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Letters to the Editor: The Dangers of Guns, Drones, and Vapes

Motherboard readers respond to this week's stories.
Photo: Shutterstock.

Hello, happy holidays, and welcome to Motherboard's weekly letters to the editor section. I'm Emanuel Maiberg, and I'm Motherboard's weekend and games editor. You may remember me from Motherboard stories such as this one where I paid a company $30 to break up with my girlfriend, or that time I just said yes to all the drugs in Fallout 4.

But enough about me. How about you, what's on your mind?

Drones and guns, it seems, judging by our inbox. We've published a lot of great stories lately about the potential dangers of vaping, high-speed internet in small towns, and CISA sneaking its way into law, but nothing got as big a reaction as Motherboard contributor Joshua Kopstein story about gun registration versus drone registration.

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We've included a few of those letters here, as well as a response from Joshua, and other letters that caught our eye.

If you want your letter included here next week, please mail us electronically at letters@motherboard.tv. We actually read all the emails, so please send them!

RE: I'll Register My Drone When You Have to Register Your Gun

(This letter has been condensed and edited)

When a gun is purchased new, it comes from the factory, to the vendor and the person making the purchase from the vendor has to fill out an ATF Form 4473. Section D of 4473 "Must be Completed By Transferor (Seller)" and includes "Manufacturer and/or Importer, Model, Serial Number, Type, Caliber or Gauge." The personal information on 4473 filled out by the buyer includes a valid driver's license, so in the end, you have yourself a mandatory registration of the firearm. From there, every state is different. In Illinois, probably since 1968, a private seller had to take down the same personal information for a buyer to keep on record, since a year ago we had to call a number to perform a background check on the buyer. In Illinois the chain of ownership has always been traceable and I'm fine with that. Even if the chain of ownership record isn't mandatory by law in another state, it's really in the best interest of sellers anywhere in the United States to get that information anyway, because if that gun is someday found at the scene of a crime, the authorities are going to go to the manufacturer with that serial number (mandatory on all firearms since 1968) and find the first buyer who filled out that 4473. If they can't tell the police who bought it from them, I'm sure you can imagine the kind of inconveniences that may befall their lives at that point. e.g. they become prime suspect in said crime. I'm sure you're probably thinking that there are people out there who are careless about the law and I would agree with you, but we seem to be fairly satisfied with allowing people to buy alcohol and own motor vehicles along with the laws that will ruin their life if they still decide to drink and drive, even while countless innocent people are often killed by such idiots; we balance these choices on risk and I can go into a whole other argument about the true statistical risk of gun ownership if you like.

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I, like many other enthusiastic gun owners, can be wary of talk about registration and background checks, mandatory training, etc. because they can and have been used as a means of backdoor restrictions that are more stringent than what a lawful purchaser can expect to face today and we won't accept that.

Josh McNattin

Champaign, IL

Dear Editor,

The recent distress of the drone operator is akin to that of the gun owner. The same mentality and tactics used on gun owners are being applied to drone owners. Exacerbating the problem, are politicians reaching for a quick answer, catering to the shallow voter, or worse, supporting government expansion for the sake of growing government.

There already exist laws to prevent unmanned aircraft from flying into restricted airspace (airports, etc.). Laws already exist to protect our privacy. As a non sequitur, and "solution" to nothing, the federal authorities are requiring people to register their property. People that simply wish to fly their aircraft in their backyard now have to be on a drone registry. What next, drone sale background checks?

As we know, those motivated to break the law will not be impeded by these new laws. They will not register their drones and will continue to do what they will with them. The only people affected will be the law abiding citizens that are now, at the very least, inconvenienced and have to pay more money to the government.

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Moreover, this is yet another chip off the edifice of our civil liberties. The media and the government will have us believe that these measures are not a big deal, are in our interest, and will keep us safe. On the contrary, all these small losses of freedom add up to a very big deal. If it were in our interest, the free market would have led us there. Registration will stop no one from acting in an unsafe manner.

