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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I know this sounds weird, but it's almost as if there were some kind of correlation between a populace having a shitload of guns, and more gun deaths.

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The top 3 safest states are all constitutional carry states.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...

From what I can tell, looking at Wikipedia:

Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...)

States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)

Except if you use the metric of murder or violent crime instead of gun deaths you find that there its much more complicated

Vermont = lots of guns and safe

Louisiana = lots of guns and unsafe

Hawaii = not so many guns and safe

Illinois = not so many guns and unsafe...

And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.

While an interesting metric, a sample size of 3 (states) seems insanely low to draw cause between guns carry == safety. There has to be more meaningful ways to glean that data, no?

May as well tie it into most popular music if we're using sample sizes that small.

https://i.imgur.com/aO6oWe7.png

I wasn't making the argument that more people carrying == safety. I was countering the argument that more people carrying inherently means less safety.

But the argument you responded to was that more guns were related to more gun deaths. You might as well have countered any tangential "argument".

Fair enough, apologies for my confusion :)

This just isn't true. Canada and Switzerland, as examples, also have a high number of firearms and not nearly as many firearm-related deaths (at least from 2014 data I could find; I doubt it's changed).

A long-gun stored in a locked cabinet in the attic with a trigger guard and ammo in a separate locked compartment is very different than carrying a loaded pistol on your hip in public. In Canada it is essentially impossible for normal citizens to carry a gun in public, let alone a loaded handgun. IIRC you need a separate license to transport your weapon (in a locked case, unloaded, and carried securely in your trunk). The idea of adult citizens carrying loaded pistols around in public is completely foreign in Canada.

What you describe is more what things were like in Italy - you can have a gun there, but you have to prove you are responsible, and it is a privilege, not a right. It seemed to work out ok in that people could still own them for self defense or hunting if they put in the effort to do so.

Oh of course, I agree with you. My point is purely statistical i.e. those are the numbers open for interpretation. The gun cultures in Canada and Switzerland are completely different to the US, but it's disingenuous to simply say more guns == more deaths.

Right, I see your point. Absolute gun ownership isn't the number we should be discussing-- it's the number of guns that can be easily carried and used in public. In Switzerland guns are everywhere, but the ammo is stored in sealed containers to prevent frivolous and unaccountable use of the guns. In Canada you can't ever carry your gun around on the street and handguns are almost completely illegal for all intents and purposes. In most of America you can carry a semiautomatic pistol in public with no consequences. Firearm incidents occur when you increase the availability for people to get and posses guns in public-- whether they buy them at Walmart or steal them from unlocked cop cars. That's indisputable.

Except that data is there to prove the point - more guns correlates with more deaths. Regardless how you compare - different states inside US or different countries.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...

What a load of rubbish.

1. The compare gun deaths. This includes suicides and excludes all other murders. So it is a totally biased metric.

They even admit most gun deaths are suicides.

2. Ignore by far the most salient variables for predicting murders.

This is typical "advocacy research". They don't care about science; they only care about getting funded. The general public knows this, so for the most part their research is completely ignored.

Don't even get me started on the "suicide is always terrible" bullshit. Many suicides are rational responses to untenable situations. I'm glad that my grandfather had a gun, when AEC and his physicians had both failed him completely.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...

Looks like your numbers are badly off (those countries have less than half the guns the US does per capita, so not all that high), and in Switzerland there are a ton of restrictions on the guns (and on the ammunition!) compared to the US, to boot.

I believe that the post above is a reference to household ownership rather than per capita, there are a number of countries where the household ownership percentage is similar, but the number per household is much lower, that is true of many things, cars, TVs, guns, etc.

I'm talking about gun deaths in total, not mass shootings as in your link. Yes, the number of guns is far below the US (every country on Earth is) but looking at the number in isolation is disingenuous.

As to legal restrictions in Switzerland, that is absolutely true but orthogonal to the point I've made. The issue lies in the number of guns per person (and I'd personally argue the culture surrounding guns which spurs it), not the legal framework. South Africa has tighter gun laws than the US but still suffers from greater gun deaths (again, in total not mass shootings).

"Gun deaths" always seems like a silly metric to me. Who cares if you're killed with a gun instead of a knife or baseball bat or whatever else? Why not just compare murder rates?

I think people care because when was the last time someone stabbed 546 people, killing 58 of them?

Guns are an efficient tool for killing people, much more so than knives or baseball bats.

This is, incidentally, the same reason other things that are efficient for killing people and not constitutionally proteced, like dynamite, are not something you can walk in and buy in Walmart.

While attacks like that are absolutely a massive and terrible problem, I think that problem is orthogonal to my original question. Those victims are also tallied under general violent crime and murder statistics. When trying to determine whether legal gun ownership is a net positive or negative to society by comparing stats across states, it makes more sense to compare general rates. Presumably gun deaths will be lower in states where it's very hard to legally get access to a gun. But does that matter if far more people are being murdered overall in those states even with mass shootings occurring in gun-friendly places like FL & NV? Chicago sees more people shot and more people murdered each month than any single mass shooting.

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

It's a bit 'noisy' because there are a lot of 3rd world places that are simply quite violent. The US has a lot more than, say, a lot of Europe.

Also, don't discount suicide: guns make that easier too. Some will find a way without, but some would be prevented if it's 'too much effort'.

Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?

I'm not sure I follow you.

> Are you arguing that the police are more likely to kill people at random in areas with higher amounts of gun ownership?

Cops have to make split second decisions with their own lives on the line. In a country where it's very likely that the person they're interacting with in a tense situation could be armed with a gun, it's going to make them more likely to shoot.

Perhaps not quite so relevant to this particular case, as the caller said the person was armed, but I think this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

> this would have played out differently in a lot of other countries.

This is precisely why the USA needs to reform its approach to police use of deadly force.

Sure, I think there's progress to be made, but the police - not wrongly - are more worried about getting shot at than in most other countries.

There are other countries with similarly high rates of gun ownership and divergently lower rates of police firearm deaths.

The problem is in the police culture towards discharging a firearm, not the greater ownership of guns. American society bears much of the blame for lionizing cops instead of scrutinizing them.

Many cases of police officers killing innocent civilians involved civilians who were either fleeing, submitting, or already subdued and pinned down. Cops in the US tend to be exonerated for using deadly force, even when the victim could not arguably have endangered others.

> Police everywhere have a shitload of guns.

Wrong, police in e.g. UK or Japan do not customarily carry guns. And SHOCKER these countries have fewer police-related homicides.

Most UK police do not carry guns, yet those police forces still have firearms officers, and in a case like this where they would be responding to a suspected armed murderer and hostage taker, you can bet that firearms officers would be involved. Those police forces have substantial armories, they just don't issue a firearm to the majority of cops. Comparing UK firearms officers to US cops, I would contend that armed officers in the UK are less likely to kill because of the cultural and structural unacceptance of such killings in their country.

I would expect poorly trained police to end up faster on the trigger in environments where anybody else may have a gun.

Actually it does sound weird to me, because in the vast majority of cases this is simply not true for the US.

The liberal obsession with guns exists to avoid having to think about other factors involved in the US's high rates of crime and murder.

Do a graph of legal gun ownership versus murder rate (comparing US states, or countries). No relationship, in fact slightly negative.

Do a graph of other demographic factors against murder rates. Bingo!

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