powers. The mention of militia could be interpreted to mean only members of the militia, clearly under the command of the military, can own guns. Of course a repeal of the amendment would be fine with me too.
Times change and interpretations change. I do not feel bound to interpret the Constitution by only considering what the founders meant. But for people who are originalists the well regulated meaning in the wording of the second amendment should imply broad government powers of regulation. It’s the only part of the Bill of Rights that grants a right to both the government and the people. It’s an oddly worded amendment. I imagine that the founders understood that a broad, unregulated right to own guns might not be the best public policy and hence threw in the well regulated wording. Also they mention it being necessary to a free state. If it is no longer necessary to a free state what then? Can a ban be placed on ownership? I don’t know how they would answer the question. I do know how I answer it.
That's probably the place to end this back-and-forth. We aren't going to hash out "rule by men" versus "rule of law" a thread about banned subreddits. But I think the right way to be unbound from what the Constitution means is to actually convince people to amend it. There are significant justice implications to ignoring the laws of a country in service of realpolitik.
The second amendment means to me something different from what it means to you. As I’ve said all along In these threads, fight for your rights. Advocate for your position. I will fight to change public perception.
No, its not, otherwise it wouldn't explicitly allow penal slavery.
If the text becomes too arcane or unclear, the correct remedy is to amend the constitution, not backfill the meanings of the words from outcomes we already have in mind.
you misquoted it the text reads: 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.
emphasis mine, It is the right of the people that will not be infringed.
Rhode Island's 1842 constitution starts like this:
> The liberty of the press being essential to the security of freedom in a state, any person may publish his sentiments on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty . . . .
So according to you, if the 'security of freedom in a state' is threatened, then the government can suspend the freedom of the press?
Or take 1784 New Hampshire constitution:
> In criminal prosecutions, the trial of facts in the vicinity where they happen, is so essential to the security of the life, liberty and estate of the citizen, that no crime or offence ought to be tried in any other county than that in which it is committed . . . .
So according to you, 'if the trial of the facts in the vicinity where they happen is not essential to the security of the life' (again, in wartime or any exogenous circumstances like 9/11 attacks) then this right of citizens to be tried in the county where the crime was committed can be suspended by the govt whenever they deem fit?
Or maybe, this 'justification clause' which was written in many different ways at many different places by the people of that time is actually 'one and the most important justification' for a right and not 'If and only if trial of the facts in the vicinity ...'.
Let me explain another scenario. The first amendment starts with "Congress shall make no law...". Today we clearly understand it to mean 'US Congress', but in the year 2256, People have created a new legislative body called Congress-22 and now they claim that first amendment only restricts Congress's power to restrict speech. On the other hand Congress-22 still has the power to restrict speech and religion.
Same thing goes with 'militia'. It used to mean "pretty much all able-bodied men from age eighteen to forty-five". This does not mean that it ONLY protects the right of 18-45 men to keep and bear arms, but it cover everyone's right to keep and bear arms.
They left out part of it
> First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the __right of the people__ peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Does that mean that first amendment is not an individual right to free speech, press or religion?
> Fourth Amendment: The __right of the people__ to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
How about now? You don't have the individual right against unreasonable searches and seizures?
> Ninth amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained __by the people__.
Again, the 9th amendment which claims that there are rights outside of constitution and they are retained by the people, just because they are not written in the constitution. Are these all the 'right of the states'??
Or my favorite one, the tenth amendment:
> 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__.
Here, it uses "the states" and "the people" separately. Clearly if second amendment meant it is a right of the states to keep and bear arms, then it would have mentioned it so, and not said "right of the people".
I think you had me wrong it is an individual right. They neglected to include the of the people part in their quote. The 2A applies to the people not the militia
I pretty much agree with you on the rest
> There is nothing unconstitutional about repealing an amendment. The Constitution details the mechanism for amending it.
You really think you can get 34 states to vote to repeal something from our bill of rights?
If you are a democrat mastermind and want to do that then your best bet is to get more and more states created out of the blue states to get more than 2/3rd of the states to vote to repeal 2nd Amendment.
The Founders weren't stupid. They did not intend for any random nut to have the right to carry a gun. The lethality of weapons available at the time the 2nd amendment was introduced is not even remotely comparable to that of the puniest modern handgun. Simply put, an armed individual didn't pose much of a threat back then. They could hardly envision the nightmares we have to endure today, or else they might have been more precise with the language in order to preclude exactly this sort of Al-Qaeda-esque interpretative perversion of a 'sacred text'.
That you're dispensing the carefully-crafted bile conservatives have vomited into our society is little more than a testament to their capacity to brainwash the masses.
You might well be a member of your state militia and not even be aware of it...
The main point the founding fathers had for the militias was to defend the country from foreign invaders and from a tyrannical government. I know people think we don't need to worry about tyrannical governments these days, but what if what happened in Libya, Syria and Egypt started happening here? How would we fix that kind of a situation?
IANAL but it seems like it applies to people not militias
Wikipedia gives some historical context which makes it seem more clear that it's about people not state-run militias:
> Samuel Adams proposed that the Constitution: "Be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless when necessary for the defence of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of their grievances: or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures."
If "inalienable" means "when you have met some specific requirements" then the term is meaningless btw.
I hope the NRA folks also take a look at GOA.
Conservatism, I though, was all about making slow and slight tweaks to society, rather than radical changes. But refusal to allow even the slightest evolution or deviation on some issue, like gun rights, leads to the opposite: at times it feels like we are heading towards outright civil war.
In the face of an obvious societal problem like gun violence, real conservatism would say sure, lets make some small changes to gun regulation, see how that goes for a few years or decades, then re-evaluate our position to see if society is better or worse off. Instead, seemingly obvious minor tweaks to gun regulation get cast as the first giant step towards impending repeal of the 2nd amendment. Maybe we are past the point of no return, I don't know.
You could easily live through 50+ years of incrementally handing over bits and pieces of your right to bear arms to the government before things turn ugly. It's San Francisco relaxing its building codes since it hasn't had a big earthquake in 100 years.
Because the anti-firearm crowd won't budge an inch either.
All the evidence points towards gun-free zones failing to reduce violence. Will the anti-gun crowd work with gun owners to expand where law abiding citizens can carry?
> If people can't get sensible gun regulation
Without making this partisan - you can't have strict gun control without strict border control.
Should we try and meet the conservatives in the middle and help them secure our southern border?
The irony of your statement when guns flow from the US to Mexico, not the other way around.
Maybe the Mexicans should build a wall to protect them from illegal US guns?
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/...
Does it make my statement any less true?
Does the current direction of gun flow matter when we are talking about a future US gun ban?
The logic that makes more sense to me is gun control in the US would result in less guns going over the border to Mexico.
With strong gun controls in the US what will stop guns from traveling in the other direction from Mexico to the US?
The only reason they don't today is because nobody in the US wants lower quality firearms from Mexico.
Basic firearms are significantly less complex than you would think.
Any one of the cartels is big enough and rich enough to make hundreds of thousands of firearms/year.
But why do that when you can get them dirt cheap and higher quality from the US?
Mexico has a demand for guns. US has a supply. The guns go south. US cutting its supply will not increase the demand internally to the level of Mexican cartels, and even if it did it is a stretch to think Mexican cartels can run guns as effectively in the US as they do in Mexico.
We have much more enforcement and LEO structure all around than Mexico.
If your solution is a wall at the border you have completely lost me.
The US has a higher demand for firearms than Mexico does - it's just local manufacturing more than meets the local demand.
> it is a stretch to think Mexican cartels can run guns as effectively in the US as they do in Mexico.
They do just fine running drugs and people. I don't see why guns would be any harder.
> If your solution is a wall at the border you have completely lost me.
Gun bans at the city and state level have been found utterly ineffective at reducing violence - in large part because people run guns over the state/city border.
Why would you expect a nationwide ban to be any more effective?
It would still be easy to run guns over the border - just the border now is a national border instead of a state/city border.
"I'll agree not to shoot your kids today, but only if you let me beat up your cousin instead." That's more or less what your argument sounds like to me. Can we agree that gun violence is a problem in the US, on a level vastly higher than many other parts of the world? Can we talk about how to move towards a society with less gun violence? Let's work together to find things that will help reduce gun violence. I'm willing to give up a lot of things I care about to move that way. You seem to only be willing to head that direction if you get something else you want in return. And it's especially jarring when the thing you want in return seems a to always move things back in the exact opposite direction, expanding access to and availability of guns.
Yes - by implementing proven policies and removing ineffectual ones.
> You seem to only be willing to head that direction if you get something else you want in return.
Because we don't trust anti-gun people.
> expanding access to and availability of guns.
^ and this is why we don't trust anti-gun people.
Like I said above gun free zones have been shown to be ineffectual.
Yet you don't want to remove this ineffectual policy and try a different approach. You just want stricter and stricter gun control.
> I'm willing to give up a lot of things I care about to move that way.
Are you?
So if the evidence supports arming teachers and reducing the number of places that qualify as gun free zones will you support these changes?
I never said anything about "gun free zones". I'm not sure what they are, I don't know how effective they are, but I don't see how they hurt either. To me, it seems like more guns, easier and cheaper availability of guns, more destructive guns, less strict and less comprehensive / universal background checks are all things that lead pretty clearly to more gun violence. That's why I'm against those things. I'm willing to change my mind. But the NRA is too busy disparaging victims of gun violence.
I really don't see how arming teachers helps. I've heard arguments for it, but those arguments really just don't ring true to me, and it seems that more guns will lead to more violence. I haven't read studies that seem credible and support what you are saying. Do you have any? I've looked, and there is a lot of really contradictory stuff out there. I'm willing to support anything that will reduce gun violence, in general.
I've been thinking about this thread for a while, and I think what bothers me is this. If you think expanded background checks (for example) will help reduce gun violence, why will you only support it if you get something else in return? Why can't we find things both sides thinks will help, and enact those things? Why must you hold those things hostage until you get some other thing that the other side fears will make the situation worse?
You have it all wrong. I don't believe they will reduce gun violence.
I'm saying if anti-gun people were trustworthy I'd be willing to try some of these policies - then if they didn't work we could just stop them - no harm done.
> but I don't see how they hurt either.
And that's the problem: You are happy to infringe upon a fundamental right without clear evidence that it's a big win for society.
That mentality needs to be opposed at every step.
> To me, it seems like more guns, easier and cheaper availability of guns, more destructive guns, less strict and less comprehensive / universal background checks are all things that lead pretty clearly to more gun violence.
But the actual evidence for these is not at all conclusive.
What is conclusive is firearms are used for self defence all the time: https://fee.org/articles/defensive-gun-use-is-more-than-shoo...
Your anti-gun policies can just as easily ensure more women are raped and sexually assaulted.
Features of the current US pro-gun-control movement include the notion that it's somehow absurd handguns, which are used in the vast majority of US gun homicides, are more tightly restricted than rifles. The idea that the gun used in your deadliest school shooting, the VA Tech massacre, is basically useless and ineffective. The belief that the AR-15 is some kind of super-powerful danger rifle too powerful for anything but murder (it's actually a tad underpowered as hunting rifles go). Also unyielding, full-throated defence of the elected official in charge of the police department which ignored all the warning signs about the Parkland shooter. Pretty much only pro-gun folks seem to be questioning any of this.
To give some idea about the quality of this debate, the founder of gun control group Moms Demand Action literally pointed her followers at a photo of a scary-looking black gun, trying to make it look like some incredibly dangerous killing machine, and demanded they pressure the retailer into not selling it to under-21s https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/969572513154936833 It was actually a .22 LR bolt-action rifle, probably the least effective long rifle in widespread use it you want to kill anyone or anything, that was optimised entirely for competitive target shooting. I can't think of any other country off-hand that considers 18 year olds incapable of buying and owning those. Her follow-up was to accuse the NRA of misogyny for pointing out how stupid and clueless this was, with the help of Media Matters for America.
