[DanielBMarkham]

“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said.

Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it.

The problem is that it always is a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm. Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming. Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that. When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch.

Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming of it?

Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not so much.

[haberman]

Most of these slippery slope arguments are made by people who seem to have no actual experience with any of the issues at hand apart from reading 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. This gives them about as much credibility as someone whose information comes from watching Jack Bauer on 24 and Fox News.

You cannot come to reasonable conclusions about issues like this without seeing what's going on in the real world. This is not a math problem we're talking about; you can't sit around thinking and extrapolating and expect your conclusions to mean anything. It's like trying to run a scientific experiment without any data.

Do you know anything about criminal law? Do you know anything about the legal checks that are in place that prevent your doomsday scenario from happening? Are you aware of how evidence rules are applied in real cases? I'm sure you've read stories about the most egregious abuses, because they are the ones that pop up in the feeds that you read, but do you extrapolate from these that all cases are like this?

I say all this because I recently had the very eye-opening experience of serving on a juror in a five-week criminal trial. I realized that many of the prejudices that the technorati crowd has about the justice system are totally unfounded, at least for the case that I sat on. Our jury was not a clueless bunch of simpletons, our prosecutor couldn't get whatever he wanted by just saying "think of the children," and the judge was not an apathetic overworked bureaucrat who let anything slide.

What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay?

Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime? (edit: I'm talking about dense urban areas).

[ghshephard]

Given that I spent the better part of my childhood firing a .22 and a .306 after school at whatever I decided was worth shooting (not to mention fall season, when whatever was worth shooting usually had four legs), I would argue that discharging firearms is not a crime. And it most certainly fits _the_ definition of "victimless crime." The only parties that you are indirectly benefitting would be Walmart (or wherever you pick up your ammunition).

[tptacek]

Were you doing that in a dense urban area?

[ghshephard]

I had neighbors. I was taught (as most gun users are) to be aware of both what I was shooting and, and, importantly, what was _behind_ what I was shooting at.

The Rural/Urban/Suburban thing is irrelevant - what's important is the safety of the discharge.

Regardless - the point I was trying (and clearly failing) to make is that there is nothing illegal regarding the discharge of a firearm. The crime is doing so irresponsibly and in an inappropriate location.

[oh_sigh]

Firing a firearm in an urban area in public is, as far as I can tell, almost always illegal. No one is trying to invent a system that detects every gun shot ever. No one cares if you shoot in a shooting range, or in your expansive back yard, or in the wilderness.

Could you please find me one example of a public space in a major metropolitan area where it is legal to discharge firearms? That is the issue here.

[roel_v]

"Regardless - the point I was trying (and clearly failing) to make is that there is nothing illegal regarding the discharge of a firearm."

What? "Discharging a firearm" (shooting) is illegal in almost every situation in urban areas. If you think that you can go shooting at beer cans in, say, Central Park, as long as you make sure to only shoot at a downward angle and with a sand hill behind your targets, you're in for a rude awakening. It is unsafe to shoot in all but the most controlled circumstances (e.g. on a shooting range) in urban environments, and even suburban ones.

[tptacek]

Who's thinking about deploying gunshot detection systems in rural areas? If nobody, then what does it matter? Gunshot detection systems in cities are almost by definition targeting inappropriate discharges.

[ghshephard]

I don't really care about gunshot detection systems. I'm trying to bring a bit of balance to a thread that had the unqualified statement, "Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime?"

I wouldn't be surprised to believe that some percentage of the HN audience might actually _believe_ that discharging a firearm is a crime, so I was seeking to inform them that it is not the act of discharging a firearm that is a crime. It's doing so in a negligent manner, or in an inappropriate location. Check your state/municipal bylaws.

[Spooky23]

A healthy skepticism of placing recording microphones on street corners all over a community is a natural reaction to an egregious abuse of civil liberties. It probably doesn't mean much to you, because you're probably white, and probably live in a "good" neighborhood. So this won't affect you.

The slippery slope is already iced -- the systems are already being used to record conversations. But I guess that's ok, since it's just affecting those people on the wrong side of the tracks.

[ghshephard]

I don't believe you could come up with a better definition of "victimless crime" than "discharging firearms within the boundaries of a dense urban area." "Discharging Firearms" is akin to "Driving Car" or "Operating Forklift" or "Owning Swimming Pool" - all of these acts can potentially be dangerous, but, responsibly done, the risks can be mitigated. (Though, statistics seem to indicate it is inordinately more dangerous to own a swimming pool than to discharge a firearm, in terms of accidental deaths of children per year of doing so)

[roel_v]

Listen, I think many of the people responding to you are sympathetic to your argument (as in, pro gun ownership, not being alarmist, etc - I certainly know I am), but you're hurting the cause more than you are helping it by comparing "discharging firearm" with "owning swimming pool". Your Freakonomics example was about gun ownership, not shooting it. I don't see how you can reasonably argue that shooting a gun is equally safe or unsafe than is "owning a swimming pool".

Of course the risks of firing a gun can be mitigated and controlled, but to do so, one needs a lot more rules and procedures (both on the individual and societal level) for guns than for forklifts and swimming pools. If you disagree with that, I'm afraid I (or, I suspect, some or most of the other people responding to you) won't be able to have a real discussion with you since our fundamental assumptions would then appear to be so far apart that we'd have to regress to a much more fundamental level and clarify those assumptions first before it would make sense to come back to the relatively high-level argument at hand.

[ghshephard]

My bias, I guess, is growing up with the sound of gunfire on a daily basis from family and neighbors. I didn't really think it was a big deal - just became part of the background noise. The concept of "Gunshot detection systems" just seemed ludicrous to me. I didn't actually realize until I googled a bit that it actually _was_ illegal to discharge a firearm within certain city limits - I would have argued (and lost) that the law was "negligent discharge of a firearm"

I guess if it's illegal to do so, then a "Gunshot Detection System" has use. In the same way that Red Light cameras and Speeding Detectors serve a function in managing those laws.

There are lots of places in the Bay Area where you can safely discharge a firearm within city limits. At least I know I need to review the various city/municipal bylaws to see whether it's legal.

[haberman]

What? Even if you are the most responsible and conscientious gun owner whose bullets will never damage any people or property, discharging a firearm in a dense urban area is severe noise pollution and causes distress to people who hear it because they have every reason to believe that they may be in danger. And there is practically no legitimate reason for it outside of self-defense.

[krschultz]

I live in the northeast and own several guns. I would never even consider discharging them in an urban area. Even most suburban areas are unsafe. From my point of view, if I'm not at a gun range or on a giant expanse of rural/hunting land, the gun is locked up.

A gun locked up in a gun safe is surely safer than swimming pool. But a gun being shot in the backyard of a suburban home is definitely less safe than a swimming pool.

My neighbors live roughly 60 feet away from my house. If I went outside and shot a racoon that crossed my property, I'm pretty sure I would be in prison.

[DanielBMarkham]

I could feel the outrage in your comment and felt compelled to reply. I don't usually reply because, quite frankly, it's impossible to accurately convey your argument to 40K+ readers and most of the time the thread underneath my comments is just an indication of how poor a job I did with communication.

You've constructed quite an elaborate straw man ad hominem around me, so let's clear some things up. I do not watch Fox News or listen to talk radio (although there's nothing wrong with either). I do not have a feed that provides me with shallow-reasoned libertarian tripe. In fact, I scan more than 30 editorials and commentaries daily from sources as diverse as the foreign language press, Mother Jones, and the NYT. I also have many friends in the law enforcement community and think they do a great job. I am somewhat familiar with the system as it exists today. Nowhere near an expert, but not a theorist either.

Now that we've straightened out that bit, let's get to your argument. You cannot come to reasonable conclusions about issues like this without seeing what's going on in the real world.

This is exactly what I said: that real world tactical considerations are all that matter to some folks. The existing situation is that we have no gunshot detectors. So the question becomes, aside from structural political considerations, "Do such gunshot detection systems provide more societal value than harm?"

This might surprise you, but I'm all in favor of gun control laws for the inner cities. As population densities rise, the local government by necessity must take more control over citizen's lives. Note that I said "local government" and "by necessity". So the only problems I would have with these systems is whether they are being selected by the majority of the local people and whether or not they are deemed necessary by those people.

Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime? (edit: I'm talking about dense urban areas). No, I'm not, but since you brought it up, let's take a look at the real world data. According to the article, the vast majority of gunfire in a city doesn't cause death or major bodily injury. That looks pretty victimless to me. Personally, for a device that can cause bodily harm or injury to only one other person? I'm comfortable with an safety rate of around 99.9%. Others may have different preferences. The point here is that you can never have a perfectly safe conditions. The only question for folks to ask is how much risk is acceptable.

My problem is that we are making sweeping decisions for the entire country without realizing it. When you have a negative law, like "you can't own a gun", it only impacts the area where it is passed. But when you introduce new technology not covered by laws, especially technology meant to fix a social problem, you're setting a precedent for everybody. I'd argue that for 99% of the land area potential future gunshot detection systems will cover they will be neither wanted and controlled by the people nor deemed necessary by them. They'll become like automatic radar systems: another income stream and another intrusion into what used to be a mostly harmless affair.

