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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

This is just as silly as the people who say that we need to ban Muslims from entering the US because they're too dangerous.

Your odds of being murdered in a hate crime in this country are quite low. You're far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver or by falling down the stairs. As a general rule, any event that shows up in the national news is something not common enough to be afraid of, because anything that common is no longer newsworthy pretty much by definition.

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FYI:

There were 33,636 deaths due to "injury by firearms" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

And there were 32,719 fatal car crashes http://www.statisticbrain.com/car-crash-fatality-statistics-... (ok, not serious source but I guess the real numbers are not too far away)

Traffic fatalities have ticked up quite a bit in the past couple of years, with about 40,000 deaths in 2016, but the rough magnitude is correct.

But I'm specifically talking about hate crimes. The vast majority of those firearm deaths were suicides, and the vast majority of the homicides weren't hate crimes. According to the FBI, there were 18 murders that qualified as hate crimes in 2015 (the most recent year available): https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015/topic-pages/incidentsand...

When I first moved to the US (Capitol Hill, Seattle), reading the local news about someone being shot and killed in street robberies gone wrong a few blocks from my apartment were a bit of a shock having moved from Australia.

If you ask me but 11K deaths via gun (homicide!) are way too much

I totally agree, but that doesn't really affect my point.

Don't get me wrong: I know what you wanted to say but your counter argument was wrong

I don't understand, what was wrong exactly?

...the majority of that 33,636 number being suicides:

>21,175 suicides

Correct, but how many people died in the average fatal car crash?

Also, how many of those gun deaths were accidents, suicides, etc.?

Read the wikipedia entry ;)

Sure, our current statistics show your statement to be true. But, I think many people are alarmed at the trajectory of hate and intolerance in the US.

Also, being murdered is the worst thing that could happen, and maybe that event is still rare, but a set of stairs isn't going to harass you or discriminate against you. There's a whole spectrum of bad things that could happen to people because of the climate in the US.

The original comment said, "It is just not worth getting shot by a random idiot while walking on the street."

If you want to talk about other negative aspects, then fine, but that's a gigantic move of the goalposts.

Care to explain why?

For me, getting shot while walking on the street and getting shot when having a normal conversation in a bar looks almost same.

I genuinely want to know, what is the difference between the above comment and this particular incident. Because, this reasoning might also be the reason, why in U.S people prefer to have guns in their daily life (where living is the goal, and not how to prevent dying).

I think you've misunderstood the conversation. I am including getting shot while having a normal conversation in a bar. When I pointed out how unlikely it is to get shot as part of a hate crime, the response moved the goalposts to include "a whole spectrum of bad things that could happen" including non-fatal harassment and discrimination.

Having someone call you names or refuse you service, while bad, isn't what the original comment was talking about.

assuming normal distibution, murder is at one extreme of the bell curve of hate. it's not just about getting shot.

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