I wasn't referring to the most recent crazy murder-suicide incidents.
More towards the fetish folks who collect guns against the day when
they'll be able to justify their use. Or the guy who open carries
around a handgun loaded with hollowpoints on the day somebody dents his
car and he happens to feel cranky.
Per the technical claim, I've actually held to that in the past, but on
consideration, I think that there are so many potential avenues for
regulation that it no longer seems to me to hold water. The presence or
absence of different kinds of weapons (or pharma) changes the
conversation (both inner and outer) for better or worse. Folks who are
about to lose it are more likely to if the means are available.
Certainly simple licensing restrictions may give otherwise volatile
situations some room to breathe.
Carl
On 12/18/12 2:21 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 12/18/12 2:03 PM, Carl Tollander wrote:
It seems to me the knee-jerk response to this sort of thing is to
improve detection and mitigate consequences, as with gun control I'd
guess detection can and will be defeated by someone like this (in
part because he probably has someone helping him, like his mother),
and consequences can't be prevented in some cases. In a few years
people will be able to go to Kinko's and print-out weapons on 3D
printers. How will gun control work then?
It will work just fine. We will go to Kinko's and print out
something that renders your printed out weapon useless, at least for
awhile. There will always be some mod to the regulation regime that
will defeat the self-entitled folks that want to amuse themselves by
gaming the system, at least for awhile. Its an iterative process.
Rules like "Don't shoot people" also work pretty well. The kind of
person that plans to kill a classroom of kids and then kill himself is
the kind of person that will break the rules. Anyway he's dead and
not responsive to the usual sorts of incentives people respond to.
Something more serious went wrong in his development than exposure to
weapons. `Gaming' is hardly the appropriate word to describe these
kind of final decisions in a person's life.
The technical claim is just that manufacturing will become easier and
cheaper for everyone and that trying to regulate objects will become
more and more about concealing information. That's not a good
development either for society, even if it does have safety implications.
Marcus
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