One of the things that we don't talk about is how many laws are broken all of the time and it doesn't matter much to society at large. Things like the majority of these urban firearms discharges, people who lie to federal agents, speeding, or so on. To me, it looks like the purpose of these urban firearm discharge laws are just to have another crime to tack on to a suspect when sending them off to jail. I think the data shows that. But in either case, we have all kinds of laws, like speed limits, that are broken all of the time. Do we want to computerize our system of justice such that they are all followed all of the time? I'd give a vigorous "hell no!" to that idea. The system grew in complexity based on the idea that it was porous. You make it airtight and you'll have massive civil unrest on your hands. My opinion only, for what it's worth. The system of law we have evolved is not a system of morality or a way to lead your life. It's just a bunch of ad-hoc rules that are mostly consistent and worked by mostly great folks. But society couldn't function if you enforced 100% of all the laws all of the time. If you want to automate enforcement, we're going to have to get rid of a lot of legal code.

[haberman]

> I could feel the outrage in your comment

I think you're mistaking a clue bat for outrage. You sound like me when I was in high school: high on concern, low on experience. I don't know if you're young or not, but I'm basically saying what I needed to hear back then.

Also, my comment was not intended to offer unqualified support for this program. But if we're going to debate it, let's debate it in terms of the real world and not in a philosophical vacuum. The real world has checks in place like wiretapping laws and evidence rules. Are these perfect? Maybe not, but you do not even acknowledge that they exist.

> According to the article, the vast majority of gunfire in a city doesn't cause death or major bodily injury. That looks pretty victimless to me.

Gunfire in dense urban areas is harmful even if it does not hit anything: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4036259

> To me, it looks like the purpose of these urban firearm discharge laws are just to have another crime to tack on to a suspect when sending them off to jail.

Suppose you lived in a high-crime area. Are you saying that it's totally fine with you if people drive down the street shooting guns as long as they don't hit anything? If you hear gunfire, how do you decide whether you are in danger or not?

> If you want to automate enforcement, we're going to have to get rid of a lot of legal code.

There's nothing in the article AFAICS about automating enforcement, just detection. I'm not sure how you're going to charge someone with discharging a firearm without an officer showing up. How would you even know who to charge?

[Retric]

The ratio of random gun shots to injury in a city is above 1/1,000 shots fired even excluding intended targets so by your own argument it's rather dangerous.

Also, most peoples risk threshold is far below that for good reason. If you take a 1/1,000 risk of death per day (as a sum of all activity's) you have less than a 50/50 shot of living 2 years. On an hourly basis assuming 15 active hours a day 1/100,000 risk of death per hour = 50/50 chance of living 13 years. Really, 1/100,000 per hour is about the rational threshold for dangerous vs safe but 1/500,000 is closer to average.

As to speeding laws that's a side issue. With it's own set of arguments that has little to do with gun control.

[Cushman]

> Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers

I wouldn't bet on this. Suppressors are highly controlled Federally, and completely illegal to own in Illinois (and Iowa and Michigan and a number of other states as well). You may think that doesn't matter to criminals, but most illegal firearms are purchased legally at some point-- not gonna happen for suppressors. And they aren't mix-and-match; you need a threaded barrel for your gun specifically. (There's a nice little scene in Goodfellas about this problem.)

But let's say you get ahold of one. You've got a line with a crooked Class 3 dealer in Indiana (this is someone who is also allowed to sell machine guns and grenade launchers) and he decides he's gonna risk his life by selling to a gang banger. Fair enough. So you get home, you load up your 9mm, screw on your shiny new suppressor, and go outside to take a potshot at some asshole you got beef with. Two minutes later, a couple of squad cars show up, lights flashing.

What happened? Well, you got your suppressor, but you're still using your same old bog-standard black-market ammunition. The can turns the hearing-damaging bang of your gun into a merely very loud bang, but it does nothing about the supersonic crack your bullet makes. You were quieter, but far from quiet; a ShotSpotter that was close enough easily picked you out.

If your dealer was looking out for you, he would have mentioned this, and recommended you switch to a subsonic ammunition. If he was really looking out for you, he'd also mention that this ammunition has significantly reduced range and stopping power, and probably does not have enough operating pressure to reliably cycle your automatic-- meaning you need to cock your gun every other shot like Jack Bauer. Sounds pretty much ideal for your inner-city gang fight, right?

And lest we forget, when the fuzz finally catches up to you, whether with the ShotSpotter or with good-old-fashioned police work, you are not going to get slapped with possession and sent upstate. As soon as that suppressor gets entered into evidence, with its nicely filed-down serial number, they're going to make a phone call, and the ATF is going to come to town with some serious Federal prosecution heat. They will hang you up by your toes until you tell them who sold the thing to you, and then they will find that person and make them severely wish that they had not.

So... yeah. Don't bet on it.

[njharman]

Suppresors are not hard to make. Due to selection pressures (jail/death) criminals in the aggregate are crafty. They will figure it out.

