This seems to be the pivot point at which the thread went into flamewar. I'm sure you didn't intend to cause a wildfire, but combining inflammatory material with inflammatory rhetoric has that effect. So would you please not post like this to HN in the future?
That would be USA. Nothing much is happening on the federal level, because of the deadlock there. But there's plenty of new legislation on state level.
Do you live in a blue state? Folks are in a state of apoplexy here in Maryland. If gun ownership wasn’t written into the Constitution the overreaction would have been complete long ago. (Same thing with free speech.)
It really depends on whether said shooters fit a profile that is conducive to the agenda. Most of the time, they don't, and are otherwise problematic villains, because they tick the wrong census boxes or a cursory search of their social media history reveals that they have the wrong political and social opinions. And so after a day or two the story is memory-holed.
I do not understand the attack on "thoughts and prayers." There are plenty of people sending "thoughts and prayers" who also support gun control. I get that it calls out the hypocrisy of Christians who don't support gun control, but it also seems like an overly broad attack.
What does someone who both believes gun control is necessary and wants to send "thoughts and prayers" do? I think the idea of gun control is a target at a solution while thoughts and prayers are meant to console the individual.
Anyway, it's just something I found super annoying. I had someone who I know lost a loved one (not due to guns) and I struggled with what to say. It's a simple thing, but I realized I didn't know how to attempt to console someone anymore.
It isn't the "thoughts and prayers" part by itself, it is the "thoughts and prayers" offered by politicians and then absolutely nothing else. Even Christians can find it hypocritical:
> "Prayer that doesn't lead to concrete action toward our brothers is a fruitless and incomplete prayer. [...] Prayer and action must always be profoundly united"
Otherwise, that to many people the phrase has become synonymous with willful inaction is just collateral damage.
It doesn't even call out the hypocrisy of christians that don't support gun control. They can believe in other ways forward, like arming all kids with guns and having them practice lots of active shooter drills, or whatever, but it is the "it is not that bad, let's not worry about it" attitude that makes people angry. The original comment I was replying to talked about a "having a national dialogue on gun control", which simply hasn't happened.
I want to clarify something, I'm not attacking you or your comment. I'm really asking for clarity. I appreciate what you've stated.
It's funny, we assume everyone uses the same definition of a phrase or slogan as we do and just by reading through the comments on this I see that's not the case.
The attack is against high profile politicians who regularly act to block or dismiss gun control measures, but also reliably jump to announce that they are sending "thoughts and prayers" to the victims of gun attacks. I don't think this would be relevant in the case of an individual interaction.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/20/us/thoughts-and-prayers-flori...
> hypocrisy of Christians who don't support gun control
I don't see how the two equate to hypocrisy. A friend of mine (a Christian) is strongly opposed to gun control. He has a concealed carry license and carries everywhere, because he wants to have the means to protect himself and his loved ones from an active shooter, if necessary. He cites "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," and feels personally affronted by gun control legislation.
That, and he prays regularly for others. I for one would not accuse him of hypocrisy on that basis.
You are correct, I should have been much more clear on that statement. I've heard very good arguments against gun control that are not hypocritical. My statement was my attempt (a failing one) to ask my question with the least amount of bite possible. I actually wanted counter opinions, not to incite a flame war. It seems to have gotten good responses, and that's what I was looking for.
> hypocrisy of Christians who don't support gun control
That's a gross oversimplification of what it takes to be a hypocrite. I've met people who fall into the hypocrite category on both ends, but I what I didn't understand is how this "thoughts and prayers" thing was being used.
To me it felt like an attack on Christianity, which I didn't fully understand. I feel like I get it a lot better now though.
Our gun industry produces more than 11 million guns a year. Sure, many of those wind up in Mexico and Central America via the drug trade, but that's still a lot of supply being sustained through the system.
Guns wear out, simply cutting production would do a lot to reduce the number of guns in the system (outlaw or not).
It will take a long time for guns to wear out such that simple and possibly deadly armed robberies, bank robberies and church and school shootings would be possible well into a few hundred years. Beyond that in this political climate, even if you pulled that off, you would literally have tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens making their own (not from 3d printing, but actual metal working). Then assuming they can reclaim half, you still have a hundred million guns in the wild.
We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat.
China is the perfect example of where people are making their own guns, they aren’t that great and lack economy of scale. Besides, China has a death penalty in place for illegal gun production.
Guns will wear out eventually, heck, they can also run out of ammunition. Industrialization is an incredible enabler for gun use (one the founding fathers obviously didn’t have to worry about), and taking that away causes the system of mass gun violence to fall over quickly.
Simply taking 11 million units of production offline will make guns much more expensive worldwide, let alone in the USA. That crazy person who has an idea to go shoot up a school will have to find some money to pay up if they don’t have one already. Let’s also not ignore what happened in other countries that banned or severely cut back on gun use: none of what the pro gun crowd would predict what would happen.
> We'd save more lives by forcing car manufacturers to install ML based drunk detection systems in the driver seat.
Why do that when Uber/Lyft have already mostly solved the problem and self driving cars will do so even more? If gun advocates actually believed in gun control at all, we could talk about technological solutions in that space. But their position is that any gun control at all is useless, and ironically enough implies that only a ban would be worth considering. (And yes, I’m all for taking away your manually driven car when self driving car technology is ready, it just makes so much sense from a safety and traffic perspective).
Racewar comments are unacceptable here and will get you banned, so please don't.
