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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

The topical thesis of this article is extremely weak, considering:

1. Male underachievement and lack of identity is happening elsewhere. Certainly in Canada. 2. Mass shootings are not happening everywhere

I think there is a much simpler explantion for male mass shooters: men commit vastly more crime. America has a cultural tendency for mass shooting crime, so it shouldn't be surprising men dominate that crime like they do the rest.

Maybe fixing male identity would do it, but that's far from a given, and given international experience it doesn't seem to be the direct cause. (Men committed most crime even when they were confident in their identity)

The more likely cause is the legal structure around gun ownership in the United States.

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America doesn't actually have a greater tendency towards mass shootings. In fact, Norway has the most per capita deaths from mass shootings across the US and Europe. There US is 11th in the rankings for death rate and 12th in frequency.

https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...

Those numbers are from 2009 through 2015. That's just cherry picking, because those years just happen to include Anders Breivik. I think its well established that the US is the market leader in mass shootings.

Edit: Also, the president of Crime Prevention Research Center is John Lott, who's a known gun rights advocate. Your source does not seem to be very impartial.

Anders Breivik did not commit mass murders in 10 counties.

Edit: with regards to the US being the market leader, politifact rated a similar comment by Obama mostly false.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/...

What it rated false was the part where Obama said this type of thing doesn't happen (at all) in other countries.

And they went on to say that a lot of the other countries that ranked highly were small countries that had a single attack. Statistics don't work well in that regime.

And of course, here's what politifact themselves commented later:

"June 22, 2015: We heard from several of you regarding Obama's use of the word "frequency," and that frequency could refer to the incidents of mass shootings, not deaths as we examined. Looking at Obama's claim by incident, the United States has a higher rate of incidents than Finland, Norway and Switzerland. We agree that there is no preferred comparison and each is valid, and we've changed some language in this article to reflect that. ... "

Connecticut (the state where the Sandy Hook shooting too place) has a population of 3.6 million, compared to Norway's 5 million.

Would it be more reasonable to compare individual US states to individual European countries? If so, are we going to throw out outliers like Berveik and the Sandy Hook shooting? Because with that philosophy pretty soon there aren't any mass shootings anywhere.

Nope. First it is reasonable not to define such a thin slice of violent behavior (mass shootings of 6 or more people it related to another crime and some more criteria I can’t remember) as to have a completely meaningless stat. If you unabashedly cherry pick like that, you can ‘prove’ anything you like.

Fact is: the us has 10x the gun deaths and 4-6x the homicides compared to other modern industrialized democracies.

Regardless of your attempts at spin.

Fact is: when you try to make a reasonable apples to apples comparison between the US and European countries with regards to mass shootings the numbers supporting your original statement are at best murky and at worst bordering on pants on fire falsehood.

You may have some valid points regarding gun deaths and homicide rates, but that's not what this discussion was about.

That time range "conveniently" includes the 2011 Breivik massacre, which skews the result mightily. Mass shootings are sufficiently rare, particularly in Europe, that single events have an outsize effect on the stats.

According to most other stats, the US has more "school shootings" than most of the rest of the world combined, see for example https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...

Also, the gun homicide rate is around 10x that of other rich industrial nations. If you think that there's a substitution effect you're right: if all homicides regardless of weapon are taken into account the ratio drops to around 4-5x.

There were 27% more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in EU than US from 2009-15. That's across the entire EU. So the low population skew effect is removed at that scale.

If you'd like, we could compare European Nations to individual US states. But then if you get to discount Breveik in Norway, Connecticut gets to discount Sandy Hook.

I agree with everything you said, however

> The more likely cause is the legal structure around gun ownership in the United States.

Gun ownership may be an enabler in mass shootings, but I don't believe it's the cause. Merely having a gun doesn't automatically make you a mass murderer. There are other underlying issues there. Not that that means the U.S. shouldn't do something about the legal structure around gun ownership. It's probably going to be much much harder to actually address the underlying cause.

“We must do something even if it’s the wrong thing.”

Sorry, that’s a fallacy I can’t get behind.

Sorry, I should have said "cause of the difference"

Obviously people don't go on sprees merely because they have a weapon. But they need gun access in order to commit a mass shooting.

I do agree there might well be some additional cause. I think if you flooded Canada with guns you would see more mass shootings, but perhaps not as much. The US does have an overall higher crime rate, after all. And mass shootings do occur elsewhere, though the US is consistently high up per capita.

>The more likely cause is the legal structure around gun ownership in the United States.

And what are your qualifications on the topic? What do you actually know about the laws starting at the founding and hitting the popular milestones of 1934, 1968, 1986, 1994, 2008, and 2010?

If someone doesn’t know why those years are significant but still has strong opinions on the topic... well, it’s just that the USA has been having this “conversation” for 200 years and these people are just new to it, being unaware of the facts is a bad position to start from.

This isn't an argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority