I'm not in the interest of rehashing decades of the same arguments about guns in society on HackerNews, and per Poe's law, I can't actually tell if you're sincere or not. Assuming you are, it bears summary:
You basically have it with "it reduces the blast radius". Guns are a great tool for damaging soft tissue to the point of death. Gun control advocates believe, with less access to guns, people will kill less.
It is also worth adding that most gun deaths in thbe US are from suicides. Means reduction is well-understood as a way to decrease suicides.
> So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?
We don't need to get stuck in a hypothetical, since we can look at other countries and see how they manage these public goods. Guns are unique in that they're exclusively for killing, and provide scant other value outside sport.
Notably, nowhere that had success in tighter gun regulation needed to censor 3D printing. This legislation is something 'both sides' of the gun debate should be able to get behind and oppose. There is very little potential benefit for the cause of "gun control", and very much potential harm.
guns democratize mass murder. With a gun, I can kill a bunch of people before police can stop me. A knife? At best I can kill one or two in a public place before people run away and eventually a different group is going to stop me pretty quickly.
> Killing people that way is physically difficult, and it's relatively easy to just tackle you
I won't argue this as this sounds entirely hypothetical but let me ask you this: if you saw someone stabbing people, would you volunteer to tackle them or would you choose to delegate?
One, a knife never runs out of bullets and never needs to reload. Second, a knife doesn't make a sound. I'm unsure of what training you have but a knife is absolutely the tool of choice up close even if you had a gun on you. One can fatally stab dozens of people in a concert without even being noticed or detected.
I can't make those assertions about a gun.
The point is, a gun in the U.S. has been a weapon of choice but in other countries where a gun is very hard to get, stabbings are equally dangerous and widespread. I have been reading about fatal stabbings in the U.K for a decade now.
It's almost as if evil people will use whichever tool they have at their disposal to hurt people and we are just making it more difficult for good people to defend themselves against the evil.
> Successful mass murders with a knife are fairly rare
I mention 5 myself below but there are more. What I find surprising is how the term "mass murder" seems to be applied almost exclusively when a gun is used, but rarely a knife.
If you look for "mass murder due to stabbing", the media almost never frames it with that terminology, whereas they would immediately use it if a firearm was involved for the exact same number of victims.
When people hear "mass murder", they likely think of hundreds of people dying instantaneously to a volley of bullets, but that's a distortion of what "mass murder" actually looks like in the U.S:
By standard definitions, a mass killing involves 4 or more fatalities. While "mass murders" using a gun get wall-to-wall media coverage, mass murders with a knife rarely make it past local news. If you think these devastating knife attacks are just a myth, here are a few recent ones you can look up right now:
- February 24, 2026: A 32-year-old man fatally stabbed four people at a residence in the Purdy/Gig Harbor area. Responding deputies shot and killed the suspect at the scene.
- July 19, 2024: A grandmother, a mother, and two children (ages 4 and 5) were fatally stabbed in their Bensonhurst apartment. A 24-year-old family member was arrested.
- March 27, 2024: A 22-year-old man went on a "frenzied" spree, killing four people and injuring seven others. The attack involved a knife, an aluminum bat and a vehicle.
- March 10, 2024: In a domestic murder-suicide, a father fatally stabbed his wife and three children (ages 10, 12, and 17) before killing himself. It was the deadliest mass killing in Hawaii since 1999.
- December 3, 2023: A 38-year-old man used a kitchen knife to kill four relatives, two children and two adults, and injured three others (including two police officers) before being shot by police.
The “Oklahoma City Fertilizer Bomb” style bomb is heavily watched. ANFO just isn’t a good vector for a lone wolf anymore. With that said, any GWOT veteran with explosives training could make enough HME to make a mass casualty event à la OKC all over again. Maybe not all at once, right this second, but it’s a real threat vector. Worse, these training manuals available open-source and easy to replicate.
My neighbor is retired EOD, he has all Federal licenses manufactures explosives for the purpose of stump removal, if you can believe it, I’ve seen the process. It’s so easy a caveman could do it. Thankfully, no one really seems to do so. Mostly because manufactured firearms are easier to get ahold of. Or in Europe, smuggled weapons.
We cannot forget what insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan did. It’s hubris to say “can’t happen here.”
I don't think the licenses are hard to get anyway. The hardest part is satisfying the storage requirements.
As a bit of trivia, when congress defunded the ability for felons to restore their firearm rights, they actually forgot part of it. By an accident of history, felons can still get an explosives license.
Explosives are a weird case because Americans can just buy industrially manufactured high explosives. Attempting to DIY an explosive that is almost certainly inferior to what you can buy commercially is a red flag.
Before 9/11 caused them to tighten up the rules, buying high explosives in the US was cash-and-carry. You could walk in and select different kinds of high explosives from a giant menu. If you wanted something unusual they could special order it. The only real requirement was that you had a non-sparking container for it (basically, no exposed metal) when you carried it away. Most people aren't familiar with this because most regions of the US don't have much need for these types of stores.
It still isn't difficult today from my understanding, there is just more paperwork. The more practical hurdle is complying with safe storage regulations since they want some distance between where you store it and the neighbors. You can't just stash a few hundred pounds in your suburban garage.
You mean "before the Weather Underground blew up a bunch of random shit with hardware store dynamite in the 1970s".
>It still isn't difficult today from my understanding, there is just more paperwork.
The paperwork and compliance is enough of an expensive PITA it precludes everyone who isn't a regular commercial user, which is exactly the point.
It used to be that farmers just cleared forest and blew stumps and rocks up. This might sound absurd but when you start looking at the cost of doing that job with equipment it's preferable if you're rural enough to not endanger anything.
It worked how I described in the late 1990s. I know someone who went through the new process and it didn't seem that onerous. As I recall it isn't that different from the process for getting Global Entry on your passport.
Explosives are still heavily used in mining and construction. Many of those operations are just a couple individuals, not any kind of real company.
> I know someone who went through the new process and it didn't seem that onerous
My understanding is that it's nigh on impossible as an individual now but I may be wrong.
>Many of those operations are just a couple individuals, not any kind of real company.
In my limited experience the guys who do the explosives have typically made a business out of it and get subcontracted to many mines and jobsites to blow this or that up.
While quasi regulated they just raise the bar of expertise required. Poisons, bioweapons, and explosives are pretty easy to make at scale without using suspicious inputs.
At the moment the 3D printing crowd are pretty savvy I’m sure many could hook up a new controller or flash their existing one.
OK, then what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property? As we build more housing and cities close in, these wild animals are being run out of their natural habitat.
Is the answer "dont be on rural property!" or are there real practical solutions?
> but I think bombs and bioweapons and etc are very bad examples for you here
Are there better examples?
Also, I for one don't undermine the drive and tenacity of an evil person and to what extent they are willing to cause harm.
In the U.K., where I feel guns are only showpieces (do even cops have them?), stabbing is a known problem.
In India, where ammo is way more expensive than machetes and knives, people are literally murdered with them.
The only argument I can understand, when it comes to banning guns, is that it reduces the blast radius that an evil person can have.
So what's next, lock down the air, radio, roads, internet, water, food supply chains because these are all attack vectors?
If that's the proposal, what's my plan when coyotes and mountain lions attack my child and I on our regular walks on rural property?