The campaigns for "sensible gun control" basically just use the term as a talking point that avoids having to actually explain and justify what they're calling for; after all who could be against sensible, common-sense restrictions other than some gun nut whackjob?
I see a lot of dismissal of gun control advocates in threads like these, but arguments regarding gun control from those who claim authority on the matter tend to devolve towards strident defiance - "if you try to take my gun I will shoot you with it." That doesn't make for constructive discussion.
People who sell guns want a way to perform background checks on the people they sell to, but there's no way to do it because only licensed dealers can access NICS. As long as the private background check system has the same privacy invariants as the existing paper system for dealers (primarily that it is not possible to look up which guns someone owns, only to take a serial number and see who owns it) there won't be significant opposition.
At a federal level, it's not that easy. If there was an easy way to ban them, the ATF would have already. It's really hard to define a bump stock in a way that wouldn't either ban a lot of other things, short of classifying them as machine guns. If you classify them as machine guns, at this point, you pretty much have to let people who already have them enroll them on the NFA registry (federally, there is no legal basis to confiscate property that was legally acquired and legal to acquire when acquired), which is not necessarily what you want either.
And saying someone is stupid isn’t mocking. (Although it can be)
It’s like old men legislating abortion laws who know nothing about female specific health topics.
What the NRA is doing is a disservice to gun owners. They are making a gun ban more likely by not offering any reasonable alternatives.
My opinion is we need state run (but federally funded) gun licensing to ensure safe owners and gun registry to ensure the guns stay with those owners.
Other countries do it. It works just fine. We are not having that conversation in America today in part because of the extremist views of the NRA.
Surely the burden for coming up with a reasonable, sensible gun control proposal should be on the people who're insisting we could have one if it wasn't for the pesky NRA and their gun nut supporters?
Without that there is no room to enforce regulation. The NRA and the gun culture will never budge on these two items, so they make an outright ban inevitable.
People can call things reasonable or unreasonable, that's fine but try to argue that registering a gun or obtaining a license is such an undue burden for the individual gun owner vs the harm of vast unchecked gun profileration for the rest of society.
NRA supporters are gun nuts. I am a gun owner.
There is a difference.
Here is a recent ad from the NRA,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrnIVVWtAag
That doesn't come off as at least a little unhinged to you?
The NRA does a disservice to gun owners and the whole country with their amped-up, violent rhetoric.
Well I don't want to give an inch more to gun control proponents because they have already made their intent clear, they believe that a completely gunless society is much more admirable than what we have today.
It's like this, imagine if a British politician Nigel Windsor calls for the 'assassination of the Queen' and overthrowing of Monarchy. Upon failing to achieve support on that, he proposes bill such as "Full budgetary accountability of Queen's security" or "Transparency of Queen's Expenditures" where Queen's security details be made published or "How about we reduce the number of Queen's guards by just one".
Who in their right mind would believe that Nigel Farage wants "sensible expenditure on Queen's security" since we know that at the end he wants to overthrow the British Monarchy?
This is the same case with gun control. We know that most gun grabbers don't own guns, have never owned guns and will never own guns, it's not in their culture. They also fantasize European countries regarding Healthcare, gun control, hate speech, discrimination laws and Australian style complete gun confiscation. Now they say "Come to a reasonable gun reform or a complete ban is inevitable", which to gun right proponents sounds like "Publish Queen's security detail or else an assassination of the Queen is imminent", I'd say if they could ban guns, then they would have.
This is exactly my point. You point to extremism as justification for yet more extremism in the opposite way. This won't end well for anyone. I'm not sure how, but as a society we need to find a way just sit down and walk things back. I'm willing to work towards a compromise. It seems you would rather not budge, and so the extremism continues.
There are plenty of people like me who don't care about 100yr old rifle historians, or hunters, or sport shooting, or the rest. We just want our kids to not get shot, and think that the current level of gun violence is far too high. Where can we turn to? Gun lovers and the NRA specifically don't seem to be able to offer any response at all beyond "my cold dead hand" and "don't give an inch".
Given what New York has done recently, I presume that a lot of gun owners will also simply refuse to comply with any registration orders. And, as usual, the black market guns will remain nigh-untraceable, especially among those who are barred by law from owning them.
The best you could do is a database of last-known locations, maintained entirely without cooperation by owners, that will probably consist mainly of business locations of licensed firearm dealers and crime scenes.
Gawker is well ahead of you here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-09/gawker-po...
The same shape (Spitzer-tip boat tail) is used for virtually all modern target and hunting rounds. 5.56 (and .223) is basically a glorified varmint round. Certain 5.56 rounds, however, are designed to be frangible, which causes the bullet to break up on impact and causes more wound channels. Hunting ammo in 5.56/.223 does not do this, as it is designed to stay in one piece.
Obviously, with drunk driving, no one tends to blame the tool, either, as gun control movements often are doing. It is worth pointing out that automobiles are fairly regulated, though. There is a "street legal" definition for a car, you have to have an operator's license, and there are things you cannot do in a car -- elsewise, your license gets taken away. For better or for worse, America's one of the few places out there with a relatively high minimum age to purchase alcohol -- 21 -- and drunk driving was one of the reasons it ended up this way (https://www.boston.com/culture/health/2014/07/17/why-21-a-lo...).
I personally think it's fine to counter over-emotional focus on the tool (after all, 99% of AR-15 owners are just normal, average folks who don't commit mass shootings or indeed violence of any kind). Ultimately, though, "what they're calling for" is a reduction of gun violence. If "they" don't get a reasonable counter-answer to their concerns (and in my opinion, the NRA is doing a poor job here, themselves often being overly-emotional in response), it's entirely possible the regulations "they" want will result in the end.
What if gun owners who didn't keep their guns locked in gun safes had their bullets replaced with rubber ones, or had mandatory trigger locks installed on their guns?
I dunno, I'm just spitballing here, but cars are heavily regulated, licensed, the whole nine yards, and if we had a tenth of that applied to guns, we could probably do a lot to reduce gun deaths and gun violence across the country.
From my perspective, I welcome ideas like these. Limited access control ideas along the line of this framework is where I think the focus needs to be.
Some discussion also could be reserved for equipment like "bump stocks", that at first glance seems to solely be designed to circumvent existing law (it is highly illegal to modify a semi-automatic into a fully-automatic gun). Again, treating these type of equipment like the extremely highly regulated machine gun class is something even the National Review agrees with. (https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/bump-stocks-machine-g...)
Not sure of the first two off the top of my head, but the other two of the named examples are things that the NRA vociferously opposed, and (especially Brady) fought to repeal after they were adopted, so not exactly examples of the NRA budging. Ditto with many of them state laws you wave your hand at.
The NRA may lose sometimes, but thats different than budging.
That sounds like budging to me.
Common sense gun regulation is a benefit to safe gun owners and less people will die from misuse, less criminals will have access to guns, less mentally unstable people will be able to go on killing sprees.
This is all in benefit to gun owners. How does sensible gun control (not bans) hurt a legal and safe gun owner?
That's what a compromise looks like, gun owners get easier concealed carry rules and everybody gets safer gun purchases via enhancements to the NICS system.
You realize that "sensible" is both subjective, and cuts both ways, right? Have you ever noticed that the "compromise" touted by gun control advocates is always, 100% of the time, entirely one-sided?
That isn't compromise, that's capitulation. Compromise would be "Okay, universal NICS checks for all gun sales, but private citizens can access it for free". Compromise would be "per the full faith and credit clause, CCW permits are now legally recognized in all 50 states and become shall-issue, but there will be a standardized framework to get them".
Compromise is unambiguously not "ban bump stocks" and everyone who disagrees going "okay!".
So long as gun control compromise is a one-way street, I remain a dues-paying NRA member.
You never had a constitutional right to owe a firearm. This is legal nonsense put together relatively recently, starting as answer to the Black Panthers arming themselves and then later some politics. Please look at https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-sec...
> From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun.
And, in light of recent events: everyone not turning in their own guns and campaigning strongly for reversing this nonsense is an accessory to the mass murder of children. Everyone who used their money to support the proliferation of guns have blood on their hands.
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise. District of Columbia vs. Heller.
Can I ignore or rewrite the 14th amendment because I find it confusing?
> I do know that views on how the Constitution should be interpreted have changed over time.
Yeah, people started ignoring parts they weren't comfortable with and finding new parts in prenumbras.
Your argument boils down to, "I don't know, everyone. There are a lot of gray areas, so we better just agree to do what I want."
We best not just agree to do what I want. That would be absolute power and that would be horrible. No one deserves that much power. No one should be so arrogant that they think they are always right or that their opinions are beyond reproach.
I welcome discourse and debate. It's necessary for a properly functioning society.
https://www.firearmsandliberty.com/embar.html
Do you support women’s right to terminate their pregnancy? Assuming you do, what would you think of similarly worded pro-life argument?
I think you’ll find such emotionally charged arguments are never effective and will convince no one.
It’s also uninformed, as there’s plenty of objective evidence to suggest that guns save more lives than they take[1–2].
[1] recent study: https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/cdc-study-use-firearms-...
[2] more via: https://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
Note that among US states, there is no correlation whatsoever between gun ownership and gun homicide.
There are more important things than the issues you cite. If losing historical content and "niche communities" having to go find new hobbies means just a couple fewer kids don't get shot this year, then I'll take that trade. And I hope you will consider taking it too. Are your hobbies really that important to you? What's your worst case scenario? Mine is yet another school shooting, but this time in my kids school.
More generally, I really hope that as a society we can find some way to back away from extremism. As a liberal, I'm dismayed by the cancer that Trump represents. But I imagine that his supporters are just as dismayed by things liberals do. The more liberals push for gun regulation, the more the NRA won't budge an inch, and doubles down on even more extreme positions for fear that liberals will confiscate all guns -- give an inch, take a mile. Sooner or later, people are going to decide they really have had enough and start actually proposing to take that mile, because we can't seem to discuss things and come to a reasonable compromise.
That you can't ask "why does someone need to own 3 semi auto rifles?" without the NRA freaking out or unwilling to even discuss it over some absurd slippery slope like "if the government tries to attack its own people and they are dying in the streets, we need our weapons" is absurd. That doesn't give me any comfort. How about you not let your country turn into a hellhole and then you don't need that. But right now people are dying, why do people need those guns again?
Anyway, while I'm inclined to agree with what you are saying, you also gotta be realistic in that nobody is shooting up schools with 100 year old weapons and people discussing that isn't the same thing. That's an extreme position. Practice what you preach.
I can't tell who I pissed off, but based on you getting downvoted as well, I'm guessing it's the pro gun people. You're right, you can't discuss this reasonably... It's behavior like that which makes it hard to give the pro gun people the benefit of the doubt. People are more important than guns, that should be obvious.
My family is a victim of gun violence. You never get the victims back.
Can't we all agree to get the extreme videos off youtube, before we worry about some corner cases with niche communities? Because if some random guy's fascination with 100yo rifles means kids in my son's classmates are more likely to shoot the place up, then screw that.
I was trying to specifically call out the parent's reaction. Not "youtube is part of the problem and yes we should do something about and yes banning most of this stuff is reasonable but but maybe youtube could carve out some careful exemptions for my harmless hobby". It seemed dismayed at even the concept of any limitations whatsoever.
It's not like this stuff is new. These same attacks have been going on for decades, only now does Google decide they've had enough. It's the reversal of position which is strange. Reddit's had videos of people getting chopped up and flayed for years now, it's only now they're cutting down on it. That seems strangely connected to them getting $200 million in funding and chasing after Facebook's tail. Maybe that's not strange, just obvious.
I'm ranting a bit, but the problem is how top down these decisions are. These companies build up communities then pull the rug out from under them. Either support that stuff or don't, but this wishy washy nonsense where they only react is lame. What do these companies really beleive in? $.
Do you support banning violent movies and video games?
I mean I love gta but I couldn't in good faith make the argument that it's less harmful than videos on making ammo for 100 year old rifles.
