Yes. People kill people. But people don't kill other people with bare hands. May be they do but it would be such a minute fraction that it is not worth talking about. So given that people do need weapons to kill other people which weapon is more destructive given the current statistics. Right now there are about 30000+ gun deaths in USA. Of that about ~18000 are homicides. Which other weapon can cause so many deaths? If we allowed people to carry grenades, C4, tanks, or even nuclear weapons on a regular basis we would see lot more people getting killed. But we don't allow that. Given this scenario allowing free availability of guns is what is causing these many deaths. This is borne out by statistics from other countries which ban such free availability and use of guns. So yes people kill people. But it wont be so easy to kill so many people if guns are restricted to law enforcement officials.
> But it wont be so easy to kill so many people if guns are restricted to law enforcement officials.
Ever hear of Democide?
Far, far more people have been killed by their own government than at the hand of their fellow citizens. The American Second Amendment is designed to prevent just that.
So what you are saying is you are ok with 10000+ deaths year over year for many many decades to counteract an extremely remote chance of US federal government behaving like Saddam or Assad? On top of it even if US Feds wanted to murder their own citizens they would have to employ the Army as police are controlled by state government. We all know where the state govt will land if it comes down to killing their citizens. Also, another issue is that Army in US is not mindless enough to obey the Fed govt to kill 100s of 1000s of citizens. And even if they did taking on the US army by militias with their puny machine guns is laughable.
> So what you are saying is you are ok with 10000+ deaths year over year for many many decades to counteract an extremely remote chance of US federal government behaving like Saddam or Assad
The violent crime rate has been trending down in the US for decades, and continues to do so. You seem to be making the assertion that banning firearms would result in fewer deaths due to violent crime - an assertion that is not borne out by reality. Further, the number of people killed by government action in "peacetime" exceeds this number by many orders of magnitude.
> We all know where the state govt will land if it comes down to killing their citizens.
We do? I seem to recall several instances of states acting in exactly that manner. I'm originally from Arkansas... are you familiar with the "Little Rock Nine"? The governor called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent desegregation in Little Rock's Central High School.
I have no idea why you would believe that the state government would protect unarmed citizens if the feds came calling.
> And even if they did taking on the US army by militias with their puny machine guns is laughable.
That's fantasy. No one is proposing this. Any action that brought the US military to bear against the American people would be met with a great deal of resistance from all corners of society - including from within the military itself.
You don't get it. The entirety of (current) leftist ideology falls apart if force is ever used on any large scale. So "it can't happen", right ?
The same goes for intelligentsia's hate for violenc. Keep history in mind, intelligentsia will order "their" forces to do horrible things on their behalf against defenseless people, but touching a weapon themselves, no no no no no. What should be understood is that they have nothing against violence. They just want the guarantee that the plebs can't use violence against them, and that they, personally, can never be forced to commit violence, so they cannot be directly blamed for things, even things that are obviously their fault. Like, say, you will not find a single French philosopher accepting responsibility for the French revolution's aftermath, despite the fact that they were very, very much responsible for it.
What should be understood as well is that figures like Gandhi epitomize this behaviour. He's commonly misunderstood. He's a very religious Hindu man from a Brahmin family. His hatred for violence does NOT come from a desire for peace (no more than any other human, he wants a peaceful city to live in, like anyone else, but he certainly does not want peace at any price), it comes from being raised to never, under any circumstances do any work, certainly not manual labour, and certainly not risky work, like committing violence against other human beings. Such a thing would massively lower his karma, it'd be like forcing a jew to celebrate his birthday with a pig barbecue. He has, however, ordered large numbers of both soldiers and civilians to commit violence on others, or threaten them, he even ordered genocides. And even more often, he has often created or contributed to situations that he knew perfectly well would erupt in violence. He is at least partially responsible for the tens of millions of deaths during India's partition.
This person is celebrated by leftists, by the lower ranks because "he is a man of peace" and they can just deny real history because they're 15 years old and haven't ever touched a history book with more than 50 pages (they also revere complete monsters like Che Guevara of course). The higher ranks are well aware of history, yet they love him for his cunning use of violence. How he caused huge battles while moving his forces right under the nose of the enemy. How he created situations that got millions of muslims killed (in revenge for what they did - not saying there wasn't any justification) without ever ordering anyone to fire a gun (he did make sure they had more guns than the enemy of course). How he kept getting his way by creating situations that were completely intolerable for his enemy, e.g. preventing villages from getting food, preventing government departments from operating by cutting communications, destroying the means of escape for refugees by sabotaging train lines, ... Thereby forcing his adversaries to start the attack, usually at a disadvantage. But he is no more a man of peace than Adolf Hitler, and for the same reason. Which is another reason they revere him. This guy killed millions, maybe more than Hitler ever did, because they disagreed with his ideology. He did so without so much as ordering a single person killed. And of course, they revere him because he won.