Also, accounts that use HN primarily for political or ideological battle eventually get banned here, and when people keep doing that, we eventually ban their main account as well. Why? Because HN is subject to all sorts of forces tearing it apart, and those forces win by default, so we have to protect it. If you'd review the site guidelines and take that spirit to heart and help protect it, we'd be grateful—and it's in your interests to do so, since that's the only way HN stays interesting in the long run.
Or what about people who feel bad that these things happen, but believe it’s the cost of living in a free society? Every system has trade offs. You can be sympathetic about the system having downsides while still believing that the system is better than the alternatives. There is absolutely nothing inconsistent about it.
To use a less charged example: developers might feel bad for novice users who get computer viruses on Windows or Mac OS. They might even help people out. And that’s entirely consistent with those sample people opposing locking down Windows and MacOS like iOS in the name of security.
My (non-US) understanding of the outrage is that they feel that the person saying it is not actually going to actually keep the victims in their thoughts and prayers...
I felt that a similar thing happened with those thai kids stuck in that cave. An international effort was made to rescue them. What if this year one of them is dying because their parents can't afford healthcare? Would that create an international effort?
At the same time, I too felt compelled to help them when they were stuck...
I don't think it's as much an outrage thing as it is a control thing.
Sure, cars are unsafe and thousands of people die on the roads every year, but I am a good driver and I won't have a bad accident like that. If I do it's my own fault.
Yes, eating too much is bad for me but it's my own fault - I could just eat less.
(side note - if I believe it would be my fault if I die of something, I'm going to believe if you die of that thing it's your fault)
Kids getting shot at school - not their fault and there is nothing they could do to avoid it.
Being blown up by a terrorist's bomb? Nothing you could do as an individual to avoid it.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Please don't break the site guidelines by taking a thread further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative some other comment was. TimTheTinker shouldn't have gone there, but you fed it with at least 10 flamewar comments, and that's egregious. Regardless of strongly you feel about choice, nothing good could possibly come out of what you did here, and meanwhile it damages the commons, which is already fragile.
Well, if we're talking about potential, most pro-lifers make exceptions for cases of rape or incest. However, if it's one's "sincerely held belief" that a ball of cells is a human because it has the potential to become a conscious human being then such exceptions are the equivalent to killing an adult who's only crime is to have been conceived as a result of rape or incest.
Personally I am pro-choice, but if you are really pro-life you cannot morally allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest- unless of course your stated agenda isn't the same as your real agenda
I'm pro-life and wouldn't make any exception in case of rape and incest; there's already been a crime, no need to add another (innocent) victim to the tally. But I think that we would need to also put into place to help women with unwanted pregnancies too.
I’m pro-life, and I think killing an unborn baby for any reason is abhorrent — as you said, it’s the same as murdering an adult. (Although there are cases where the mother’s life is in danger - but that’s always about “who to save” in the middle of a surgery or something - that’s different.)
I don’t know who you’ve heard that viewpoint from (abortion is wrong except in cases of rape/invest) but I don’t believe that and I don’t know anyone who does. I think it appears as a political concession and rarely (if ever) as a sincerely held belief.
Say what??? A neural tube doesn't instantly transform into a baby at the moment of birth.
The unborn that are getting killed can typically move about, feel pain, and respond to injury. They react in agony when being torn apart or injected with brine.
They have brainwaves, which is the usual standard (varies by state law) we use to draw the line at the end of life, with the loss of brainwaves meaning death. Obviously we don't need to check dusty old bones or a person chatting with the doctor, but we do check in the difficult cases.
Consistency demands that our standard for one end of a lifetime be as similar as possible to our standard for the other end of a lifetime. That standard for death, subject to minor variations in state law, is brainwaves.
Conveniently, such a standard eliminates the rape excuse. There is plenty of time prior to brainwaves.
All those same things apply to house flies. Look, you believe what you believe because a priest or a guy wearing khakis and a sports jacket named "Pastor Skip" told you so. Don't pretend that your opinion came from anywhere else, or that all of the tortured logic in your post is anything other than a post facto justifiction of that religious opinion.
This is off topic and unacceptable on HN. Regardless of how strongly you feel about the unborn, no internet flamewar is going to improve or resolve anything, ever say anything new on the topic, or ever make any new connections between people. All you're doing is helping to destroy this site, which is fragile enough as it is. Please stop.
A human zygote is a person, and so is everything that follows. From the moment of fertilization, there is a single developmental progression of a single organism. There isn't any other meaningful scientific or logical distinction that can be made. Before fertilization, you have the gametes from two separate organisms. Afterwards, there is a new, unique organism (a human being) who has a separate identify.
And yes, that means I think common in-vitro fertilization practices (including making multiple zygotes and throwing some out) are morally wrong and equivalent to abortion.
If anyone disagrees, I contend it's because of the moral implications, not any lack of soundness in the scientific or logical arguments.
I think the commenter is just pointing out a potential fallacy -- comparing things that are fundamentally different to force a conclusion that is nonsensical.
Like how you compare a live woman with a history and thoughts and dreams with a few micrograms of cells that a body may or may not spontaneosly eject via well-characterized biological processes?
North Korea imprisoning a single idiot American who crossed the border = national dialogue because it's outrageous
School shooting where 3 people die = national dialogue on gun control because it's outrageous.
DUI accident that kills a family of 5 = small blurb in local news because it's not outrageous (even if it should be).
Thousands of people dying from obesity-related health issues = crickets because it is not outrageous.