> and yes banning most of this stuff is reasonable
Why is it reasonable? Show me the clear evidence that banning this kind of content leads to less violence.
We can't. Because some guy posting videos about historical weapons doesn't mean that has anything to do with your kid being safe.
Taking guns away helps reduce damage, but those intent on doing harm will still find ways to take at least one life (or at least attempt to). One too many for my taste.
I really wish we could get people help before we have to worry about them picking up weapons of any kind. Probably wishful thinking.
That's absurd. Why does it always have to be a dichotomy? Surely a nation of 300 million people can address multiple issues at once? All we've got going on is people doing this tribal bullshit while we kill each other.
Which means? Too many bullets? Wrong color? Too accurate? Too easy to use? It's a meaningless term unless you interpret as a positive attribute.
What's important is he had 24* weapons, 14 of which were AR-15s with bump stocks which allowed them to fire at 9 rounds per sec (easily Googleable).
So not technically assault rifles but practically he had 14 assault rifles. Which is crazy. How can you even purchase that many?
Do those who resist gun control believe arsenals like that are reasonable? This question is in good faith. I just don't understand it.
If it's not obvious, officially what happened in Vegas is a coverup.
The most hilarious scenario is the suggestion that he was actually doing an arms deal with bad guys who were planning on assassinating some Saudi nearby. The arms deal went wrong so they murdered him and to cover that up they shot up a crowd. Which you know, makes more sense than walking away or buying your guns in the desert anywhere within 100 miles around there.
The easier thing to believe is the guy loved guns and decided to kill people. You can't keep up that rate of fire no matter how many mags you've got, that's why he had multiple weapons.
I'd love to hear an explanation that isn't crazy and actually has some evidence behind it, but otherwise Hanlon's Razor and all...
"You can't keep up that rate of fire no matter how many mags you've got"
Citation needed. You could make shot timeline with the audio. It's 101 that changing mags is faster than switching guns. I have most if not all of the footage, there is nothing there that makes me suspect he needs more than one gun, I have extensive experience shooting similar weapons.
Did anything remotely interesting happen in SA soon after?
If you've got a non-crazy story (didn't call you crazy, you didn't provide anything but a vague suggestion), have at it.
Did anything remotely interesting happen in SA soon after?
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I have seen no proven link between YouTube videos showing proper gun handling and gun violence. I say this as someone who hates guns, but most of the points you raise are not logically sound.
As for the argument that the ban is a bad idea because it is ineffective. I don't know if the ban will help. I'm not an expert, though it seems pretty obvious that our current situation isn't working so well. Do you think a ban will increase gun violence? How sure are you?
The suggestion that Youtube should wait until there's proof that videos they host cause harm is nonsense. A private corporation needs to be cautious otherwise they're opening themselves up to unnecessary risk from being sued by a plaintiff who manages to demonstrate harm (within the limits of a single specific case). YouTube doesn't have a moral duty to uphold freedom. They have a duty to protect their shareholders value.
The government shouldn't ban things until there's proof that the thing is harmful to society (and even then there's a good argument that they shouldn't), but that's got nothing to do with what's happening here.
The blog of the Austin bomber is a good example of all the "red flags".
This is why I honestly think this move is not really about protecting a community, I think it's about image for advertisers. Facebook is getting reamed for it's lack of data control, so lets ban some hot topics and make it look attractive for advertisers looking for somewhere else to go.
And as for the "Blumph!" comment, we still have yet to see Syria driven to the state of Libya so that's at least quite a few kids saved from getting shot right there.
That would include backing away from extreme censorism. Banning everything that could potentially lead to your child's death would result in banning... everything!
Personally I think it's funny how the left and right are so illogical on their chosen issues. When the right doesn't want to take refugees they stoke fears about Islamic terrorism. When the left wants gun control they stoke fear about mass shootings, despite the relative rarity of both.
Both sides of the aisle prefer emotional manipulation to actual facts when it suites them.
What do you think about prohibiting drugs and alcohol? Like another commenter was a victim of gun violence in his family, I'm a victim of alcohol abuse in mine. Yet, many people enjoy these substances recreationally without problem.
It's hard to weigh a purely "for fun" activity against something with dire consequences. It feels selfish to say, "my hobby is more important than your life" but that's ultimately what the 21st amendment repealing Prohibition said. And it's not an entirely unfair argument when the people safely enjoying the activity are in the tens or hundreds of millions, and the ones harmed by it are a tiny fraction.
I like guns. I don't love them. But it's a fun activity like darts, but with "cooler" machines. I could be persuaded that my hobby is net-negative for society, but it's hard to give up a clearly safe, fun, activity because of an abstract notion that somewhere else in this country of 100s of millions of people, someone is using it for evil, especially when it's fairly rare.
And liberals aren't totally blameless when it comes to the "coolness" factor of guns, either, if you look at essentially any modern movie or TV show, in which they're fairly well glorified. If the solution is to make people not want to have this hobby - and I think that's probably best bang-for-your-buck (heh) solution - then maybe Hollywood should self-censor like YouTube here and not have guns in their movies (or blur them out like in Korean dramas).
Guns aren't toys. Yes, they can be used for hunting or just shooting stuff, and most guns aren't especially more effective at killing people than a variety of other household items, but assault rifles were actually designed to kill people, to assault entrenched positions (the stg-44 in WW2). It's not made for hunting or anything else, it's made to kill people.
The consumer ar-15 is just a variant of the m-16. With a bump stock it becomes fully automatic, easily getting around any laws. I posted this in another comment, but the Vegas shooter had 14 of those modded up. 14! Why does anyone need one of those killing machines for fun, much less 14? It's easy to see how he killed fifty people in a crowd.
I don't understand the justification for that. When your ability to have fun with a "toy" which is actually a killing machine makes it easy for dozens of people to get murdered while they are out having a good time, it's an issue. Seems like a warped sense of priorities. Yet you'll find people (many here) who believe that even limiting them to one (or god forbid anyone even suggest it) is some kind of assault on their liberties. That's not reasonable. The Bill of Rights wasn't written with anything beyond the notion of hunting rifles and muskets. It doesn't say "all citizens should have the right to fire 90 rounds per 10 seconds to defend themselves or have a good time".
Should attacks like that continue to occur, it's going to be that complete lack of moderation by gun users themselves which is going to get their rights taken away. I don't say that as wanting that to happen, but it seems obvious.
It can be as little as just taking away a important part and store it in a good locker somewhere else in your house or even just hide it or you can do like me and get a weapons safe approved by the insurance industry and bolt it to the floor. (I got mine for somewhere around USD300 and it is big enough to also contain hard drives, medications, important papers etc.)
By being careful with storage and also introducing others to safe gun culture we might make a difference by preventing accidents, preventing more stolen guns on the black market etc.
Edit: It seems I'm annoying some people. Anybody see what I did wrong? Honestly more interested in the explanation than in the stupid votes:-/
Edit2: Tried to make my post less annoying. Thanks 1337biz
Sorry for that. Will take steps to fix.
> His gun might not be working,
Based on the description it seems to be very much in working order.
> he might even have no bullets at all.
Still makes it a valuable target for criminals as ammunition might be even easier to get hold of.
> Just don't make so many assumptions about other people.
Thanks again. I'll try to fix now.
I also saw someone downvoted you and will do my part to fix that.
At least how I read the announcement this kind of linking will be forbidden which means that the companies making the products have no feedback mechanism on how successful the advertising is, which in turn can kill channels
> Provides instructions on manufacturing a firearm, ammunition, high capacity magazine, homemade silencers/suppressors, or certain firearms accessories such as those listed above.
That's going to impact a lot of channels that focus on firearms/military history as well as general how-to sorts of channels. YouTube has been a great resource in the past if you're wondering "how do I properly install these trigger pins in my rifle?" or "how do I safely load this muzzle-loader in a deer stand?"
Right now, manufacturers often put videos up on YouTube of how to install parts they sell. Like with Ikea furniture, I find these way more helpful than a paper manual. Same for videos about how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble guns (which often link to whatever cleaning products are used) [edit: BTW assembling something that already is a gun still falls under the ATF's definition of manufacturing a gun, so if Youtube uses the same definition these videos are banned even if they don't refer to specific products]
As for the 100 year gun-- let's take the M1 Garand (in WW2 movies, it's the one you hear go "ping". It's only ~85 years old, but bear with me). Over the last decade, the US government has sold off several hundred thousand of these rifles. As far as older guns go, they're fairly common. They shoot .30-06 ammunition, which can be found in most gun stores. However, 85 years ago metal was lower quality. If you use modern commercially available ammo in a Garand it will break [1]. There's a few options though. You can buy surplus ammo and hope that it was stored properly and that 40 years ago the quality control guy at the factory was having a good day[2]. Many people opt to recycle an initial batch of brass and manufacture their ammo. If done correctly this is safe, but there's a bit of a learning curve. Unfortunately the new policy bans videos that detail how to safely manufacture ammo.
[0] channels like ForgottenWeapons often describe how antique firearms work, which might run afoul of the new rules
[1] you can mitigate this with an accessory that reduces the pressure from the gasses. There's some good videos about it on youtube
[2] for more obscure weapons, I don't think this is an option
However, this is presuming that the laws regarding that are reasonable and not too lax, which as I understand they aren't (yet).
In the same vein, I think YouTube should take down a lot of life-threatening "life-hack" videos. Wilfully misguiding the public into soldering wires together unsafely, and in all likelihood get yourself killed or start a fire when one plugs in the resulting mess should be illegal IMO, akin to some kind of manslaughter.
Here's a video that will definitely fall under new regulations: you be the judge.
I grew up in Port Lincoln, then moved to Adelaide, and now Launceston. Also, I have family in Queensland.
In my experience it isn’t unusual at all for someone to own a gun, or guns, in Australia.
My father had guns, my sisters family have multiple guns for pig hunting. Half the guys I work with have a veritable smorgasbord of firearms, I’m talking 10+ firearms, for hunting and just general enthusiasm. People I’ve worked with in IT in Adelaide own handguns for target shooting.
I guess it depends who you hang out with. Even some of the “hippies” I’ve known along the way own guns for pest control and dealing with injured livestock.
I guess the average city dweller in Australia probably doesn’t own firearms, but if you spend enough time in the towns and smaller cities... plenty of guns.
We do seem to mange not to shoot each other up very often. Im more worries about being punched in the back of the head.
According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-hou... , 42% of households have guns, so while it’s close, the median household does not have a gun. And, again, firearms are far more common in rural areas than in urban areas, so I believe the statement is true.
+ Those background checks are used for lots of things other than firearm purchases
+ Firearms can be transferred legally in some cases without background checks
+ Plenty of firearms existed before the background check system and are still owned and functioning
+ Many firearms are purchased, left to rust or otherwise break, and never repaired.
+ Firearms are occasionally turned in to the police or surrendered (usually when a family member passes and their relatives don't know what to do with the firearms).
The other source of information is directly asking people, but that runs into a bunch of problems too, mostly that people will lie.
I also don't think there's any kind of remotely common pattern that lets us correct this bad data from self reporting. Liberal gun owners are likely to lie about owning a firearm since they don't want their family to know, and conservative firearm owners are less likely to trust the person they're reporting to. Many firearm owners are taught to never ever talk about being a firearm owner to avoid being a target for burglary.
My point is, we simply don't know at all. Any gross figure is extremely suspect.
Still, bad numbers are all we’ve got. I’m sure most Americans have seen guns, or know gun owners, but I’m also sure most Americans — especially most urban Americans — don’t actually own guns themselves. If they did, people wouldn’t routinely confuse “semiautomatic” and “machine gun” or “submachine gun.”
My father owned a rifle for a time when I was young, but sold it probably 30 years ago. One member of my wife's family has what would be considered a hobby farm and recently bought a rifle for shooting pests. Outside of that, I'm not aware of another gun owner amongst friends and acquaintances.
But I have a tradition with my son of sending each other links of people in other countries shooting things up with their 50 cal machine guns and the like.
