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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

And yet the countries that make obtaining guns more difficult are still much safer. It’s almost like if you rigorously regulate guns and have strict background checks, you can dramatically reduce gun violence... see Japan or Switzerland as proof where you can still own a gun but they don’t have mass shootings like we do here. And no, mental illness isn’t the issue. We have roughly the same amount of mentally ill as other countries, it’s the easy access to funds that explains the 10x increase in gun violence.

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That doesn’t prove anything because those countries were also much safer than the US before they had gun control. https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/doc... (page 2).

Until 1978, you could buy handguns and automatic weapons in Canada without a license. You could buy rifles without a license until the 1990s. But the gap in US-Canadian homicide rates was the lowest in 1960. And the gap was largest during the first 40 years of the 20th century, before Canada required licensing and background checks.

Australia shows the same pattern. It introduced major gun control in the 1990s. But the gap in US-Australian homicide rates actually shrank after that time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Gu...

Australia didn’t have a single mass shooting after they imposed strict gun control in the 90s. You’re just ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of you. Gun control works—period.

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong you think another commenter is.

We've had to ask you this more than once before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm pretty sure my point was also based on the data. And I submit that homicide rate, which is a well-defined metric that accounts for population differences and has been tracked consistently across the world and has been for a long time, is a much better data set than "mass shootings," which is an ill-defined metric that's subject to various confounding factors. (E.g. it fails to account for substitution of gun homicides with other kinds of homicides.)

Gun control may reduce homicide rates somewhat, but the typical justifications for it are just bad statistics. Pointing out that Canada and Australia have gun control and much lower homicide rates, for example, ignores the fact that those countries had much lower homicide rates than the U.S. before gun control as well. Any analysis that ignores that basic fact is complete garbage.

Likewise, there is a correlation between gun ownership rate and homicide rate internationally, but that's driven in large part by the U.S. having so many homicides and so many guns. Gun ownership rates vary dramatically inside the U.S. too, but leaving out a couple of outliers (Louisiana and Mississippi), there isn't much of a correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates within the US: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Househol.... Five U.S. states have lower gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but all have higher homicide rates. Meanwhile, 9 U.S. states have much higher gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but similar homicide rates. If gun ownership rate was a dominant causal factor influencing homicide rates, you'd expect to see much higher correlations among U.S. states.

And even then, correlation is not causation. Higher violence may cause higher gun ownership rates. Or there may be other factors. What distinguishes Iowa from Louisiana, which have similar gun ownership rates but vastly different homicide rates? Or South Dakota and Mississippi, or Oregon or South Carolina, all pairs of states with similar gun ownership rates, but vastly different homicide rates?

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