> 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.
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.