I can't imagine why anyone would think that watching such things constitutes any kind of risk to anyone.
My favorite for-example: one of those old great libertarian thinkers applied libertarian principles to the parent-child relationship and decided that a law that compels a parent to feed a child is an immoral law; parents should be free to let their children starve to death.
A triumph of logic over emotion? I guess, if you're okay with a society that permits parents to let their children starve to death without consequence.
It is not logical to allow a child to starve to death. Using an argument that a law is immoral is more about emotion than logic.
Knowledge used to be something kept fairly secret because in the past it was hard to research how to do and make things. I used to have a lot of trouble finding information about my cars in order to work on them. The same experience repeats--you had to be in a club with like-minded people to bootstrap knowledge and people held on to manuals and homebrew documents created on a typewriter with annotations in the margins. Now all that knowledge has been dumped onto the Internet and is easy to find and videos make it fast to pick up.
The problem with being in a club is that most of the personalities don't mix but the club controls the gateway to the knowledge. For a long, long time, gun clubs were loaded with Elmer Fudd types who looked down their noses and modern semi-automatic rifles and handguns. They only accepted typical hunting rifles and shotguns, the odd Browning semi-auto, maybe an M1 Garand or M1 Carbine for WWI and WII nostalgia, and of course, the cult of the 1911. But they didn't understand the 2nd Amendment, not like many of us do now. Because they didn't need to--there weren't vast armies of thug leftists trying to bludgeon the nation into some form of corporate collectivism.
What has changed is manufacturing technology, not the guns themselves. Things have changed quite remarkably and those old ideas are disappearing, which is mostly good. What isn't good is that the knowledge, information, and yes we have the best selection of small arms in 150 years, is available to all at affordable prices. A few outliers are having problems dealing with the responsibility of it all. But we as a society can't cater to the least common denominator. We have laws to deal with criminality but lack the will to do so--hence why the Broward deputies didn't arrest that wacko during one of the 40 some times they were in contact with him. Either they directly desired his violent outburst for political reasons, or they were just too politically correct to act. Regardless of the details of each incident, we have a remedy in law and that is to punish the guilty and stoically move on. If the sheriff were to lose his job for being incompetent, all the better.
Firearms are just one teeny part of what it takes to stop the oligarchy. Humans tipped the balance once before: When guns were invented and first arrived in Europe, commoners made good use of them shooting armored noblemen right off the backs of their horses because screw those guys. The scientific revolution being the direct result of the end of medieval period. We all owe a lot to firearms, they are the necessary evil for humanity.
For some, this is the intended outcome.
This is the chilling effect from the attack on Section 230 safe harbor protection (an attack which was largely “justified” by conduct which was already found to be outside of the pre-existing safe harbor, and so which needed no modification to deal with.)
Companies that are being responsible to their shareholders are going to change behavior to minimize exposure to content which is likely to draw civil litigation when their protection from that risk is weakened.
That's speaking as someone who would like to see clearer legal protections for content-neutral hosting platforms.
Thats a slightly different, but related [0] effect. The NRAs own PR approach has made special deals with the NRA a PR liability for many businesses. Public relations aren't something companies burn money on for entertainment value, they do it because corporate image impacts the bottom line, because it has a direct effect on things like consumer choices and ability to attract and retain talent.
[0] related in that lawsuits are also used to address political issues (and targeting tangentially-involved businesses formgun violence is a well-known example of that), so that the public mood on gun policy that shapes the reaction to NRA PR efforts also is a factor in the legal risk that firms face with Section 230 being weakened.
Probably because they don't want to be the target of personal abuse.
I have no sympathy towards gun use - but the principle of large monopolies applying their own morals to censor content seems wrong.
Do you think it's wrong for a woman to shoot a man who is raping her? Is it wrong for her to practice gun use to prepare for that possible threat? Do you support police use of firearms to neutralize criminal use of firearms?
I imagine the person you are replying to is not a closet rape supporter, but they likely think that allowing every adult member of a population to arm themselves is not the ideal solution. I imagine you disagree with that view, but the way you have expressed yourself is the start of an emotional flame-war, not a discussion.
Guns are dangerous. Yes they can be used for self defense, but they are also dangerous on their own.
I believe that un-regulated guns are more dangerous (to everyone) than the danger of some subset of people being more vulnerable without them.
I'm not advocating for a ban, but heavy regulation about who can buy them, how, what kind of training they need, and verification of safe storage. Just like I'd expect my government to do with other highly dangerous things like explosives, some drugs, and more.
You can't anonymously own a car in the US, you can't (legally) buy one at a car convention then take it on the road without registering it. Larger knives have regulations and rules around who can buy them, and some are just illegal to own in many states. Tequila requires you to be over a certain age, and you can't buy it if you are visibly drunk.
These things are dangerous. Yes, they won't jump up and attack someone on their own, but even well educated sane good people have accidents with them, which is what I mean by these things being dangerous.
And just like with automobiles, I don't think banning them is the right move, but I do think requiring a "gun license" where you can prove that you know how to handle, store, and can show you have the skills to safely use a gun should be required, as well as registering and proving that you have a safe place to store them that is out of the reach of children, mentally ill adults, and theives.
Safe gun owners will need to do very little to get approved to continue owning guns, and many unsafe gun owners can be denied. Not to mention that increasing the "average" storage security would mean that less would be easily stolen reducing the number of unregistered guns available for purchase on a "black market".
I'm pretty sure that means we will either continue the path we are on now (which makes things "about" guns illegal, without making guns illegal or registering them), or we will leapfrog the registry and just outright ban most models or types or people from owning them.
Like you said many gun owners are letting perfect be the enemy of good here, and are unwilling to compromise on something that will allow them to keep guns for sport and self-defense in some situations. And that's going to lead to pressure building up to the point that their complains aren't going to matter, then they won't be listened to at all while the avalanche falls removing most or all gun rights.
Otherwise you get two people talking past each other. The fact that there are people who are fans of gun control AND express themselves immaturely with vapid politicised statements appealing to emotion doesn't excuse the almost trollish characteristic of the "do you think women should be defenseless against rapists" above.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
If you don't want large monopolies to act as censors then don't put them in the position to do so. You're uploading your videos for free on their platforms, sometimes even expecting them to pay you for it. I can't really see how you can complain if they decide that they don't want to deal with your content anymore. Find an other platform or make your own, that's how the internet is supposed to work.
On the contrary, it's literally censorship. It's moderation through censorship.
> I can't really see how you can complain if they decide that they don't want to deal with your content anymore.
I don't find this line of thinking convincing. It's certainly appropriate to criticize moderation policies of platforms. If YouTube decided to censor videos on how to use condoms, #BlackLivesMatters, "conspiracies" about governments reading everyones' emails, or opinions on the Damore firing, criticism would be entirely warranted.
This in itself is okay. I certainly can find places on the web that would censor / moderate videos on how to use condoms, pro-#BlackLivesMatters posts, etc. Not my cup of tea, but they have a right to moderate how they want. We all can chose the social webs we want with the amount and style of moderation we look for. (Seeing the places on the web that are "moderation free", I don't think that is a great option unless you really enjoy a lot of spam and nastiness.)
The real problem is really that, for the average person, the social web has become monopolized into a few uber-dominant platforms, most of which (due to their size) are going to pursue a middle-of-the-road-American moderation policy that (due to their size) is muddy, opaque, and arbitrary. If one sticks to a social vision of just the monopoly platforms, there is "no choice".
Personally, I don't use the big social networks much. The more specialized, de-centralized social web of 10 years ago (eg: forums) is still around, and they are less subject to big-corporate moderation messes. A quick Google shows that, for instance on firearms trading, several firearms BST forums still are around and active. In forum world, if a lot of people didn't like the moderation of one place, they simply went to another forum. That's something that's not always possible even with the closest big-social equivalent, subreddits. The web in general originally was a lot more decentralized than today. The centralization of social in today's web feels like quite the mistake.
(do note that I'm not a lawyer, so this might not be 100% accurate)
I suppose you can say that but I don't think it's a useful definition. Censorship is a strong word, if we overuse it it's going to lose its meaning. Censorship generally has the intent of removing something from society at large because the elites deem it dangerous. Youtube isn't calling for the removal of gun content from the internet, they're just policing their platform. I mean, if what they're doing is censorship then what isn't? HN will ban/flag/delete many off-topic/controversial posts on sight, is that censorship? If your Dungeon and Dragon forum bans you because you posted porn, are they censoring you?
I'm not saying that Youtube couldn't or shouldn't be criticized for their move, I was specifically replying to the parent's claim that there was a change of mentality on the internet at large. Moderation or "censorship" as you like to call it has always existed everywhere, online and off. The real problem here is that Youtube wields a disproportionate amount of power by virtue of being quasi-monopolistic.
If you expect advertising-powered private platforms that host your content pro-bono to suddenly start fighting for your ideals against what they feel is their own economic interest I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. Especially if said platform has no serious competitors and knows a huge amount of its users is effectively "captive" audience.
Yes. Censorship is a neutral term.
> If you expect advertising-powered private platforms that host your content pro-bono...
I expect people to let each other say their piece. Content owners and content hosts have a partnership, and the balance of power definitely tips toward Reddit and YouTube at the moment.
We can argue that "someone can go start up a more permissive platform", but if we're not sharp and clear about how current hosts should behave, the next hosts won't have a clear understanding of what they should be doing differently. If we're not sharp and clear about how current hosts should behave, regulators trying to get YouTube and Reddit out of the moderation business will likely defer to whichever lobbyists happen to be in the room.
I expect that, as always in these situations, a minority of users will migrate to alternative websites (voat, alternative video streaming websites etc...) many of them will end up coming back to Youtube/Reddit because that's where all the content is and the network effect is strong. Repeat in one year when Reddit decides to issue a new wave of subreddit bans. I genuinely don't know how we can get out of this situation.
Or where exactly is the line?
This is not censorship.
It's changing because they're trying to follow 'public sentiment' and keep up the sign-ups, views and clicks to get advertisers their money.
If we want them to not be able to censor/moderate/control their platform their own way, they need to be regulated/classed as a carrier/media org.
It's only been 'open' till now because that's the most profitable model...
People need to realise these companies are not public services compelled to free speech, it's just an expectation the users expect to be met.
Sure. They can also choose to lie, say sexist things, and promote irresponsible drinking. And I'll criticize them if they do that, too.
I said:
1. It is by definition censorship.
2. People should strongly criticize things that are both legal and wrong.
I do think content hosts need some legal status if we want an open internet (and digital free speech) to survive. But because I'm for healthy conversation, I'm pushing back on replying to valid point with arguments for ending the conversation.
This is doublespeak.
>censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
"Doublespeak is a language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable."
Note that the definition for censorship you quote doesn't necessarily apply here, youtube is not prohibiting "any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security", they're prohibiting it on their platform. That's a huge difference. It's "you can't say that here" versus "you can't say that period". If I invite you to my home and you start spewing nazi propaganda I'm going to kindly ask you to leave, is that censorship?
You can't force Youtube to host your content if they don't want to and they can't prevent you from posting your content on other websites if you want to. There's no censorship or free speech issue here, only the problem of a monopolistic centralized platform without serious competition. That's why net neutrality is important and that's why Making the Internet Decentralized Again is critical if you value freedom of speech and opinion.
It's the suppression or prohibition. Nowhere is the definition constrained by location. There has never been a case of censorship that was enforced on every corner of the globe -- only where one's scope of influence has the power to do so.
Do you have a source for this? The latin word censere does not seem to be defined only as government officials silencing opinions they don't like:
>Definitions:assess, count/reckon, decree, vote, determine, recommend think/suppose,judge
http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/8896/censeo-censere-c...
>Maybe you think the word has a different meaning
It was simias who thinks the word has a different meaning, which is why I cited the dictionary. Do you think the dictionary is wrong?
Makes one wonder where this new definition is coming from?
