The Moment of Silence Link Just Shown on HN

http://www.causes.com/causes/807161-stand-with-sandy-hook/actions/1716727

by tokenadult • 14 years ago

4 4 14 years ago

det23x• 14 years ago

For me this was really disturbing. I was digging in an old thread, because I often use HN for research on specific topics, and suddenly it popped in my browser and I had no idea what was going on. It did not feel like _me_ controlling my laptop at that moment ...

Zikes2• 14 years ago

It wasn't "gun violence", it was "disturbed individual violence perpetrated with a gun". A gun didn't suddenly become sentient and start mowing people down.

thaumaturgy• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baPgr_tw79Q

I think I just realized how old this argument has gotten. "It wasn't the gun's fault, it's just a tool, it was the person's fault".

OK, fine.

How did that person get a gun?

If gun advocates like yourself are actually concerned about protecting their gun-owning rights, they should be organizing and policing themselves to make sure that things like that video above can't happen.

Putting an advanced weapon in the hands of a crazy or mentally unbalanced person does far more to harm your right to own firearms than any liberal or politician. Every time some gun dealer at a public event displays a weapon and sells that weapon to an individual without any kind of background check or waiting period or any other due process, the odds of yet another school shooting in the U.S. goes up. Eventually, the odds get to be > 1, there's another huge example of senseless stupid violence in the news, and once again it becomes politically beneficial to limit your right to own firearms.

So, you want to have guns? Fine, then keep them out of the hands of crazy people.

If you can't do that, then I can't defend your right to them.

Zikes2• 14 years ago

I'm not a "gun advocate", I'm just against the politicizing of a national tragedy. I'm against this one in particular because this tired rhetoric of blaming the gun distracts from the core issue, and that is that there was a person mentally disturbed enough to want to kill a bunch of children, and guns happened to be how he carried it out.

How did that person get a gun? From his mother, whom I understand acquired her weapons legally and after numerous background checks. Nobody sold this guy his guns, Congress never had the opportunity to come between him and his weapon of choice.

If we're going to talk about further legislating guns to prevent this specific type of crime, we've only got one single option available: you go out to every gun owner in America and tell them to give up their guns, so that there is no chance at all that some crazy person can steal it and go on a rampage.

And that is the reason this argument is so old, and why it feels so tired. Because you can blame guns and gun owners all you like, but that will never solve the problem.

The Moment of Silence Link Just Shown on HN

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