Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

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As another resident of Amsterdam. I don't think your impression of the situation really matches up with statistics. Look at these two articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

Here you can see the gun death rate in The Netherlands per 100k inhabitants is 0.58, but there's some areas in the US where the rate is quite comparable.

What really sets things apart is the suicide rate, most deaths by guns in the US are by suicide, but there's counties in the US where there's easy access to guns and the overall death rate is lower than the Dutch gun violence + non-gun suicides.

So in a lot of cases it's not that just having guns makes everything hyper-violent. It's just that if people feel like killing themselves they'll use the best available instrument available to them.

Conflating that with general gun safety as it pertains to you feeling safe walking around Amsterdam, but not in a comparable town in the US, is silly.

I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.

You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.

If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them.

E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1.

Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes.

But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate.

This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife.

Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders.

What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there.

Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3].

However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes.

1. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

3. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319

Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think.

The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?

The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.

I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.

The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.

This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude.

What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead.

The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation.

That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun.

So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3].

Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Again you single out Lithuania, completely ignoring that most European countries have a homicide rate that is 2–4x lower than that in the US. Let's just check a few: France 1.2, Germany 0.9, UK 0.9, Italy 0.8, Spain 0.7, Poland 0.7, Austria 0.5, Switzerland 0.5, Netherlands 0.7, Belgium 1.8, United States 3.9.

How do you look at this data and conclude "yup, the EU is just as bad as the US"? Instead you focus on the Baltic states and the Balkans, which is not what people commonly have in mind when you refer to Europe.

And no, we're still not talking about suicides. They are completely orthogonal to homicides. Stop injecting them into the discussion.

I'm not concluding that "the EU is just as bad as the US", and really, I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion after reading my comments.

Yes, on average pretty much any part of the EU is better when it comes to homicide statistics. All I've been pointing out that from looking at the homicide & gun death statistics in the US you can't conclude that guns are important variable driving those statistics.

    > we're [..] not talking about suicides [...]
    > Stop injecting them into the discussion.

You're the one who started injecting suicides into the discussion. In your earlier comment[1] you said, in response to a graph[2] I posted that included non-suicide numbers, which is the part I was citing, that the "lowest groups are 2-7". Those numbers include gun suicides, whereas I wasn't talking about that at all but the other data on the page which shows gun homicide statistics similar to the Dutch 0.58.

But since you muddied the water by bringing up these unrelated suicide numbers, I started to itemize the suicide & the non-suicide you were conflating them with, and now a few comments later you're complaining about my discussing something you brought up in the first place.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14034308

2. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

Man, I have to ask if you even read past the first sentence of my comment... Yes, I'm sure that the homicide rate of Rotterdam may be higher than some podunk midwestern town. What I said though, is that I feel safer living in Amsterdam over some of the US cities where I have also lived. Your statistics show that ALL of these cities(DC, Philly, NYC, SF, and LA) are objectively more dangerous to live in than Amsterdam. I'm sure you are trying to dispel something you see as a common myth, but maybe you should try having a conversation instead of giving a sermon.

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