No matter how pure your leftist ideology, you will be skinned alive by intelligentsia if you don't achieve leftist policy being imposed. E.g. the kibbutzim movement in Israel is widely reviled by leftists ? Why ? I've never met people more dedicated to living as leftist ideology dictates. They failed to take over Israel, that's why. Their failures made Israel a more rightist state than any rightist politician could ever have achieved.
Violence, arms and people choosing for themselves is just completely and utterly incompatible with leftist ideology on pretty much any level you can imagine.
Leftist policy, enforced sharing, massive government e...
Whenever you set it up so that one group of people are armed and another group is defenseless, the second group exists entirely at the mercy of the first.
That's really the problem here - not that government isn't made up of citizens (obviously, it is), but that the act of banning firearms sets up a major inequity in terms of real power. No one is saying "no one should have guns", they're saying "Only these people should have guns". That's a recipe for tyranny.
As for the purpose of the 2A, it's not exactly a long amendment. "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."
The verbiage was revised multiple times to make it more clear that the purpose was military, and applied to protection against internal threats as well as external. For example, take Tench Coxe's words printed in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette in June 1789:
"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
Noah Webster argued in support of this stance as well:
"Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States."
While obviously tyranny was not the only concern addressed by the amendment, it was absolutely an integral part of its original purpose.
Ok. I will give you that. I said ~18000 which is the suicide/accident number. I should have said ~12000 for homicide. But it doesn't change my argument at all.
Hi pistle, I've been on Hacker News a while. I found the argument that took place on this Stack Exchange to be very civil, interesting, and relevant, so I posted it here among other intelligent people like yourself to engage in civil, interesting, and relevant debate. It appears that other people agree that this was, in fact, a valid post.
That statement was never meant to be a rigorous philosophical argument. It's a rhetorical device, nothing more, nothing less.
So if you try to criticize your opponents on the basis of how weak the "Guns don't kill people" argument is, you'll end up committing the strawman fallacy just as much as they do.
The question at hand is whether killing people with guns should be more or less easy than killing people with anything else, or whether the potential of guns to kill more people with less effort than a block of wood or a knife means there should be regulations controlling the sale and use of the guns, which are not applied in equal measure to other things.
In the United States, a cultural belief has arisen holding access to and ownership of guns to be sacred, due to the right to bear arms in our Constitution.
Being a country with a large rural population, and a history of "Wild West" frontiersmanship which made living off the land necessary and in some cases vigilantism the only means of order available, many see guns as simply a tool, or a necessary means of self-defense. Some believe the threat of revolution is the only way to keep the government in check, and that more guns among the population equates, essentially, to an equitable redistribution of the government's monopoly on violence, whereby gunplay among the people is more just than gunplay against it.
So culturally, yes it is a valid argument in that it reflects, albeit without subtlety, the point of view of a large portion of the American public. However, whether it is credible is up for debate.
People kill people, but access to guns (to whatever extent) prompts them to kill people. It's not like people first decide whether to kill someone or not and then think "hm, so are guns available?" The availability of guns influences that initial decision.
Most these arguments seem to completely miss the actual issue.
It's quite normal to hear a crime described in terms of "Motive, Means, Opportunity". People bring the Motive. Guns bring a Means. Neither exists in a vacuum.
"Gun control" boils down to how you propose to attack this. So far, we haven't found a good way to control Motive. So we're left with restricting Opportunity - eg, metal detectors on US schools - or Means, eg, gun control in the rest of the civilized world.
How "true" this statement is (with all its flaws) really depends on the country. If you look at gun ownership over the world as a whole and individual countries we can see that some countries have very high gun ownership, like the USA, but they do also share the homicide rate. This if anything shows its possible to have guns within the community without large numbers of murders and accidents.
In America the argument is regularly used to defend the position of maintaining the gun laws as they are, as right, but its actually quite true that as a culture Americans kill each other more than many other developed countries. That isn't really the gun, they are the weapon of choice but as an outsider looking in I see a lot of violence and it appears to be associated with the cultural heritage in your country.