I am a gun owner and not a drone owner. But, we need to combat the mentality that dictates the loss of liberty for political expediency, counterfeit solutions, and the expansion of governmental reach and power wherever we meet it.

-Eugene B.

In your article "I'll Register My Drone When You Have to Register Your Gun" you violated a rule you probably learned in your first logic or philosophy class: you created a false equivalency between drones and guns. Drones and guns [are] vastly different things and thus only someone who has thrown logic completely out the window would say that because drones will soon have to be registered in the USA, so should guns. You might as well use the fact that motor vehicles have to be registered. Or airplanes. Or doctors. Or bicycles. You get my drift. There are many good arguments that can be made in favour of registering guns, but the fact that something entirely different has to be registered is not one of them.

Even worse, you violated one of the first rules your parents taught you: "Two wrongs don't make a right." You are arguing that one wrong, the absence of gun registration, justifies another wrong - protesting registration of drones. Those flying things have become an ubiquitous hazard at airports and accident scenes, regularly hassle wildlife in parks that are supposed to be safe places for animals, and regularly fly over your neighbour's back yard while his daughter is sunbathing. Drone registration is needed to enable criminals to be tracked down as easily as tracking down the owner of a vehicle that ran a stop light.

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Rob

Response:

The intention wasn't to equate the two—in fact it was exactly the opposite. You're right that drones and guns are vastly different things. But the point here was to highlight the insane disparity in the political will to act on vague and mostly-hypothetical threats over known, established dangers.

There are plenty of good reasons to believe drones can and will pose a threat to public safety. But the truth is no one can currently say they know exactly what will happen when drones become ubiquitous. We can use anecdotal evidence to logically deduce the various scenarios, sure, but we really don't know the exact scope or impact.

Guns, on the other hand, are a known quantity. They have a body count. We have endless data showing how they can and often do endanger the public

Maybe at some point (perhaps inevitably) a drone will be used to commit mass murder. But that hasn't happened yet. This isn't about arguing which things should or should not be regulated—it's about threat modeling, and the fact that our government seems overly focused on threats that are vague, hypothetical, or extremely rare (terrorism being one example of the latter).

Drones and guns are both technology when you get down to it. The question is, which technologies and threats are we prioritizing?

-- Motherboard contributor Joshua Kopstein

Re: Chemicals Linked to Lung Disease Have Been Found in More Vaping Liquids

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A reader wrote to Motherboard staff writer Kaleigh Rogers in response to this story, asking for more details about the study. He mentioned he was a vaper, so Kaleigh asked if there were any stories in the vaping world that aren't getting enough coverage. This was his response:

There is definitely a lot to learn about this industry and not something that can be fully understood overnight. It's good to hear that you are interested in what makes the vape industry tick. Mainly, any article that is put out with research from top universities and such, we would like to read how they got the information that they did. What they tested specifically and how they tested it. We want facts that back up the claims that are made, and without further detail on how they came to the conclusions that they did, their information is clearly just a claim and not a fact. If the researchers won't release what was tested they are generally always hiding something. Hope that answers your questions, Kaleigh.

-Kyle Arnold

One 2005 study found levels of diacetyl as high as 433 micrograms per cigarette. Most of the e-cigarette liquids tested in the Harvard study were far lower than this, with even the highest concentration at 238.9 microgram of diacetyl in one e-cigarette.

This makes itsound like vaping gives 1/2 of what is in cigarettes. But an e-cig

is roughly a 3/4 to 1 pack of cigarettes, so the proper comparison would be to give the diacetyl numbers for a pack of cigarettes, or at least 3/4.

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For the other chemicals, please note that those are present in vapor in amounts also present in room air, so it was also disingenuous for Harvard to talk about those unless they SAY that avoiding breathing entirely is the only way to be safer. (Link from reader.)

I agree with Russ Wishtart that DA/AP needs to be studied, most vapers do. But the person who HONESTLY studied that was cardiologist Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos of the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center. (Link from reader.)