[roel_v]

Have you ever made or used one? For the record, neither have I, but in the rural environment I grew up in, it was common 50 years ago to make them for poaching purposes, so I heard a lot of stories and spoke to many people who have made or used home-made ones.

For one, while it's not 'hard' in the same sense that writing an OS isn't 'hard' (after all, it's a widely studied design, many have been made/written, there is much information available, so how hard can it be to write an OS, really?), it still requires tools that aren't that commonly available (a lathe, for example - how many people do you know that have one and would be willing to make a class 3 device with it?).

But also, the home made ones aren't that good. Yes, you can make a silencer for a .22LR good enough to not be heard several miles away when you're hunting at night. But those purposes are very different from silencing a caliber powerful enough to be used against humans; meaning at the least a .38 but preferably 9mm. Furthermore it's not so easy to affix silencers to hand guns and still have the gun be concealable, you have problems with semi-auto weapons to get the next bullet into the chamber, etc etc.

So, all in all, having to use silencers, even if they would work 100%, would still cause a significant barrier for perpetrating gun crimes.

[Spooky23]

One of the primary business activities of street gangs are selling drugs smuggled in from Latin America. Do you really think that it's a stretch for them to import illegal gun accessories?

[yardie]

I think you severely overestimate the resources of most criminals. The majority are not the criminal masterminds you make them out to be. If they were that smart they would be doing something else.

And most of the market for weapons flow South; drugs flow north.

[anamax]

> And most of the market for weapons flow South; drugs flow north.

Oh really? "Weapons from the north" are semi-autos. They have autos. (No, they're not convertible.) They get them from their military (which is supplied by the US) and similar sources.

A source that says "x% of traced" doesn't tell you how they decided to trace. (Hint - they have an agenda.)

[Cushman]

This is a good point, but as my sibling points out there are suppressors and there are suppressors. It's certainly well in the ability of a competent amateur to make an effective suppressor for .22LR -- I understand you can use PVC or such materials -- but try that with a larger caliber and it'll take your finger off with a decidedly non-silent noise.

You're going to need a lathe, at least -- a machine shop would be better. Even if you copy an existing design (the science is mostly understood, but it's still easier to make one that doesn't work than one that does), the metallurgy is important-- you really need someone who knows what they're doing.

And that person had better hope that no one outside of the crew knows that they know what they're doing, because as soon as those off-brand suppressors start showing up on the streets, finding that person will become the number one priority for a number of very highly trained forensic experts. They really do take this stuff very seriously.

[CamperBob2]

Slippery-slope arguments come into play almost any time you use technology to solve social problems. It doesn't matter that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, if the entities involved (i.e., people) aren't logical ones. "Libertarians" harp on this stuff because historically, the cost of letting governments do anything they want runs into the hundreds of millions of lives.

A more enlightened approach would be to ask why Chicago has so much trouble with gun crime, given that many other American cities have higher per-capita rates of firearm ownership both legal and otherwise.

One thing's absolutely certain: the real problem, whatever it is, will not be solved with digital signal processing.

[DanielBMarkham]

I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution. The opponents made all sorts of slippery-slope arguments: that there would be a standing army, that the federal government would grow past it's ability to pay (which the supporters actually acknowledged), that the Congress would become politicians for life, and so on.

At the time, these guys were dismissed as being totally wacko (my words, not the lecturer's). What kind of ridiculous slippery-slope arguments were these guys making, anyway?

Of course, all of these predictions did come true, it just took a long time. But when they were made it was all too easy to discount them as being far-fetched. This trend in public discourse continues to this day.

[tptacek]

If a founding principal of the United States was that legislators shouldn't become politicians for life, the US Constitution could have included term limits for the legislative branch. How seriously are we to take the "debates that occurred when the United States ratified the Constitution"? The opinions expressed in those debates aren't laws.

[acuozzo]

> I listened to a set of lectures from the Teaching Company a while back on the debates that occurred when the United States ratified its constitution.

I'd like to listen to these lectures. Please try to remember what they're called. Thanks!

[CamperBob2]

I'm guessing he's referring to a course being offered on the Federalist Papers, for what it's worth.

[tptacek]

This system isn't deployed in Chicago; I've used Chicago as an example because I live here and am familiar with it. Every major American city has a gun violence problem.

I don't understand your glib "digital signal processing" sentence. Technology won't help police forces become more effective? Strong disagree.

[CamperBob2]

Technology won't help police forces become more effective? Strong disagree.

It's not a "police problem." It's a cultural one.

[plainOldText]

I think you're being unfair. The statement could have come from anyone. Moreover, in the article it is not associated with any particular group. Why do you have to point at libertarians, or any other group for that matter?