I visited Las Vegas earlier in the year and I spent some time in a range there firing all sorts of assault rifles and pistols and such. I love firing weapons and here in the UK I am limited in what I can do, no assault rifles for example nor even a 9mm pistol. But one thing an ex marine working on the range said was "I think the USA has a violence problem and guns make it worse". I think that is the truth and until the USA really starts talking about why they have so many people in prison, why its so disproportionately black people, why the homicide rate is so high when compared to most other developed countries the fix isn't going to be obvious. If you remove guns it might help reduce the lethality of the violence, maybe more people will survive knife and other attacks, but its not going to actually solve the underlying reasons for the violence.
The problem is there are two sides to this, people using guns kill people, and people not using guns also kill people:
Guns AND People => Death is TRUE
People AND NOT Guns => Death is also TRUE
Guns are thus irrelevant, its a term that can be removed entirely and the statement reduced to people killing people. The question is really do guns increase the amount of deaths due to their relatively lethality and ease of death dealing and that most probably is true compared to most other personal weapons due to there range and the damage they inflict. But People killing People as I have pointed out has dramatically different rates in different countries, guns don't necessarily increase homicides that is all based on the culture and laws of a country.
Yes. In fact, it's the only valid argument. Most people I that I know own a gun, and none have ever killed anybody. People with mental issues kill people, and they use more than just guns. I have a block of knives on my kitchen counter that have the potential to be just as deadly.
Anecdotal evidence is not real evidence. Most people I know who own a car have never killed anybody, therefore cars don't kill people. Only bad drivers kill people. Sounds silly, right?
Also, your block of knives is orders of magnitude less deadly than a semi-automatic weapon. Can you kill people with knives? Of course you can, people did it for centuries. But there's a reason why army soldiers use a gun as a primary weapon and a knife as a last resort.
26 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadEver hear of Democide?
Far, far more people have been killed by their own government than at the hand of their fellow citizens. The American Second Amendment is designed to prevent just that.
The violent crime rate has been trending down in the US for decades, and continues to do so. You seem to be making the assertion that banning firearms would result in fewer deaths due to violent crime - an assertion that is not borne out by reality. Further, the number of people killed by government action in "peacetime" exceeds this number by many orders of magnitude.
> We all know where the state govt will land if it comes down to killing their citizens.
We do? I seem to recall several instances of states acting in exactly that manner. I'm originally from Arkansas... are you familiar with the "Little Rock Nine"? The governor called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent desegregation in Little Rock's Central High School.
I have no idea why you would believe that the state government would protect unarmed citizens if the feds came calling.
> And even if they did taking on the US army by militias with their puny machine guns is laughable.
That's fantasy. No one is proposing this. Any action that brought the US military to bear against the American people would be met with a great deal of resistance from all corners of society - including from within the military itself.
The same goes for intelligentsia's hate for violenc. Keep history in mind, intelligentsia will order "their" forces to do horrible things on their behalf against defenseless people, but touching a weapon themselves, no no no no no. What should be understood is that they have nothing against violence. They just want the guarantee that the plebs can't use violence against them, and that they, personally, can never be forced to commit violence, so they cannot be directly blamed for things, even things that are obviously their fault. Like, say, you will not find a single French philosopher accepting responsibility for the French revolution's aftermath, despite the fact that they were very, very much responsible for it.
What should be understood as well is that figures like Gandhi epitomize this behaviour. He's commonly misunderstood. He's a very religious Hindu man from a Brahmin family. His hatred for violence does NOT come from a desire for peace (no more than any other human, he wants a peaceful city to live in, like anyone else, but he certainly does not want peace at any price), it comes from being raised to never, under any circumstances do any work, certainly not manual labour, and certainly not risky work, like committing violence against other human beings. Such a thing would massively lower his karma, it'd be like forcing a jew to celebrate his birthday with a pig barbecue. He has, however, ordered large numbers of both soldiers and civilians to commit violence on others, or threaten them, he even ordered genocides. And even more often, he has often created or contributed to situations that he knew perfectly well would erupt in violence. He is at least partially responsible for the tens of millions of deaths during India's partition.
This person is celebrated by leftists, by the lower ranks because "he is a man of peace" and they can just deny real history because they're 15 years old and haven't ever touched a history book with more than 50 pages (they also revere complete monsters like Che Guevara of course). The higher ranks are well aware of history, yet they love him for his cunning use of violence. How he caused huge battles while moving his forces right under the nose of the enemy. How he created situations that got millions of muslims killed (in revenge for what they did - not saying there wasn't any justification) without ever ordering anyone to fire a gun (he did make sure they had more guns than the enemy of course). How he kept getting his way by creating situations that were completely intolerable for his enemy, e.g. preventing villages from getting food, preventing government departments from operating by cutting communications, destroying the means of escape for refugees by sabotaging train lines, ... Thereby forcing his adversaries to start the attack, usually at a disadvantage. But he is no more a man of peace than Adolf Hitler, and for the same reason. Which is another reason they revere him. This guy killed millions, maybe more than Hitler ever did, because they disagreed with his ideology. He did so without so much as ordering a single person killed. And of course, they revere him because he won.