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised to see the euphemization of technology in a forum full of and run by technologists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_censor
The name of the Roman office was based on "censere" but had a more specific meaning, and it's that which evolved into the English word "censor", due to the "supervising public morality" part of the censors' job. But the meaning shifted in the process. The Roman censors didn't "censor" anything in the modern sense; rather, they judged people for violations of public morality.
This isn’t censorship, it’s commercial positioning. You don’t have to like it, and indeed you can pressure the firm to take a different line but centralisation is the real enemy here.
But Other Websites Are Available.
But that's also in the best interested of everyone.
Instead of youtube, we should visit 10 different video sites? Instead of reddit, we should visit 10 different global info sources that now have 10x less content, and spend even more time finding what's relevant? Instead of twitch, we should visit 10 different sites to watch streams?
It's the natural order of things.. there's no way to have a LOT of different sites that also contain basically everything you want.
The only thing you'd lose is the unified user profile but we have the tools to have distributed identities (oauth and friends). Before the era of social networks having mililon of forums for niche topics was common. Now you just create a subreddit instead.
Want to talk about knitting? Search for "knitting discussion online". Here are a few results: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/knitting-and-crocheting https://crochettalk.com/ http://www.knittingparadise.com/active-topic-list
Each site does not contain "everything I want" but each fills a particular niche. The fact that you actually have to search for them to find them can actually be seen as a bonus, you don't have the sort of "cross-contamination" you can observe on reddit when a community is suddenly popular enough to propelled into the frontpage and you have an influx of people who overrun your community and destroy its "culture".
Should reddit disappear tomorrow I'm sure we'll do just fine. Youtube is more complex because video hosting is much more demanding in terms of resources.
YouTube is doing its best to demonetize content that doesn’t result in subscribing to an uploader. Ie: people posting numerous videos that are unrelated because they are so specific.
To me there are two models:
- You are a platform, you don't moderate content (although you do respond to law enforcement), you are not responsible for the content on your site.
- You are a media company, you do moderate content, you are responsible for the content on your site.
Reddit & Youtube want a little from (A) a little from (B). They want the revenue from being a neutral platform, and the control of being a media company to moderate content for PR purposes.
The problem they're facing is that by banning stuff they don't like, they are endorsing everything they don't ban. So for example, at Reddit, Pizzagate is now officially endorsed as a reasonable point of view that Reddit believes is a valid opinion and is worthy of investigation. We know that reddit endorses pizzagate, because reddit moderates their content and decided to allow pizzagate conspiracies.
This could end up being a maximizing rule for revenue. So a pseudo morality may be as simple as “legal, pr coverage, max revenue).
That was the definition in the 18th century but modern liberalism (neoliberalism, corporate neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it) - as personified by Blair and Clinton in the mid-90s and then continued more or less in-tact ever since - has diverged very, very far from that philosophy. That's neither an endorsement nor a complaint, but a simple historical fact.
Reddit is apparently also preparing an IPO in the foreseeable future. It would appear they are attempting to make the site more palatable for institutional investors by cleaning up.
I’ve enabled my ad blocker on Reddit.
Maybe I’ll suggest having it added to our corporate web filters.
The UK court will consider that under it's jurisdiction because the publication was available in the UK. The UK libel law essentially puts the burden of proof on the defendant.
So now an American citizen can force an American company to prove that the claims of an anonymous user were true, or pay damages.
You can't IPO if everything on your platform is a potentially bankrupting libel lawsuit waiting to happen.
On guns tons and tons and tons of companies have cut ties with the NRA. Yet Google still has the NRA channel.
Data does not support your post.
Personal!y I wish Google would remove content with no advertisers and we can get rid of the alt right crap.
Another cheaper rate for those that don’t care.
This doesn't follow. Not at all. This new rule is pretty clear that users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services. Pizzagate has nothing to do with soliciting or facilitating transactions or gifts.
Even if I take your reading of this at face value, it doesn't follow. Having rules against one thing doesn't prove Reddit endorses everything else. That's quite a leap to make, and doesn't follow any sort of logic or precedent.
This is rather like saying you think it's fine for libraries to only carry books in line with their morals. Or perhaps that your phone only works for approved topics.
At a certain size these sites become primary platforms for communication. I would argue that at that point they should be considered a governmental entity for laws around freedom of speech applied to historical means of communication. Or made into one.
That's then infringing on their freedom of speech (or lack of). It's an interesting opinion but as it's so far away from any other I've read can you explain it more?
Speech was worthy of protection under the universal declaration of human rights, and these platforms are becoming so fundamental to communication that they should be given the same consideration.
These platforms have become so centralized, powerful, and ubiquitous that censorship on a platform has a greater impact than preventing a person from speaking. That kind of power should never be wielded unchecked by a private entity.
It's a new world. It's no longer the internet of the 90s and early 2000s.
What kind of standard are you actually advocating for?
Where did I argue that?
Kara Swisher has the same right to her opinion as everyone else. I do stand by my statement that she's part of a new wave of tech 'elites' who are brown-beating tech companies into accepting certain kinds of ideologically-based standards of conduct. Nowhere did I even imply she doesn't have a right to do that, but I can certainly criticize her for it. Doubly-so because she's a public opinionator with a significant public platform.
As a collection of standards, yes. However, trying to find a host for the content that is perceived to be wrong or questionable by the mainstream is now much more difficult. The submission is a case in point. youtube bans gun-related videos not because it is directly bad for their business (on the contrary -- it seems to have an active following), but because lawmakers and media are putting pressure on it to do so. This, in my book, is wrong.
Free speech means arguing against messages one disagrees with, or ignoring them, but not trying to suppress them.
Agreed, but "I won't provide a platform for this speech" is not "suppressing". If I put up a bulletin board in my front yard and encourage my neighbors to post things there, in general it's eminently reasonable for me to decide that certain things can't be posted - even if my bulletin board becomes the most popular one in town.
(But if it's made "the official town news source" and local government makes certain posting certain things illegal, that's an entirely different kettle of fish.)
Tangentially, there's a 4th option you don't mention for messages one disagrees with - censuring them. (As in "actively and visibly disapproving" - not "censoring"!) For some types of message, the most appropriate response is a firm, unmistakable "That isn't welcome here" / "That's a terrible thing to say" followed by no discussion whatsoever. (Eg: when arguing lends a platform / legitimacy, but ignoring implies acquiescence.)
No. Free speech refers to protection from the government censoring or jailing for speech they don't want said. If you're relying on a private company, especially one who retains the rights to take down your video at any time for any reason, to disseminate your speech and you're worried about them doing something with that speech, you're speaking wrong.
I know you mention lawmakers are "pressuring" them to make this change, and if that's true, then yes, this would encroach on our freedom of speech. However, I'm having a hard time finding anything that backs up that claim, and "pressuring" is still very different from a government outright telling YT what may or may not be on the platform.
They have ruled that private areas acting as public forums are still subject to the first amendment. See Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins [1]
> A state can prohibit the private owner of a shopping center from using state trespass law to exclude peaceful expressive activity in the open areas of the shopping center.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v....
This simply doesn't apply to YouTube.
YouTube is clearly a common area.
YouTube isn't even an area, much less a common area. (Not to mention that the “common area” thing is not a federal Constitutional requirement but a judicial application of the positive rights in the California Constitution; it is not a First Amendment right.)
It's a publication in which user submissions that Google accepts will be published, possibly accompanied by ads from which revenue is shared with the submitter.
Furthermore, you contradict YouTube's own mission statement:
> Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
> We believe people should be able to speak freely, share opinions, foster open dialogue, and that creative freedom leads to new voices, formats and possibilities.
> We believe everyone should have a chance to be discovered, build a business and succeed on their own terms, and that people—not gatekeepers—decide what’s popular.
[1] First Amendment Architecture, Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 1, 2012, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1791125
Users of telephone systems have free speech protections against the operator of those systems not because of the first amendment (and especially not because of applications of that to physical common areas against private property owners, which applications don't actually exist—the First Amendment has specifically and repeatedly been held not to apply even in that case against the property owner), but because of common carrier regulations.
> Furthermore, you contradict YouTube's own mission statement:
YouTube's PR has very little impact on how constitutional law applies to it.
Since the citation upthread notes that even physical privately-owned common spaces are not protected by the first amendment against regulation by the owner of the space [0], though the first amendment rights of the owner also do not prevent state constitutions (California's in particular) from creating free speech obligations which do bind certain private owners of an extremely narrow class of public spaces, I think it is impossible to argue that virtual spaces are somehow protected under the first amendment by analogy to private common spaces, since the latter aren't actually protected.
[0] there is, IIRC, a different line of cases applying narrowly to government's or individual government official's use of privately owned physical spaces as a quasi-official two-way channel which does create some first amendment protection in that narrow context, and these principles have been extended to online fora, but that's not germane here.
No, they've ruled the opposite, as your own source explicitly states. Pruneyard permitted California to impose free speech obligations on property owners via the State Constitution that the Supreme Court had previously found were not required under the First Amendment. (In effect, it found that the federal First Amendment rights of the property owner did not extend to blocking the state action.)
>In Marsh v. Alabama, the Court held that the private owner of a company town could not forbid distribution of religious materials by a Jehovah's Witness on a street in the town's business district. The town, wholly owned by a private corporation, had all the attributes of any American municipality, aside from its ownership, and was functionally like any other town. In those circumstances, the Court reasoned, 'the more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.''
Which was later refined:
>Food Employees Union v. Logan Valley Plaza... Henceforth, only when private property has taken on all the attributes of a town' is it to be treated as a public forum
The first case, which set the precedent, involved the distribution of written materials in a "company town," the second case created a stipulation that prevented the law from applying in strip mall shopping centers.
Basically, the case can be made that Reddit, for its own advantage, has opened itself up to the public to as a public forum to as great of an extent as possible. It obviously is never going to carry "all the attributes of a town" but I feel to see why that is the only way "to be treated as a public forum."
Free speech is not simply a law. It's a concept society must both value and uphold, or it is a right only the popular and powerful have. If I can't even speak up outside work about my unpopular political beliefs without the economic death penalty - do we really have free speech? I'd argue not really. I don't care too much that the government can't jail me for it - that's a pretty low bar.
While I do agree Youtube has the right to ban whatever they like on their platform, I don't have to think it's a good thing for society - and I will absolutely continue to call these things an erosion of my free speech in society.
Without citizens that vehemently uphold free speech policies, the entire concept folds as soon as we start carving out ever-longer lists of exceptions of those who do not have it.
You can believe that a private company has the right to do something but also be opposed to them exercising that right.
There's a difference between free speech as a legal principle and free speech as a moral principle. I personally support both, so while I acknowledge that YouTube has a legal right to restrict speech, I still disagree with their use of that right in this case.
1 provider falls and 5 more grow from the ashes, less vulnerable than their predecessor.
It plays out the same way every time.
Shows how big of a piece of shit you are.
I'd go so far as to say the early communities of the internet were, as a rule, more moderated (either explicitly or implicitly) that even these new rules.
Whoever hosts the service (and as a corollary those that pay them) determines the moderation. The thing about "free speech" (taken to mean unmoderated speech) is that's not something you can build a healthy community on top of. No one got "torn down" by nebulous "mainstream" forces; it's just bad business. All hail the invisible hand of capitalism.
But you see you should because if the government in conjunction with private industry can ban the thing you don't like today, it can also ban the things you do like tomorrow.
You'll probably finally understand when the books start burning because that's right around the corner now.
As an aside I am also dismayed in the fact that I find videos like these interesting but I will never own a gun but I like watching reviews and demos of them.
Don't like guns or beer? Tell Youtube not to displays the add on guns/beer related videos. Problem solved. Same goes for Reddit. Would advertisers care that there is gun related subreddit their ad never appear on?
I feel the decision is ideological and will hopefully hurt them in the long term.
Also I beleve that advertisers had that power but it wasn’t enough for them.
Also, channels like Forgotten Weapons which are non-political and just provide really great information on old or obscure guns.
