If you want to put an immediate end to terrorist attacks the only way to do so is to ensure that there are people witnessing the unfolding events (so they know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys) and empower them to solve the problem right away. No matter how you slice it, you can't make 1 in 5 people permanent, paid police officers so you have to look at the citizenry. If you can't abide the idea of normal people carrying guns everywhere then you need to learn to live with the idea that the police can't be everywhere all the time, and that these are the risks you take regarding terrorism to feel safe from your fellow countrymen who you deem untrustworthy.

So clearly, the rational thing is to fix the police first, come after the guns second, no?

It is frustrating to frequently see white suburbanites with a savior complex rallying for gun control while never addressing the reasons why gun ownership rates are higher in underserved and rural communities: because the police do not adequately protect these populations. That political energy would be much better spent on fixing the root of the problem rather than they symptom of it.

For what it's worth, taking a gun safety course made me realize I am not the type of person that will ever strap one to my hip to go about my daily business. And I'm an avid DIYer for basically everything, but calling the police after a break-in made me understand that clearing a building is a job I will never want to do myself. It's a nuanced issue, but I know that governments must ultimately be subservient to the people, and therefore the onus is on domestic-facing institutions to disarm before asking the people as a whole to do the same.

I know this sounds defeatist, but I actually think just having armed guards at schools is the only game-theoretically sound solution

The best we can really do is tighten all of the bolts that we can see, and hope the leak slows down to an acceptable level. Improve gun ownership laws, improve our handling of the mentally ill, assist those experiencing crippling poverty, etc. Attack all the angles reasonably to get crime down to a reasonable level.

(And an acceptable level cannot be "no incidents". To accomplish that would require a police state. We must accept that once in a while horrific things will happen, and there was nothing that could reasonably be done to prevent it. i.e., shit happens.)

But thinking about your comment just now, less gun control would help in the 8 states that don't have "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes, which include the high population states of California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Knowing that outright murder and the like might be opposed by a legally carrying concealed citizen has got to have a chilling effect on the worst of the police. Knowing that 5% of the citizens 19 or older in my county have concealed carry licenses should also have some good effects of various sorts, and temper some of the sorts of things we've been told about in this HN topic.

Won't help when they're dealing with "known criminals" or the young (the threshold age is generally 21), unless of course a parent is there or the like.

To the extend citizen concealed carry decreases crime (a hotly debated topic that's very hard to prove when things like demographics are also steadily decreasing it), that would also help.

Doing "something", something which the security state crowd had ready in '96, is what got us the PATRIOT act and the TSA.

The strong anti-gun crowd is trying to wage a slow war against gun ownership that would result in an Australia-like confiscation of weapons and the repeal of the 2nd amendment. Don't let the "do somethings" win again.

/rare political post on HN

Until then, an attempt to ban all guns is not only a politically infeasible waste of energy, but also seems like a racist attack on the self-defense rights of the disempowered.

I don't see our government - or any current government being able to do that.

It's like expecting Ford to suddenly decide they want to get into the software business, and stop making cars. It's just not going to happen: not in their DNA.

Take 'a' proposal that would have prevented 9/11: issue every passenger a pistol and frangible ammunition. [1] Can you imagine any government doing that? Trusting their citizens to be adults?

So, no: We're stuck with TSA and the government screwing the pooch by insisting they can control was can't be controlled.

[1] If you want, issue them only to people who can prove competence with firearms, or veterans. Instructional videos: "So you want to use your pistol!"

We should get started asap.

But we have to work with what we've got. The situation we're actually in is this: Even if we could get the massive political coalition it would take to repeal a Constitutional amendment, there are still millions of guns that exist in the USA.

There was an article on HN very recently about a site that allows buyers and sellers of guns to find each other and go through transactions using Tor and Bitcoin for anonymity. So I think it's fair to say that the advancing state of software and Internet technology will make it increasingly easier for people to obtain firearms illegally.

So if you outlaw guns in the USA, the practical effect is disarming responsible, law-abiding citizens, whereas anyone who's bound and determined to get a weapon and doesn't care about the law, can still get one.

(Presently I believe there is a federally mandated waiting period and check for felony records for those buying firearms, called the Brady bill; the idea is to make sure you have time to think about what you're doing and have a few days to "cool off" if you're angry about something.)

My state recently passed a concealed-carry law, whereby any citizen can become certified to carry a concealed weapon. The controversy surrounding that has made me aware of an interesting argument:

What if we go in the opposite direction?

If we assume most people are responsible enough to handle firearms, and a non-negligible percentage of the population carries concealed firearms wherever they go, then it's harder for mass tragedies to occur. When the crazed maniac begins his massacre, the would-be victims can start shooting back.

Concealed carry can also serve as a deterrent to violent crime like armed robbery. If you're desperate enough to try something like that, and you know you're gonna be the only one with a gun, you also realize that the worst thing that will happen is you get three squares a day and a roof over your head at taxpayer expense. Whereas if you know there's a decent chance somebody else will have a weapon, suddenly the worst-case scenario becomes a hole in the head, which might affect your calculations enough to change your decision.

That's the argument, anyway; I'd be interested if anyone can find holes in it.

Surely the burden for coming up with a reasonable, sensible gun control proposal should be on the people who're insisting we could have one if it wasn't for the pesky NRA and their gun nut supporters?