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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

I think we all agree that gun safety works best when there is no gun.

But unfortunately leaves physically weaker individuals in need of things like "knife safety", "rock safety", "stick safety", and "fist safety".

As much as I hate responding to rhetoric with rhetoric, the simple fact of the matter is that there are guns, and if we're being honest with ourselves, there always will be. The number of them might wax or wane, but the very idea of a gun will not be extinguished until and unless something more powerful, and that is also dirt simple to manufacture in a garage, replaces it.

NRA's Eddie Eagle program doesn't teach kids how to become expert marksmen behind their parents' backs. It teaches kids that guns are dangerous, and if one is found, it teaches them to treat it as dangerous, to notify their parents or another adult, etc...

Pretending that guns don't exist, or that a child will never encounter one is, in my view, more akin to practicing abstinence to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Sure, it's a means to an end, and in a vacuum, abstinence is very, very effective... but when we realize that we're not living in a vacuum, and that the world we live in has guns in it, as well as people with which you might be sexually attracted, in both cases, education is a much more effective tool than unrealistic optimism.

I grew up in the UK. I have never "encountered" a gun outside the USA.

I grew up in the US, and never encountered a gun until I was approximately 30 and specifically sought them out. That doesn't mean that they don't exist in America or in the UK. They do.

I'm in the USA. I was given a shotgun for my 8th birthday. I shot an AR-15 when I was six. Guns were not treated as some mystical, forbidden devices.

Both my kids (8 and 11) have their own rifles, and we shoot regularly. If my kids want to shoot or handle a certain gun, I let them do it under supervision with no reservations.

Then it would just be called "safety".

Do you have the data to back that up?

Yes.

[Citation Needed]

You act as if data is going to detach you from your fear-based emotional connection to your gun.

Which is why gun-free zones are the safest places. /s

A simple look at other countries would tend to say that, yes.

Were that true, we would expect Switzerland (3rd highest number of guns per capita in the world) to have a higher murder rate than the UK (82nd in guns per capita), but it does not. This lack of correlation continues with other European countries: Serbia and Sweden have a fair number of guns, but not much murder, while Ukraine and Lithuania have few guns, but some of the highest murder rates in Europe.

If you're about to point out that social, economic and political conditions are very different in Switzerland and Ukraine, you're probably on to something. Murder rates of various countries do correlate with several measures of social, economic and political stability, but not with gun ownership.

Switzerland has guns, but no bullets. So you can probably give up guns or bullets and get gun safety - not that that's a very startling conclusion.

Secondly the fact that A=>B doesn't mean that also C=>B so you should expect high B when either A or C is true.

(Read => as implies, causes or correlates with - it doesn't really matter).

That isn't true. You're probably thinking of the change to ammunition issued by the army to members of the militia (a large fraction of the population) for civil defense. It is no longer standard practice to issue ammunition to keep at home.

Buying ammunition from a gun store appears to be an option for anyone with any of several types of gun license.

It really depends on the sample - if you look over the last 100 years the picture really changes. You'll find massive government killings of their own unarmed citizens.

Yet would those massive government killings of their own citizens not have happened if those citizens had guns? There are plenty of methods a government can use to kill large swaths of its population without ever coming in contact with said population, even a 100 years ago.

The strongest military on Earth couldn't defeat a bunch of illiterate people with 40 year old guns in terrain they knew well.

Anti-firearms people love to imply that weapons of mass destruction and other exotic shit would be used to quell uprisings in an American Revolution-style event.

"You can't stop planes and tanks with a rifle, therefore the Second Amendment is useless!"

Small arms seemed to work just fine in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Personally, I think it would be more useful to ban (or make harder to get) handguns than automatic weapons. In almost all the legitimate uses of guns I can think of, rifles and shotguns work just fine. Easily concealed firearms are the problem. Make those more problematic to own and buy.

So we'll just forget about (atomic) bombs that we drop from the sky, gasses and other biological agents, cutting them off from necessary resources like water (or poisoning it) and food and so on? The strongest military in the world could probably just outlast them. Might take another 100 years though.

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