So a link aggregation site (Reddit) bans a link aggregation forum (/r/gundeals) because it doesn't like the content of the links being aggregated.
The internet worked perfectly fine before YouTube and Reddit, it’ll work perfectly fine after.
I mean, I understand the problems this poses for people, but I just don’t see how taking ownership of your own platform is a bad thing, even if it is forced.
Nobody is stopping gun fans from building their own social network for guns after all.
If people did that, quality would probably even increase. I mean, just look at HM. Even if HN is another centralized social network it still managed to become much better than anything tech related on Reddit or YouTube.
Looks to me like they don't want scrutiny.
Whenever something happens, people can point to whatever was on the headlines during the last week and say "see, they're trying to sneak in while everyone's preoccupied with this!"
Unless we're talking, like, 9/11-level media preoccupation, I don't put much stock in claims like this.
To be cynical, why offer a seller access to a market for free when you can charge for it?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarketsNoobs/comments/8641hg...
[0] there were products that aren't legal in certain states or cities, but nothing that is illegal at the fed level.
Those that did sell guns were federally licensed retailers, gundeals did not (to my knowledge) allow for private sellers to post. All federally licensed (FFL) retailers must perform a background check (or transfer to another FFL to perform one) before transferring to a purchaser. I don't see how any of that could be considered as not "law-abiding".
All of that applies only to the US of course, but I'm not aware of other countries having deals there.
Like the Russia collision which has been dismissed by the intelligence committee?
And Mueller managed to indict 13 russians that had nothing to do with trump?
Or that the dossier was fabricated?
Or that the fisa request was illegal and given based on evidence manufactured by Dec and Clinton campaign
> vile
You mean calling illegal immigration wrong, same as what oba and Hillary have done in the past? (YouTube is your friend)
> rampantly bigoted
Example please.
Crickets?
Also I'm okay with losing 5 points over this lol. But everything I've said is factual so flag all you will and nothing will come out of it. Mods can you van the flaggers for the upcoming false flags?
What a sad day. Reddit used to be something so special.
If only tech giants stood together and fought the corporate interests and NGOs pushing censorship on them.
I've pretty much stopped using reddit because it's full of political nonsense now anyways. If they are going to be banning subs every 6 months, what's the point of reddit anymore?
Anyway, hopefully this'll all help stimulate the creation of actually-censorship-resistant platforms.
Fantastic.
"They don't gotta burn tha books, they just remove 'em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as tha cells
Rally round tha family, pocket full of shells"
A dangerous mechanism introduced to support a good policy is still a dangerous mechanism. Proponents of policies requiring expansions of power should be very careful about the consequences of giving that power to someone with different goals, because that will happen at some point.
> This is a legitimate discussion.
Since when did that matter. It's discussion they don't want, legitimate or not.
(As for the bit about YC, it sounds pretty weird to me but I don't know what you're referring to.)
Posts without URLs (Ask HN, Tell HN, etc.) also start off with a penalty, and I've turned that off too.
> We've joked about doing something like this in the past but now it's becoming more and more realistic and not so crazy. We'll see!
...
> It would be very difficult to be profitable, one of the main hesitations.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Katie_Pornhub/overview
If I take my car (a Jeep Grand Cherokee) and ram it into a crowd - I'm confident that can take out more people than I can with a gun, knife, probably even bomb.
Point being, I understand not facilitating trade, but for the love of god, videos? You really want to push the right over the edge?
We need guns. Legally, in the U.S. it's our right - one of the first and most protected rights. The ability to defend yourself and country in the face of tyrany. Look at what happened in Ukraine, Syria, etc. A government doesn't fuck with a populace that has guns, so it increases stability. When you don't have the ability to defend your rights, you don't have rights anymore.
Further, violence isn't associated with guns - it's associated with people being suppressed or by mental issues. The weather is more associated with murder than guns...
I even understand trying to reduce ways to kill massive amounts of people easily. But again, I have a car, I know how to make chlorine gas, so on and so forth.
Address the actual problem and stop making this political. We know you're afraid of guns - that's fine. I'm affraid of dogs, but I'm not going to support banning them (look at them, they are built to kill things human size).
Stop talking about mass murders and start talking about tragedies, do a black out on mass murders names. That'd probably fix the issue in time. Then teach everyone about gun safety, how to use them, the dangers, etc. I'm telling you right now, by removing these videos you're arming people, and exhasborating the problem.
In fact, they just pushed me to buy a weapon.
\flip table and walk out
Yeah but guns are "cool" while ramming a car into a crowd it's not that cool.
I believe people should be allowed to bear arms but that doesn't mean the guns should be sold and advertised as lollipops.
The problem is you're right, they are being advertised. Although, what I will say is I don't know a single person who treats them as toys (I live in a pretty rural area, so pretty much everyone has one). Every gun is taken care of and very well managed.
It always amazes me, because I'm one of the few people who refuse to have a gun in my house (might change). People in the bay area (where I lived for two years, before leaving) have absolutely no idea how common and really safe guns are. I think it leads to a lot of fear mongering.
(About 60% of gun deaths are suicides, 30% are homicides, and only 10% are accidental. Unlike with car deaths, where almost 100% are accidental.)
[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
Here, however, guns have been severely restricted for several years, to the point where I believe it has been counter productive. We did see a decrease in accidental gun deaths, but violent crime and murder rates have increased significantly. Unfortunately, from my observation, the potential threat of deadly force is still a necessary deterrent sometimes.
If you compare it to other nations, the statistics are also worrisome:
"Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the U.S. had 82 percent of all gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
But, shooting is common. It's a hobby. A killing machine is normalized and it becomes a culture. So, those mentally ill men feels completely normal to shoot people when they go crazy.
Consider this: ramming car into objects becomes a hobby and people starts to do that and take pride in it. They practice it every week. Then, those mentally ills will start using those methods. And then government will ban riding a car. But, this is not happening, just a hypothesis. You can replace car with other objects you can think of here.
That's why countries where gun are banned for general population, does not have mass murder by "common people" like USA. There are mentally ill people everywhere, not just in USA. This is the point gun lovers don't understand.
First I beg to differ- compare the EU to the U.S. or the U.S. to India, or to China for that matter or the U.S. to Brazil. Not just "countries". The US is one of the largest countries on Earth (by population and landmass), with one of the most diverse sets of population... It's really hard to even find a comparison.
And I can tell you've never used a gun, it's not really something you go - "yeah let's kill people for fun today". Most of the cases (literally all the ones I know of) do it for revenge, or how they feel about themselves, don't really think a hobby is playing into it - more likely it's that when guns are used we plaster their names all over every media outlet.
The comparison isn't favorable to the US.
Often this makes people feel isolated or ostracized, because they don't fit in or are being out down. Then you get mass murder or murder in general, because I you don't relate. Basically, you have no incentive to care for one another.
Lot of those groups hate each other. Many of them have lower status in society. And millions of people there have mental issues. People don't give shit about mental health there. If guns become normal there, it would be catastrophic.
I never said people kill for fun. When mass shooting happens, using gun feels normal. Because they have been using that weapon (gun) like it's supposed to (shooting practices and hunting) for a long time.
Sorry, but this is completely false.
I am not going to link to it for reasons of taste, but you can google "encyclopedia dramatica high score" for a very thorough run down on mass shootings. They occur globally and are by no means a phenomenon isolated to the US.
Compare the USA situation to countries at war or with armed insurgencies and, of course, it might seem even tame. If you aspire only to give your citizens the security of a corrupt developing world dictatorship then this comparison is probably useful.
I read the parent comment again and I don't see the phrase "at all" in there, so the clear implication (at least to me) is that they meant mass murders by gun happen far less often.
Next, I'm assuming that by "mass shootings" you mean the FPS, Single Player category on there (since the only other FPS aka shootings category is Co-op Mode which seems to be almost exclusively terrorism and gangs, not "common people").
Here is the raw data: https://pastebin.com/rfHy5KUu
Here is the aggregate by country: https://pastebin.com/NPi3kELY
USA has 'only' 4.3% of global population but 17 out of 50 top ED loner shootings and one third of deaths and almost half of injuries.
If that's not a phenomenon then I guess nothing is.
Perhaps I should just publish some results. Seriously, every time I debate a data scientist I just send them to the data. Heat correlates more with mass murder than anything... Like I don't really get it.
While of course no country can ever be mass shootings free and immune to them since a determined person (ISIS, Breivik, etc.) can always get a gun eventually I was just pointing out that based on the cited stats USA is standing out with regards to frequency (even compared to much more populous China, India, EU+UK+Norway, etc.) so there is some US specific phenomenon related to mass shootings (for whatever reason, gun availability, society, heat, magic, that's beside the point I was making).
I want to understand why we're taking another attempt at the sisyphean task of banning guns when less controversial mental healthcare reform is ripe for discussion. In the case of the Parkland shooter, everyone knew the killer was dangerous, but there was no reasonable mechanism for getting an appropriate combination of judges, law enforcement officers, and mental health care officials empowered to do anything about it.
Current U.S. law says mental health is only a problem after violence already happens. We need other mechanisms. And we need funding and accountability to make sure people are actually cared for and not just locked up in the prison system. Police officers are not psychiatrists and jails are not hospitals.
Not sure what you mean by mentally ill, but they have definitely been used for that in Europe.
So, demolition derbys? Is there a higher rate of murder by car among people that participate in them?
Funny. I live in a country where gun ownership is common-ish. Curiously, per your theory, though - no mass shootings.
Gun ownership is not the root of all evil.
The Syrian government just uses barrel bombs on civilians and rebels, anyway. It's hardly a preventive measure. If the US gets to a Syria situation, there's going to be tens of thousands dead. But yay, when the world ends for those people, at least we've got firearms and can reenact The Patriot.
Okay, I don't support the restrictions YouTube and Reddit are putting on free speech, but I think we need to keep things rational here:
> We need guns. Legally, in the U.S. it's our right - one of the first and most protected rights. The ability to defend yourself and country in the face of tyrany. Look at what happened in Ukraine, Syria, etc. A government doesn't fuck with a populace that has guns, so it increases stability. When you don't have the ability to defend your rights, you don't have rights anymore.
Guns as they are allowed now don't allow you to protect yourself from tyranny. Look at the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Whether or not you believe they had illegal guns, they had guns, and they died. Guns lose to tanks every time. When the second amendment was drafted, guns made sense as a way to defend your rights from the government, but in the modern day, it's been probably half a century since civilians lost the arms race. Civilian gun ownership has lost its relevance as a means of defending our rights in the face of increasingly militarized law enforcement.
> Further, violence isn't associated with guns - it's associated with people being suppressed or by mental issues. The weather is more associated with murder than guns...
There's a case to be made that the culture around guns increases violence, but that's ambiguous. What isn't ambiguous, is that a mentally ill person with a gun is more dangerous than a mentally ill person without a gun.
> I even understand trying to reduce ways to kill massive amounts of people easily. But again, I have a car, I know how to make chlorine gas, so on and so forth.
You can argue that a mentally ill person could build a fertilizer bomb or drive a car into a group of people, but I'll point out that we have laws restricting those things too--let's not assume that people who support restricting gun rights don't also support restricting fertilizer and car rights.
> Stop talking about mass murders and start talking about tragedies, do a black out on mass murders names. That'd probably fix the issue in time.
I think that this is part of the issue: that won't "fix" the issue. It might help, but people will still want more gun control, because the magnitude of the issue isn't relevant to how people feel about it.
More people die every year in car accidents than die from civilian-owned guns in 10. By all statistics, we should be much more worried about why we let drive than who we let own guns. But again, the magnitude of the problem isn't what people are reacting to. Guns are just much scarier to the average person than cars.
So people are always going to push for more and more gun control as long as gun violence exists at all, and gun violence will always exist, because it's impossible to control it completely. You aren't going to "fix" gun violence, so unfortunately we need to accept that that isn't an option on the table, even though everyone wants it to be. And once we accept that we can't "fix" gun violence, then it's easier to stomach that gun rights might have some validity worth weighing against restrictions of questionable efficacy.
