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Comment by back_beyond | Hacker News Reader

Recreation. Many people enjoy visiting a firing range.

Why not let the firing range own the weapons then, and rent whatever you like for the day? Or at least, why not store them there in an approved gun locker you can rent?

Some people do exclusively rent guns and never take them out of the firing range. If this is your only intended use, that's probably the best strategy. However, like others have suggested, an additional reason to own a gun is self-defense; a gun stored at the firing range is completely ineffective in this regard.

Only the latter addresses customization of guns, and I've done a fair amount of that, plus fixing a couple of issues, plus of course all my cleaning of them, at home. Or assembling your own, in the US AR-15 pattern rifles are pretty much the ultimate examples of both.

Because I don't just use one range? Also, I can't shoot intruders with a gun at the range.

I've never understood "guns for self defense". Gun ownership without storing the gun in a proper secured gun locker is completely irresponsible, and is much more likely to lead to your kids or someone else discharging the firearm and injuring/killing someone than it is likely to be useful for self defense. And if you do store your guns appropriately, you won't have time to get them in a self defense situation.

The former is like saying "I won't wear seatbelts so I can get out of the car quickly in case of fire". The latter is saying "I'll buy a fire extinguisher for my car, but I'll keep it locked up under the hood."

And if you do store your guns appropriately, you won't have time to get them in a self defense situation.

Simply not true: https://www.google.com/#q=push+button+gun+safe (Americans are problem solvers, after all; you can also use one with a key and keep that on your person, say, on a string around your neck; this is also what hardening your entrances etc. is about, to give you time to react).

And "appropriately" is really situation specific; I haven't lived in a situation where there was danger of another abusing one of my guns for decades. There's also the pattern of keeping it in your safe until you get home (and if you're really hard core, carrying it until you go to bed). And you're completely ignoring concealed carry, which covers 42+ of the states and ~72% of the US population, 12+ million licensees, and 10 states without a license requirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980298

And that's before we even get into the "much more likely", which simply isn't supported by the facts, starting with a 25% drop in the number of fatal gun accidents per year in the period 1980 to now, while both the population and number of guns owned by it roughly increased by 50%.

Note that if you're depending on e.g. Kellerman's studies, they score only fatal outcomes for home intruders as successful defensive gun uses, when the majority don't involve any shots being fired, the vast majority don't involve anyone getting hit by a round, and pistol torso hits resulting in fatality only about 1/4 of the time. Even the biased CDC admits to the utility of guns: https://www.google.com/#q=%E2%80%9CSelf-defense+can+be+an+im...

I guess my main argument against the need for guns for self-defense is that outside the US, only people living in the worst slums of megacities plus people living in the less civilised parts of Africa, Middle East and Latin America feel a need for guns for self defense. Everywhere else people do fine, and it's not like people getting killed in armed home invasions is a problem anywhere civilised. The occurrence of e.g. school shootings are also orders of magnitude lower.

At the moment, correct, in most places there is no need to defend against violent crime in most parts of the U.S. It's shortsighted to think it will always be that way. Guns for self-defense is a long-term form of insurance.

Is that really true for the U.K., where the courts first stripped its subjects of the right to effective self-defense (using more force than the perpetrator) in the 1950s, then the Parliament by statute in the 1960s, and of course this was in the middle of increasing gun control that started more than a century ago and that is now almost total.

Historian Joyce Lee Malcom has pointed out that a steady trend of declining interpersonal violence starting in the 13th Century reversed in a few decades. Others point out that "burglaries" in the U.K. much more frequently take place when dwellings are occupied than in the US. See the British Crime Survey, which as of 2009 said:

There were 284,427 burglaries.

20% of those were face to face.

In 59% of those cases, violence was threatened or used.

In 40% of those face to face encounters, violence was actually used against the householder, a rising number since such statistics were first collected in 2002-3.

If the subjects of the U.K. don't feel a need for guns for self-defense; maybe they aren't getting killed in large numbers, but they're getting brutalized, and that's very bad in a zillion ways.

The very definition of citizen, vs. subject or slave, is one who bears arms in defense of his polity.... (Although that's not something that Black Armband History mentions....)

Your "orders of magnitude" claim about school shootings is flatly WRT to Europe, especially Western Europe (which is significantly larger than the US in population), compare, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Europe and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... This is especially true about the ones of larger magnitude.

And yet, there is a 1.5x higher chance per capita of being in a burglary in the US vs UK, and 4x more likely to be killed. Even though US citizens have much higher gun ownership.

https://dispellingthemythukvsusguns.wordpress.com

"Being in a burglary", such that you might get killed, counts as robbery in the US, and per that page:

UK robbery incidences: 76,179 (THOSB – CEW page 61, paragraph 2.)

76,179 / 561 = 135.72

US robbery incidences: 354,396 (FBI – CUS)

354,396 / 3116 = 113.7

You are thus 1.1x (135.7 / 113.7) more likely to suffer robbery in the UK than in the US.

Now, robberies in the context of home invasions I don't know, and I didn't see it on that page. Nor did I see where you then got a 4x more likely to be killed if in a house invasion robbery in the US, although I'm quite willing to believe it. But I'll seriously look at that page, the author's inclusion of BCS and NCVS statistics means he's serious (as, e.g., a posting in the current "Dial 911 and get Wall Street" topic notes, US robbery statistics are understated by cities where they don't even bother with them if there's no injury).

Same reasons most people own a car instead of lease - for one it is yours - every time you go back to the range, your favorite gun is the exact same as when you left, a few thousands rounds have not been thrown through it since. For two it costs less over time, to own if you shoot frequently. For three you are in control of maintenance and upkeep.

Because they're pretty to look at and can make incredibly loud noises / destroy things. Guns are just appealing to own. And plus a properly maintained gun will be more acurate than the one you rent at a range.

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