No matter how pure your leftist ideology, you will be skinned alive by intelligentsia if you don't achieve leftist policy being imposed. E.g. the kibbutzim movement in Israel is widely reviled by leftists ? Why ? I've never met people more dedicated to living as leftist ideology dictates. They failed to take over Israel, that's why. Their failures made Israel a more rightist state than any rightist politician could ever have achieved.
Violence, arms and people choosing for themselves is just completely and utterly incompatible with leftist ideology on pretty much any level you can imagine.
Leftist policy, enforced sharing, massive government e...
You're dead wrong about the second amendment, or at least you are if you read it in its entirety.
That's really the problem here - not that government isn't made up of citizens (obviously, it is), but that the act of banning firearms sets up a major inequity in terms of real power. No one is saying "no one should have guns", they're saying "Only these people should have guns". That's a recipe for tyranny.
As for the purpose of the 2A, it's not exactly a long amendment. "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."
The verbiage was revised multiple times to make it more clear that the purpose was military, and applied to protection against internal threats as well as external. For example, take Tench Coxe's words printed in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette in June 1789:
"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."
Noah Webster argued in support of this stance as well:
"Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States."
While obviously tyranny was not the only concern addressed by the amendment, it was absolutely an integral part of its original purpose.
So if you try to criticize your opponents on the basis of how weak the "Guns don't kill people" argument is, you'll end up committing the strawman fallacy just as much as they do.
In the United States, a cultural belief has arisen holding access to and ownership of guns to be sacred, due to the right to bear arms in our Constitution.
Being a country with a large rural population, and a history of "Wild West" frontiersmanship which made living off the land necessary and in some cases vigilantism the only means of order available, many see guns as simply a tool, or a necessary means of self-defense. Some believe the threat of revolution is the only way to keep the government in check, and that more guns among the population equates, essentially, to an equitable redistribution of the government's monopoly on violence, whereby gunplay among the people is more just than gunplay against it.
So culturally, yes it is a valid argument in that it reflects, albeit without subtlety, the point of view of a large portion of the American public. However, whether it is credible is up for debate.
It's quite normal to hear a crime described in terms of "Motive, Means, Opportunity". People bring the Motive. Guns bring a Means. Neither exists in a vacuum.
"Gun control" boils down to how you propose to attack this. So far, we haven't found a good way to control Motive. So we're left with restricting Opportunity - eg, metal detectors on US schools - or Means, eg, gun control in the rest of the civilized world.
In America the argument is regularly used to defend the position of maintaining the gun laws as they are, as right, but its actually quite true that as a culture Americans kill each other more than many other developed countries. That isn't really the gun, they are the weapon of choice but as an outsider looking in I see a lot of violence and it appears to be associated with the cultural heritage in your country.
I visited Las Vegas earlier in the year and I spent some time in a range there firing all sorts of assault rifles and pistols and such. I love firing weapons and here in the UK I am limited in what I can do, no assault rifles for example nor even a 9mm pistol. But one thing an ex marine working on the range said was "I think the USA has a violence problem and guns make it worse". I think that is the truth and until the USA really starts talking about why they have so many people in prison, why its so disproportionately black people, why the homicide rate is so high when compared to most other developed countries the fix isn't going to be obvious. If you remove guns it might help reduce the lethality of the violence, maybe more people will survive knife and other attacks, but its not going to actually solve the underlying reasons for the violence.
The problem is there are two sides to this, people using guns kill people, and people not using guns also kill people: Guns AND People => Death is TRUE People AND NOT Guns => Death is also TRUE
Guns are thus irrelevant, its a term that can be removed entirely and the statement reduced to people killing people. The question is really do guns increase the amount of deaths due to their relatively lethality and ease of death dealing and that most probably is true compared to most other personal weapons due to there range and the damage they inflict. But People killing People as I have pointed out has dramatically different rates in different countries, guns don't necessarily increase homicides that is all based on the culture and laws of a country.
Also, your block of knives is orders of magnitude less deadly than a semi-automatic weapon. Can you kill people with knives? Of course you can, people did it for centuries. But there's a reason why army soldiers use a gun as a primary weapon and a knife as a last resort.
Guns make people more afraid, and frightened people with guns shoot people.
However well it works for you, there are any number of sad, frightened little men like George Zimmerman who will shoot unarmed kids out of fear.