While it may be true that a lot of people know that vaping is safer than smoking, in California, that is not the case, thanks to the public health department, which has done an aggressive TV propaganda campaign implying it is MORE dangerous than smoking. And even for the Harvard study, quite a few people have posted that a newly-vaping mother, father, brother, or sister, got scared and decided it was safer to smoke. So Harvard and the media leaving that out, IN CONTEXT, is, literally, causing deaths. It is tempting to say that they have no responsibility to take into account the scare stories being publicized by highly-funded nicotine prohibitionists, but pretending to be innocent of the impact of the sum of what one's organization has been doing for the past 3 years is as dishonest as saying cops that cover for a bad cop are themselves innocent of blame for police brutality.

Sincerely,

Karyyl Keystone

Response:

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Hi Karyyl:

Thanks for your letter. I've had a few readers point out this distinction, and it definitely has merit. I think my concern is that it's difficult to draw a direct comparison between e-cigarettes and cigarettes. One vaper might smoke half an e-cigarette cartridge in one day, another might smoke two full ones, and different models hold different levels of e-liquid. While it's true that one e-cigarette is not a direct analog to one cigarette, since the researchers didn't provide exact liquids levels, I used the measurement they included (micrograms per e-cigarette) to illustrate the point. I think the point still stands, but do understand your distinction.

Thanks again,

Kaleigh

Re: Gigabit Internet Prices in This Small Town May One Day Beat Google Fiber — Dec. 14, 2015

Earlier this week we published a story on a local municipal fiber internet provider called LeverettNet. What made this particular provider special? On the surface, it looked like LeverettNet was offering Leverett, Massachusetts residents fiber internet at speeds of 2Gbps for $39.95—twice the speed of Google Fiber, for almost half the price. Not bad for a town of just 1,876 residents! But, alas, that thesis—which was the angle of a story in the town of Leverett's local paper, and where we first learned of LeverettNet's service—was more complicated than it originally seemed.

The paper's angle—that LeverettNet was upgrading its bandwidth from 1Gbps to 2Gbps—was technically correct. However, we interpreted this as meaning the speed to LeverettNet users had increased. Rather, a closer look at the LeverettNet website showed that it was merely the bandwidth of its "point of presence," or access node, that had been increased. From there, the connection to subscribers' homes remained at 1Gbps.

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Meanwhile, we incorrectly reported that the cost of LeverettNet service had dropped from $44.95 to $39.95 per month. In reality, this was the cost of combined internet and phone service, and not internet-only service, which costs $24.95 per month. An additional maintenance cost of $49.95 per month also applies, and was not acknowledged in the initial report.

These are all errors that should have been caught during the editing process, and ultimately, invalidated the originally reported premise of the piece. That's on me. There's no excuse for mistakes like these on Motherboard, and I'm truly sorry our usual editorial standards were not upheld.

-- Motherboard Editor (Canada) Matthew Braga

Re: Hack Into a Linux Computer by Hitting the Backspace 28 Times

I am a Linux Mint user. I read about the Hack Into a Linux Computer by Hitting the Backspace 28 Times yesterday. I tried it. It did not work. Looks like the security hole was already patched. Thank you Update Manager. I frequently read about Linux security holes. It has always been my experience that they have been patched before they have been reported in the news. While it is good to report Linux security holes, it would be nice to report about how quickly they are patched, in fact often before they appear in print.

Tom

Response:

Thanks for reaching out Tom. Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat have issued patches already, as we noted in the story. So you either got yours without noticing, or your system wasn't affected (the researchers noted that the bug depended on many factors, so perhaps our machine wasn't vulnerable at all).

-- Motherboard staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Re: Lawmakers Have Snuck CISA Into a Bill That Is Guaranteed to Become a Law

Wow. Thanks for the article. I'm blown away by our government's determination to strip private citizens of any morsel of privacy, and the lack of real leadership by our Congress. It is infuriating that I, as a mere citizen, can do nothing but mourn the loss of my right to privacy.

Daniel