

The Moment of Silence Link Just Shown on HN - tokenadult
http://www.causes.com/causes/807161-stand-with-sandy-hook/actions/1716727

======
Zikes
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
<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.

~~~
Zikes
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.

------
det23x
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 ...