> I'm telling you right now, by removing these videos you're arming people, and exhasborating the problem.
This is absolutely true, and I think it's one of the biggest problems with the left right now. Too many of us don't seem to understand that by restricting free speech we create martyrs.
The thing about firearms is they equalize power. You are almost certainly bigger and stronger than me, you could beat me up in a fight, if I had a knife you could probably take it from me. When I have a gun your power advantage is greatly diminished and your size becomes a detriment. If we're both armed with firearms the disparity in power is much closer than otherwise. If we played out a fight 10,000 times we'd expect the odds to be 50/50 on either side.
The same is true among groups of people: a pair of cops with a gun can control a dozen prisoners working in a chain gang until just one of those convicts has control over a gun. You only need to look at how expensive it is to clear a madman who's held up in their home or for soldiers to clear streets in the middle-east even when most people living there aren't armed (as they're just regular people caught in a conflict zone). Armed individuals mean it's no longer possible for 1 or 2 people with guns to overpower them, you need to outnumber 3, 5, 10 to one to tilt the odds in your favor again.
Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
That's where the value of an armed population is found. The government can kick in my door with a half dozen thugs and take everything from me. What they can't do is take everything from a town where half the homes have people prepared to resist. An armed population makes it impossible for a government to effectively oppress the people. Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona? That's the way a firearms owning population protects against tyranny. The government can get away with "picking on" small groups: klansmen, draft-dodgers, homosexuals, men's-rights activists, but it is much more difficult to impose a more totalitarian rule without popular support.
That's the system I think most people generally support: the government has a "right" to use violence against its enemies provided that use is targeted and narrow. It doesn't have a "right" to broadly disregard the will of the people or to try and enforce rules most people won't somewhat-willingly comply with.
---
Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't he...
The old Wild West adage, "God Created Men and Sam Colt Made Them Equal!"
> rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
Of course that's impossible, but look at what small groups of insurgents have done to the US military in various parts of the world. But yea, even if every person in a city owned an AR-15, they would only be an annoyance if the government really became a tyranny.
> Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
A few things about this:
1. It's worth noting that every single one of the guns being used by the resistance in Iraq is illegal. If anything, this isn't an argument that gun rights are important, it's an argument that gun laws are irrelevant.
2. It's also worth noting that your best examples here had fairly limited success. The "tyrants" in Iraq have control of the economic resources of the country, which is arguably their goal.
3. I'd argue that the limited successes of using guns to resist tyrants were due to a group united around a shared cause, not guns. Each of the successes of guns you mentioned could be attributed to this. The most effective resistance during WW2 wasn't even gun-related: it was the vast underground that smuggled soldiers and Jews.
> Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona?
I get your general point, but this is a bad example: the Khmer Rouge was a fairly populist movement. Pol Pot's army was mostly uneducated monarchist peasants who didn't understand communism. A populist leader leading a bunch of people in Texas or Arizona to commit genocide is totally imaginable. But in that case the people with the guns doing the tyranny so I get that this isn't your intent. :)
> Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't help, it certainly can't hurt." and they'll hear stories of children killing themselves or their parents 'accidentally' and say "even so-called responsible gun owners can't be trusted not to put themselves and others in danger through negligence."
> I understand those positions, I'm even sympathetic to them. At the same time, I don't think it's too much to ask that those of us who think that maybe the American relationship with firearms could use some changes at least try to consider the arguments, rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
In fairness, that fantasy isn't a straw man: there are plenty of people who totally believe that.
That said, I do have a nuanced opinion on this. My ultimate position is that taking someone's gun and jailing them when they have never killed anyone with it is equivalent to convicting them of a crime because they might commit it--government needs very good reason to restrict the rights of individuals, in my opinion. But I also don't think that infringing the right to gun ownership is as damaging to society as infringin...
Sure, but if you think they were alive, do you think they would have looked back at what happened, they would have seen this as their failure or victory?
If Branch Dravidians didn't have guns, they would simply be arrested and forgotten in the history, whereas today they are folk heroes.
If anything, to all the gun rights supporters, Waco shows that fighting with guns works.
> Guns lose to tanks every time.
Then how do you explain US-Vietnam war, Second Iraq war, Afghanistan(first with USSR and then with US). The USSR's Afghanistan war is a great example, the only thing we supplied the Mujahiddins was guns.
Tanks only win centralized armies and we are very good with fighting centralized Armies (First Gulf war was a good example), however we SUCK at fighting decentralized forces. The only reason why we manage to defeat ISIS because ISIS got too centralized (and we got strong leadership), but keep in mind we have still not managed to win Iraq and a replacement of ISIS is in works.
Tanks exist for a very specific reason in modern militaries; they are effective in combatting deeply entrenched or armored enemies. When the modern tank was conceived in WWI, trench warfare brought the conflict to a grinding halt, and a tanks were the solution. WWI was a ground war fought by regular militaries. Many modern conflicts are guerilla wars fought against irregular militaries. Guerilla forces do not control battlefronts at strategic positions that require armor to penetrate. Guerilla forces do not have emplacements that cannot be defeated with small arms. Guerilla forces do not field any armor of their own.
Likewise, most features of modern militaries that were developed to fight other nation-states prove nearly useless against irregular combatants. Aircraft strike buildings and armor that guerrilas don't have, or combatants that are indistinguishable from the general populace. Navies fight ships that guerrillas don't sail. Modern EWAR disables communications and technologies that guerrillas don't use. Such capability is lost upon an insurgent force. This misunderstanding is (in some ways) a bizarre sort of American exceptionalism, where we seem to think that the more expensive military will always win, despite the overwhelming evidence to that not being true.
Guns are an immediate force multiplier that can cause a lot of injury with little planning. Guns make it easy for someone who has a brief thought of suicide, anger, or stupidity to act on that thought with irreversible consequences. While in high school, one friend committed suicide with their family's gun. Another person I know was shot because their friend was playing around with a gun.
I think only when both sides can agree that a) guns will likely never be banned and b) yes, guns are dangerous and require more regulation that we currently have, will we get anywhere. Until then people will just talk past each other.
[1] This is based on older studies at this point because the NRA has made it impossible to get funding to study gun violence.
Correlation does not equal causation. Wet streets do not cause rain. Until you provide a study that shows a baseline population and another who are given a treatment (say "here's a free gun that you weren't going to buy on your own") and compare the results, the null hypothesis is not broken.
Plus giving people guns who do not want them is bordering on unethical since if the study shows as is already implied it means that person may be hurt or killed.
How is the NRA stopping anyone from funding studies?
>study shows as is already implied it means that person may be hurt or killed
Your arguments are epistemologically broken. Would giving, low-blood-pressure people, blood-pressure regulating medication suddenly make them have high blood pressure? No. Wet streets do not cause rain
My arguments are not broken at all. To do the type of control you suggested above would mean putting guns in homes of people who would otherwise not have one. Previous studies have showed that owning a gun increases the odds of injury by gun. Putting subjects at that sort of risk for a perfect control study absolutely has ethical implications.
How is the NRA stopping anyone other than the government from funding studies?
>Previous studies have showed that owning a gun increases the odds of injury by gun
No they haven't. The studies show that people who own guns have higher likelihood of being injured. It does not show that owning a gun /increases/ odds of injury.
Places that have wet streets have a higher likelihood of it raining recently. Does that mean that wet streets cause rain?
You are assuming that the non-gun-owning population and the gun-owning population are the same. This is illogical. Perhaps it's the case that people who buy guys are just generally risk takers/more reckless than the general population (which is reasonable given that they're purchasing a gun in the first place). The problem with your logic is that its vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
That sounds wordy but I just don't have the skill to articulate my feelings. There's just... something fundamentally wrong with how everything can feel so zero-sum.
Honestly, these sorts of things would work better if people acted locally more. It's human to be upset about the Parkland incident. It's not appropriate for a resident of Spokane to have strong feelings about Florida gun laws, let alone actually lobby for them. Discussing current events can be healthy, but only to the extent that it helps us develop our thoughts about how our local communities should work.
Whoever is doing it, convincing YouTube and Reddit to force internet-wide struggles over these issues isn't choosing the right battles.
Saying that they have a right to censor their platform is OK, if this was the case from the outset. As it is, once these platforms were free and unrestricted. It's only after they grew big, are became protected by network effects that allows them to do stuff like this.
This is censorship plain and simple, it's disgusting, risk-averse behavior that displays a debasing obedience to safe money and corporate interests.
I don't know exactly why this angers me so much, party because it is a bait & switch like I said above. Party because it futile, users will simply go somewhere else. Partly because much of the content that I like to watch and learn about these days is probably on some goody two-shoe's shit list. I despise that they get to decide these things on platforms that have profited to much from an unrestricted and free Internet and online culture. They are hating the players, not the game.
If you want freedom of speech to apply in privately controlled media, you would have to compel them to distribute content they do not agree with, which is itself a violation of freedom of speech.
And this is the problem with a simplistic idea like "Freedom of Speech". It is not possible for everyone to hear everyone else's point of view, so some speech will always be restricted. Therefore, our society inevitably makes decisions about which speech to amplify and which to silence, and just because that decision is not being made directly by government, does not mean it is not being made.
In practice when people complain about censorship, what they mean is that these implicit decisions are not being made in a way that they like. And in saying this, I'm not trying to imply that their criticisms are wrong, or that they're being disingenuous or malicious in trying to change those decisions. I'm saying this to reframe the debate, because framing it as if access to speech can only be controlled by intentional malicious restriction prevents us from questioning the ways in which society already controls access to speech.
The most common way speech is restricted is economic. The rich can afford to amplify their speech, and the poor cannot. We have historically accepted this without question as an economic reality, but then the rise of social media gave us a glimpse of a world where economic restrictions are not as big a factor, and so when these restrictions start to re-assert themselves we question them.
People call it "censorship" and demand "free speech", because this is the most pervasive set of ideas we have to understand this dissonance, but the reality is we are always censored, and speech is never truly free, and unless we accept that, we will not be able to ask real questions about what kind of societal discourse we truly value.
People can advocate for social norms and different ethical frameworks without advocating for legal or regulatory changes.
> ...speech is never truly free, and unless we accept that, we will not be able to ask real questions about what kind of societal discourse we truly value.
They are called ideals because we cannot perfect reality, not because they are unimportant. There's nothing wrong with forming consensus about how things should work and then only doing what is reasonable to force that vision on each other. I don't see what part of that gets in the way of asking "real questions".
Yes, but unless you're considering some means of achieving those social norms, even if that's just social pressure, it's unlikely to change anything. And when people do actually advocate means of changing the norms of discourse, people who don't like the proposed changes will call it censorship.
>They are called ideals because we cannot perfect reality, not because they are unimportant. There's nothing wrong with forming consensus about how things should work
I agree. The point I'm trying to make is that in practice "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.
If we just mean the government should not directly intervene to prevent speech, that's a reasonable ideal, and relatively few people actually disagree with that. But when people try to consider other ways in which speech is controlled, they still call it "Freedom of Speech", even when arguing for contradictory things.
And I'm arguing that the reason for these contradictions is that the debate tends to be framed in terms identifying speech restrictions and acting to remove them, rather than asking broader questions about the inevitable ways in which speech is amplified or silenced, and how we should structure discourse within those limitations.
Sure it is. The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like. But there are certainly exceptions where power is needed to counter acutely harmful speech like "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" and "don't post stolen passwords".
Governments and corporations just have different interests and different amounts and kinds of power. So we have different norms and rules for what governments and corporations ought to do. But the general principle is the same.
But what does that actually mean in terms of how we structure discourse? "Better ideas" will do nothing if people are never exposed to them, so presumably we would like to structure things so they are.
Obviously we can't just identify the "better" ideas and amplify them, because the point is that people should identify them themselves. But if we don't amplify anything, it's likely people will not be exposed to them at all.
