Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

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> Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values.

I really hate to bring this up, but "no mass shootings" does not equal "no mass deaths". There have been plenty of attacks in Europe to great effect without guns being used -- for example, the truck attack in Nice, Paris is still unrivaled by any gun massacre in America.

We shouldn't play semantic games / statistical filtering games with phrases like "reducing gun violence" and "reducing mass shootings"; I think we all can agree that our collective goal as decent human beings is work towards reducing violence/harm/death, period. Why qualify it on only gun attacks -- other than for political reasons?

If banning guns indeed reduces mass killings overall (again, it's rather a red herring to say your only goal is to reduce mass shootings rather than mass killings in general), then by all means let's work towards that.

But the data so obviously shows this to be a false correlation: Right now Europe is if anything the poster-child of why gun control doesn't work, with all the truck and bomb attacks. Again, I hate to bring this up, but so often Europeans use this as a common insult to Americans but I see this as a rather strong case of cognitive dissonance.

The attacks in Nice and Paris are the French equivalent of 9/11. They’re acts of war and are really outliers in statistics. You can’t really use these attacks as an argument against gun control. In day to day life there are 0.21 homicides by gunfire for 100k inhabitants per year in France and 3.6 in the US (source: wikipedia). I think the real argument is there... But then again, as a Frenchman most of American politics are more and more foreign and impossible to understand to me (gun law, healthcare...)

> In day to day life there are 0.21 homicides by gunfire for 100k inhabitants per year in France and 3.6 in the US (source: wikipedia).

This is missing the point of the comment you're replying to. You're comparing homicide by gunfire, not homicide.

It is true that Europe has a lower homicide rate in general, but there are exceptions. Lithuania is a European country with restrictive gun laws and a substantially higher rate of intentional homicide than the U.S. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...)

Lithuania has also halved their homicide rate over the past ten years.

https://knoema.com/atlas/Lithuania/Homicide-rate

> Lithuania has also halved their homicide rate over the past ten years.

The homicide rate in the US has also fallen considerably over the last 15 years.

https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/Homicide-r...

How do guns stop a lorry mounting the pavement? They don't.

Even if they did, why would we trade these very infrequent attacks for daily misery? How many school massacres is it going to take before you realise that safety and freedom are two ends of the same balance.

Weak straw-man assimilation fallacy. Chicago has plenty of restrictions on guns but still has an extremely high violence rate, guns and otherwise.

It's much harder to be an accidental fatality in a gang knife fight. Things are safer when there aren't 8g chunks of supersonic lead flying around.

There's still as much gun crime in the US as there is —even where there are regulations— because there are still guns. In direct circulation or coming in from other states. Criminals tend to not care too much about restrictions. If they want a gun and can steal a gun, they can have a gun.

Gun control works elsewhere because we do it nationally and then get rid of all* the guns. It takes decades and insanely strong punishments. We still have criminals, we still have knives and acid and lorries and explosive precursors. All nasty stuff, but a power of magnitude when it comes to general safety of the rest of us.

* Most guns anyway. I have a shotgun but you can have rifles and there are a very, very few handgun exceptions for the right people. With all of these, there are restrictions on things like barrel length and magazine size on all guns and even more restrictions on types of ammo, and how much you can own. Not to mention the interview and home office check you get before you're allowed anything.

>Most guns anyway. I have a shotgun but you can have rifles

I would argue that rifles are more a tool for hunting than a shotgun. Germany wanted to ban shotguns (trench guns) the allies used in WWI because of their devastating effects.

Shotguns are also a good tool for hunting birds and whatnot. There are many places in the US where people hunt for cheap food.

Pistols aren't ideal for any kind of hunting though. They're almost exclusively for self defense (and the majority of guns used in homicides).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

Worth considering: if you own a truck you have to register it and get insurance in case you cause any damage. Even ignoring the effect on killings, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask the same of gun owners.

No, you don't, at least in many ag-based US states. You can own and operate a truck without a license or insurance on private property. Which means nothing would stop someone doing that, and then driving it on the roads and running people over other than a cop being lucky enough to pull them over first.

Car safety's definitely an issue too. For many years governments have basically blocked research into making cars safer for pedestrians. I'm hoping that's going to change, since it appears that terrorists are finally waking up to the possibilities. On the other hand, we recently had a really ugly terrorist incident at London Bridge, which is somewhere I go most days. The good news is the terrorists only had knives. People died, including police officers, but the death toll would have been much worse if they'd even had small caliber handguns.

Meanwhile, in other news, a gunman walked into a nursery in Liverpool today. Luckily no-one was hurt: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/27/police-hunt-...

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