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Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

> a few hundred die per year in mass shootings

More than 30 thousand per year die due to guns. American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.

Two-thirds of those are suicides and most of the rest are inner city gang violence based in the war on drugs.

Homicide statistics are rather incomplete, but they don't really paint a picture where "most" are obviously explained by "inner city gang violence":

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

so still 10000 to 15000 (depends on who's stat i'm going by here). That's a small city wiped off the map every single year.

80% of the remainder are gang related: http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm

The CDC document they link doesn't seem to make any statements about gang vs non gang homicides. I've read/searched for a couple minutes (the word "gang" doesn't appear in the pdf).

Americans are more likely to die in car accidents than be shot. Don't confuse the lurid with the empirical.

I'm English but have lived in California for half my life.

London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43610936 I've never owned a gun but I respect the second amendment which seems to have been cleverly crafted primarily to give the citizens options to overthrow a future oppressive government.

I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...

Only if you include stabbings:

>The Met Police has launched 44 murder investigations in 2018, 31 of which have been as a result of stabbings.

If you look at gun homicide rate, then the U.S. has 30 times the homicide rate of the U.K.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604

Do you still say a 30x gun homicide rate a "sinister" reason to 'ban guns'?

Why wouldn't you include stabbings? Are you suggesting that murder is better if it's done by knife than by gun?

Of course you're going to get lower gun homicide rates by banning them. You'd get lower knife homicide rates by banning knifes (I think it's time to consider an assault-knife ban), but aren't you "fixing" the wrong problem? Shouldn't we be trying to stop murder?

Because when accusing gun control of being sinister in the U.S., using stabbing statistics creates a false equivalence with the U.K.

Nobody is promoting murder here so why would you even ask that?

So what is to be gained then by pointing out that gun crime is much higher in a nation where they are legal than in one where they are not? Unless you view gun ownership in and of itself as a bad thing, then it's a useless statistic. You're not reducing crime/murder by banning guns, you're just changing the weapon. That hardly seems like justification for violating somebody's rights (in the US, it is a Constitutionally guaranteed right).

If you're claiming guns are substituted 1:1 by other weapons when not available: you're wrong.

Guns make killing far easier than weapons like knives.

That it's not "sinister" (as you said) to want gun control when the gun homicide rate is 30x that of the U.K. Why are you trying to equate knives with guns all of a sudden?

I didn't use the word sinister, only you did previously that I can see.

I'm not equating guns and knives at all. My entire point is about what we are measuring, and what we are trying to prevent.

>I didn't use the word sinister, only you did previously that I can see.

>I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...

That's not a quote of mine. I think you're confusing me with someone else.

Edit: yes, you appear to be quoting olivermarks

London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective.

Does it, though? The homicide rate in NYC has dropped hugely in the last couple of decades (an order of magnitude!); it's still much higher than London's when you look beyond a timeframe of two or three months. Meanwhile other large cities in the US, including LA, fare much worse than either London or NYC.

The issue that I see here: Yes, I believe that the second amendment was primarily intended to help overthrow an out-of-control government. It was authored in a time where memories of the Revolution were fresh. Muskets, bayonets, and cannon were the weapons they had in mind, and a lot of the country was close to frontier wilderness.

Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.

> Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.

I used to think that too, but I think the assumptions made then still do apply. We have a heavily militarized police and an increasingly oppressive surveillance state. It's a grim thought but surrendering the ability to rise up en masse has happened before and not ended well...

I guess I wasn't clear about the assumptions that I'm talking about. The power balance between citizens and government has shifted drastically in favor of the government, and there isn't any citizen-controlled, organized force. The police are militarized, and I'd expect them to be on the side of enforcing the status quo.

My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government, giving its overwhelming advantage in resources.

> My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government

Nor was that the intent. Gun rights were viewed as a necessarya sufficient condition for that; the sufficient condition was the dependency of the government on the citizen militia to enforce its will; the Constitution presupposed (but did not mandate, which led to this presupposition becoming invalid) the absence of large permanent standing armies and permanent professional paramilitary police forces at the federal and state level, and they both federal and state government would be dependent on mobilizing the armed citizenry to deal with internal threats to order and external security threats.

