A school shooter isn’t trying to say “shut down all schools”.
But a terrorist flying a plane into one of the most important symbols of your most important city is certainly trying to send your society a message.
Same with this killing
Think about how you would feel if some guys beat you and your friends up in a bar fight, vs someone individually stalking you and beating you up outside your own house. You got beaten up in both cases, but the bar fight beating will unlikely make you feel as vulnerable and scared to leave the house as being stalked and targeted individually
This is the sort of violence that begets more violence.
It's like when a conservative person is canceled they throw an absolute fit, then turn around and cancel someone on the left, without making any connection.
I am definitely worried what Trump and republicans will do as a response.
Looks like a storm is coming.
More posts debating the justification for killing 11 people in a boat in the Caribbean who did not pose an imminent threat.
HN rules do not prevent any of these discussions.
But here we have a individual who advocated those killings.
Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.
On HN it's perfectly fine to justify all this violence, to argue that the violence is regrettable but necessary, but any equivalent discussion about this one individual is somehow beyond the pale.
I'm an outside observer, but isn't that the point of the right to bear arms in your constitution? I don't think the people who wrote it were naive enough to not understand guns could be used for evil purposes, so inherently they supported the price of the deaths of innocents as a trade off for the benefits of guns, right?
That being the case, I would say their opinions and beliefs are pretty important to the current national climate.
Wilder, in the sense of less Organization, less infrastructure, slower transportation and communication. People had to protect themselves, because there was nobody around who could do it. But today, the majority of people can be reached in a matter of minutes.
> When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere,
You don't understand that guns are the major reason for this?
The logic behind the 2nd amendment doesn't hold once Uncle Sam has nuclear tipped icbms and I'm not allowed to have them. I'm also not allowed to have tanks or rocket launchers or even high rate of fire Gatling style guns.
To paraphrase, "if you think the 2nd amendment is what's keeping the government off your back, you don't understand how tanks work"
1. The goal of the second amendment was never "everyone should be able to have as many guns as they have, and if people use a gun to kill a dozen children then so be it", it was "it should be illegal for the government to take away people's weapons because the first step a tyrant would take is to disarm the populace so they couldn't fight back." That goal doesn't hold water anymore in a world where a computer geek working for the US military in a basement in Virginia can drone strike a wedding on the other side of the world. Instead, the NRA has made "guns good" into something that too many people make their whole personality, and the people who are actually trying to destroy society use that as a weapon to prevent any positive change when someone murders a dozen kids by making people feel like the only choice is between "anyone can have guns and children are murdered every day" or "the government takes your weapons and forces any dissidents into siberian-esque gulags".
2. Firearms were far less common, far less accessible, and far less deadly than they are now. Compared to what was available at the time, modern-day weapons like the AR15 are effectively weapons of mass destruction. If you went into a school with a civil war-era rifle and tried to kill as many people as you could, you'd maybe get one shot off which might not even kill someone if you hit them, and then you'd get tackled while you were trying to reload.
However I was speaking in the context of the tradeoffs of danger and the awareness of what blood you get on your hands for agreeing. Although the writers of this bill couldn't forsee AR15s and drone strikes, I'm sure they could forsee that there was a cost to freedom to bear arms.
The relative lethality of a particular style of rifle doesn't seem to matter. Better guns than muskets were available at the time, and they didn't seem to think it necessary to limit that amendment.
I don't think your opinions about the history and purpose of the second amendment holds water.
“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.”
There’s endless legal debate how this should be interpreted, but it’s not obvious that there was an assumption that there would be mass individual gun ownership.
What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.
I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence
The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.
On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.
Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history
My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.