News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Primer on DarkNet Marketplaces by pdeuchler on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:30PM (#12961365)
Thank you for slumming it around here and enlightening us idiots.

Meanwhile, in the real world, literally two hours after you posted this comment there was a mass stabbing on a school campus in Mountain View

Re:A Primer on DarkNet Marketplaces by KirinDave on Wednesday November 16, 2016 @02:06PM (#12970256)
That is a tragedy, and it's true: we do have "mass stabbings."

It's important to recognize the relative scale. "Mass stabbings" seldom exceed 12 victims, let alone fatalities. Gun violence easily extends past that.

There is a common counter-argument here that the US is inherently a violent country and therefore limiting gun ownership wouldn't decrease violence. I'm not sure that follows, but it misses a central point: Guns enable violence at an industrial scale. They're mechanized killing devices with tens of thousands of engineering hours around making it quick and reliable to critically disable a target, often via death.

A knife is a knife. Like any sharp object, it can be dangerous. A baseball bat is similarly potentially dangerous. But the scope of the dangers of these things is smaller. It seems unfair to compare them directly to gun ownership.

It seems strange to say, "We cannot stop all murders, therefore we shouldn't try and stop the easiest kind." Every life saved is someone's mother/brother/father/sister/child. It's a human story that isn't ended in tragedy and pain. Pitting that against these rhetorical devices about "all violence" seems to me to not address the central question we're asking: "Could we save more lives if we made it harder to own guns?"

Re:A Primer on DarkNet Marketplaces by na85 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @12:28AM (#12974623)
Did I say something about how mass stabbings don't happen?

Nope.