The guaranty of liberty wasn't “the people have smallarms to fight the government's armies of professional troops with the weapons of large scale warfare”, it was “the government may have stockpiles of weapons of large scale warfare, but absent mobilizing the armed citizenry can't actually effectively employ them and has very few troops to do anything”. The envisioned asymmetry in effective power was the reverse of what it is now, with or without gun rights.

What other option is there in that checkmate situation though?

The US constitution was framed expressly to overthrow the colonial rulers and keep them out...

The Swiss are all armed for the same reason

'the long-standing practice of a militia organization of the Swiss Army in which soldiers' service rifles are stored privately at home' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Switzerland

> The US constitution was framed expressly to overthrow the colonial rulers and keep them out...

No, it wasn't, throwing out the colonial rulers was done under the Articles of Confederation.

The US Constitution was framed several years after that effort was completed, to deal with the problem that that the government under the AoC was too weak to get anything done outside of the imminent life-or-death struggle of the Revolution.

...the federal government, yeah. The mistake was extending it to the states instead of letting their own constitutions say what should happen in their jurisdiction.

Actually:

   Assault by gun:                      1 in 370
   Riding inside a car, van or truck:   1 in 536

http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2...

"Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"

>Riding inside a car, van or truck:

My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths:

"Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114"

So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more?

Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2]

Center for Disease Control has more comprehensive figures: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

[1] (113/114)^400

[2] (535/536)^400

You just conflated "any motor vehicle", which obviously includes such fairly dangerous vehicles as motorcycles, with "car".

And the comment I replied to specifically talked about car accidents.

I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive...

you left out: "Motor Vehicle Crash 1 in 102"

http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...

Motor vehicle ≠ car.

and passenger doesn't equal all car accidents.

You keep posting this source, but I am extremely skeptical, considering that since 2010, gun related homicides in the US has consistently ranged between 8000 and 13000 per year, where the number of people to die in automobile accidents in the US typically hovers between 30,000 to 40,000. Also, given that Business Insider is essentially a blog site at this point, I don't see how they arrived at those numbers.

Sources:

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

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

They're posting death rates of being a passenger not dying because of exposure to cars (passenger, driver, pedestrian etc). They should retract their position or they're being deceptive.

Our government has regulations and conducts research to minimize car accident fatalities. As a result, cars today are much safer than 10 or 20 years ago. There's no reason we can't do something similar with guns.

Americans drive awful lot. Americans are more likely to be shot then citizens of pretty much any other western country and also of quite a few non-western countries.

You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner who isn't involved in a criminal enterprise has next to no chance of dying by gunshot.

>American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.

This is absolutely untrue and a completely asinine thing to say, revealing your own unexamined biases.

> You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner

A non car-owner who never leaves the house is unlikely to die in a traffic accident.

Half those deaths are suicides.

That still doesn't make the gun violence problem in the USA any better.

It makes it exactly twice as better than the original statistic.

Except the fact that gun homicides are still above and beyond every other first world country by far.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...

But still at a level most people can live with.

Except the people who died, that is.

It makes the risk of being shot by someone else a lot less than it appears to be when you use raw gun death statistics.

Non-suicidal people don't believe they'd kill themselves. But they still do later in life. Any of us might become mentally ill and do it one-day, making that statistic pretty relevant.

That’s a personal problem though, not a problem for society at large.

How do you make that distinction? Serious question.

2/3

The others have already gotten to the suicide point but if you'd like to know more you can read this article, which actually breaks down the numbers behind that 30,000.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-ba...

Thanks.

186 Asians (19,437,463 estimated total) die to gun violence a year according to this chart. And the majority in the US, whites (232,943,055 estimated total), 3,049 die a year due to gun violence.

In a country of 327,421,076 (estimated).

I used those two demographics because of their representation in tech (and thus this site).

Use those numbers to draw your own conclusions while living outside of the US.

Maybe if you’re a 19 year old black male in Chicago, but not a 35 year old Asian software developer in Palo alto

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