So perhaps we want to amplify things such that people are exposed to lots of different ideas? But everyone's ideas are slightly different, and we can't amplify all of them equally. Should we choose a selection of ideas, and amplify the best examples of them? How do we decide which ideas, and which are the best examples?
Or perhaps you have some other idea? I'm not trying to dismiss all the possibilities here, I'm just pointing out that statements like "better ideas, not power" get treated as simple and obviously correct, but are actually extremely complex when you get into details. And we quickly find that people understand these supposedly guiding principles in very different ways.
It does not make sense to apply it to someone's private property, especially when people are free to continue their speech somewhere else.
Summed up elsewhere, they are not being denied the right to say a certain thing, just the right to say it in a specific place (Reddit or Youtube).
What these people call 'censorship' is more accurately described as 'house rules'.
The Supreme Court has held that effective bans on rights are also unconstitutional. And I think that's a fair standard to apply in a broader ethical context.
You can say "go somewhere else to share your views", but if the only real places you can speak are in places you own, that's not much of a consolation. "Free speech" implies conversations where everyone can hear. It's not "free speech" to write yourself notes on your own napkin or to scream into your own pillow.
I think its entirely possible to have a public discussion in a privately maintained and owned forum. And the principle of free speech would have us, as much as possible, set up free discussions where the all ideas can be heard so the best ideas can be adopted.
YouTube has been running at a loss for over a decade. This has allowed it to become a monopoly and have undue influence on policing speech.
Censorship like this is an abuse of their monopoly privilege. The most appropriate free market solution is for the government to forcibly split YouTube off into a seperate company and let it compete in the marketplace.
In addition we can remove safe harbor provisions and start holding them responsible for the shady other content they don't remove.
Better ideas do not win -- ideas that are proclaimed the most or the loudest win. This is the problem we currently have.
I value free speech -- everyone is free to share their opinions. But speech isn't distributed evenly. It used to be that only the very wealthy or the very organized could widely distribute their speech. Now it's very wealthy and anyone with far too much time on their hands. This is not a better situation.
People can now wield speech as a weapon -- not by spreading better ideas -- but by simply using so much that it drowns everyone else out. Your own speech online is literally worth less because you're not willing to spend hours every day posting it.
To put it another way, maybe we're overconfident. Maybe the citizens, at least in aggregate, are well enough informed, but they just value things differently. To be more specific to the case at hand, maybe citizens are mature enough to handle tobacco ads on the internet.
Citizen: "Let me see those cigar ads."
Censor: "I can't let you do that. You'll just buy cigars!"
Citizen: "Well, yeah. That's the idea."
An important announcement and most people don't see it unless they read a subreddit that cares about it.
1. Ideally, we don't allow corporations to control so much of our communications.
2. Barring 1, we should set the expectation that communication platforms should protect their users' freedom of speech, with laws to enforce this.
> At the end of the day, these are private companies and they can enforce whatever arbitrary guidelines they want within the laws of the countries they operate in.
This is descriptive of reality but not prescriptive of how reality should be. As far as I am concerned, corporations don't have rights, people do, and when corporations start infringing on the rights of people (such as the right to free speech) that's a problem.
What laws would you propose to actually implement this?
I like free speech a lot as well, but it seems that boundaries get a bit fuzzy here. E.g. if you were to run your own forum like HN, don't you think you should be allowed to ban material from, say, KKK supporters?
> What laws would you propose to actually implement this?
I didn't. Note that I didn't bring up laws until #2 in my previous post.
Programs which educated people on the dangers of social media the same way we educate people around the dangers of drugs and alcohol might go toward changing the way we treat these things in our culture, but on the other hand, there's enough problems with i.e. DARE that they might be counterproductive.
> I like free speech a lot as well, but it seems that boundaries get a bit fuzzy here. E.g. if you were to run your own forum like HN, don't you think you should be allowed to ban material from, say, KKK supporters?
I think if you combine topic-based moderation with a vote system, you don't need to ban KKK supporters. On a system like HN where all posts are in the same data stream, racist posts are going to be downvoted fairly quickly. And if someone posts racist comments on a post that isn't about race, it's off-topic, so topic-based moderation says it's okay to delete it. It's not a restriction on free speech--it's keeping topics organized to maintain the functioning of the forum.
The key exception here is that when the topic is race, then you don't delete racist comments. This is uncomfortable, but racism doesn't simply go away because you censor it--if anything, censoring a racist makes them feel they are a martyr, and strengthens their beliefs. Instead, if you leave the posts up, users will respond to them with the truth. Countering lies with truth is more powerful than countering lies with censorship.
There's a tendency, I think, to see bigotry as a monolithic problem in a person, without any reasoning behind it. But if you actually listen to bigots, you'll often discover that behind the bigotry they have legitimate fears and problems, and they think bigotry is the solution to those problems. Part of the problem we have in the US that those who value equality and acceptance too often see bigots as just bigots, and forget that they are people. If we see them as just bigots, then they can't change, or aren't worth changing, and we can discard them. But that hasn't worked--that's why we have the administration we have now.
Instead, I think we need to see bigots as people, and try to address their fears and problems with facts and truth. (Most) bigots don't benefit from their bigotry--bigotry doesn't solve their problems, and prevents them from seeing the real solutions. So if we can show them the real solutions to their problems, they might see they don't need bigotry any more.
Civil rights leaders of the past understood that a conversation about race had to be an actual conversation, not just shouting your ideals and silencing your opponents. If you refuse to listen to bigots they will refuse to listen to you. It's not us versus them, it's us and them versus ignorance.
Note Cloudflare had this exact issue: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
These aren't rhetorical questions by the way. I'm genuinely wondering what HN thinks about this.
As I've said elsewhere on this thread, corporations don't have rights, people do. A more clear way to say this might be: corporations only have rights inasmuch as the people who make up the corporation have rights.
Even though you're not asking this rhetorically, the way you're asking this question is an appeal to me as a person, and obviously I don't want to be forced to host the content of people I disagree with.
But giant corporations are different from individuals. Either we should prevent corporations from being too big to fail, or we should ensure that their failures don't damage society. If a corporation owns a communication platform the size of YouTube, they lose the right to choose what content they host, because doing so infringes their users' rights to free speech, and their users can't just go elsewhere because there are no other equivalent platforms.
Just because a corporation doesn't have a right to an ideology doesn't mean we should not let any corporations have ideologies: we can let corporations have ideologies as long as we make sure it isn't harmful to the rights of individuals. The purpose of laws, as I see it, is to protect the weak from the powerful. If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms. Similarly in the realm of CDNs, groups like Amazon, CloudFlare, Akamai, or Google absolutely don't get to have ideologies. Anyone who wants to work on the internet has to work with these CDNs, so if they don't allow free speech, there isn't free speech on the internet.
> Note Cloudflare had this exact issue: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Likewise, I'm also not saying free speech is the only right that needs protection. With the CloudFlare case, the "Freedom of Speech < Due Process" is a rational argument, at least. I don't have enough context to 100% decide for myself if I agree with their decision, but I do tend to think that if the Daily Stormer was inciting violence, that's a higher priority than free speech. But note how this isn't about CloudFlare's rights at all--it's about protecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people the Daily Stormer was attacking.
Random aside: I do wish that they hadn't been so nationalistic about it though. (He said: "I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally").
> But giant corporations are different from individuals.
You can see how this gets fuzzy then, right? At what point is a corporation "giant"? How to measure and who decides that? Why is it okay for your Dave's Liberal Hosting Service to arbitrarily moderate material but not YouTube? YouTube isn't even a monopoly on video hosting services. Both YouTube and Dave's Liberal Hosting Service are still made up of individuals, and you think that individuals should be treated the same. So why aren't they?
Maybe the exact point where a corporation becomes integral enough to society that it needs to be regulated to protect people's rights is ambiguous, but it's not really ambiguous that YouTube is far past that point.
And I'm not being ambiguous at all about corporations not having rights. Limited liability has to be balanced by restrictions on what an LLC can do, or there's no incentive for people to act sociopathically (which they do). This is true at any size, and corporations violating the rights of individuals aren't limited by size. However, issues with small corporations are both less concerning and more likely to be handled by market forces.
> How to measure and who decides that?
Traditionally it has been regulatory bodies such as the FTC or the FCC. Congress typically hasn't made laws that target specific corporations or small groups of corporations, instead leaving that sort of micromanagement to the regulatory bodies. There are pros and cons to regulatory bodies versus congress handling these things. Ideally I'd want it to be elected officials so that citizens get more direct control.
"Measurement" isn't really applicable: you're looking for a size that can be quantified, but I'm talking about human rights violations.
> Why is it okay for your Dave's Liberal Hosting Service to arbitrarily moderate material but not YouTube?
I already covered this:
"If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms."
> Both YouTube and Dave's Liberal Hosting Service are still made up of individuals, and you think that individuals should be treated the same. So why aren't they?
Neither corporation has any rights: there's just not much reason to drop the hammer on Dave's Liberal Hosting Service if it's small enough that competitors could arise easily to meet need, and they've not banned any existing users. All the users who Dave's Liberal Hosting Service would "discriminate" against are already using Bob's Conservative Hosting Service, so free speech is available to society.
There are really only two household names in the video hosting space in the US, YouTube and Vimeo, and both of them ostensibly support all content, but don't actually live up to that promise. Not only is free speech not available in that space, but it used to be (at least, moreso), so previous users have had their channels taken away from them; their best options at that point are basically starting over if you've built a channel. If YouTube had started with the promise of censored content, they would have grown in tandem with competitors with more permissive content policies, and this wouldn't be the problem that it is today.
Both corporations are made up of individuals, but when they're acting behind the veil of a corporation and in fact decisions are being made by only a few of those individuals, while they trample the rights of the rest of the individuals that make up the corporation. If you're going to appeal to the idea that people shouldn't be forced to host content they don't agree with on a platform they built, you should realize that it's very unlikely that the engineers who built YouTube are the same people as the executives and board members making the decision to censor their content. The larger the corporation, the more disconnect...
This may smack of censorship in some ways, and if it was a government agency, it certainly would be. Unfortunately, the core of the problem that a lot of people are dancing around is that we've come to expect private businesses on the Internet to care about anything other than their profits - but that's asking them to violate their corporate morality of "profit at all costs". They're not going to do that; we are either the customer or the product. This is those private companies forcing their moderation policies, so as to continue increasing their userbase and advertising income. Reddit and YouTube/Google are essentially moderated private platforms and if they decided that tomorrow all that could be posted on their sites are cat pictures, they would be well within their rights to do that.
This is a common misconception. Nowhere is it defined that only a government can conduct censorship.
What Reddit and those cheering the migration of gun and sex enthusiasts is that those people are also frequent contributors to the funny, light subreddits. If they go, not only do other, straight, subreddits lose out, but the alternatives they go to start to get straighter too.
People will indeed move to something better. And they will move quickly. We have seen it with myspace to facebook and digg to reddit. So far, the alternatives, to me, seem not that attractive, but I imagine it would only take a few people to move to make it so.
It only takes a few sane early adopters.
Nothing changed except the site got a bit better because a bunch of the assholes migrated to voat or remade those subreddits under different names.
I am not saying they are the only people keeping the site alive, that would be silly. I'm saying that people that like to tell jokes will make the alternatives they go to better and more attractive, and make Reddit a bit less attractive.
Your examples of previous banning was about toxic subreddits where the main focus was on toxic "jokes". I'd agree with you, toxic joke tellers are probably going to always joke toxicly. But a gun enthusiast, a craft beer lover, a historical re-enactment, an adult porn star, they are not primarily makers of toxic jokes. I hope you can see the difference here.
Having said that, I still don't buy the argument that this will have some sort of larger negative impact on the reddit community. Reddit is way too large for some niche subreddits to actually matter in the big picture.
I'm proposing that an exodus of non toxic people from place A to place B makes place B less toxic. Now I don't think we will see the alternatives improve overnight but if things carry on along this road then we will see it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson
I wonder if he would be considered a terrorist today...