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Comment by messel | Hacker News Reader

Why stop at new laws? Existing laws should be relentlessly reviewed for relevance.

One issue I see with random sample law experimentation is blindness to effects which only crop up when everyone is subject to a law. Take for example gun control. If a small sample of folks aren't allowed to have guns there may be little negative fall out. But taken to the extreme if gun ownership is illegal than by definition only law breakers would have guns making the random burglary or home invasion far less dangerous for criminals and far more dangerous for law abiding citizens.

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This is the reason why jury nullification exists. It's just a shame that most citizens have no idea that it either exists, or is a valid choice when serving on a jury.

A problem with jury nullification is that the interactions between laws is complex and can easily have unintended consequences. I am overall in favor of jury nullification, but it requires an educated jury. The complexity of our system of laws makes that very difficult.

An interesting issue. One way around it would be to enact the law in two states that have a similar environments. Continuing the example with gun control if there were two states with similar situations, both of them have an abnormally high gun crime rate, one of them could serve as a control state. If say 10 pairs of states were compared it would serve as a reasonable experiment on whether the law should be passed nation wide or not. Even better if evidence comes up that passing the law would only be beneficial in certain circumstances then it would help reveal the underlying causes of the problem in the first place.

Sharp response G_wen. Appreciate the way you overcame the random sample issue with distributed geo-sampling.

Gun control is a case where there's probably enough data to do interesting analysis if someone were to collect it and study it without trying to make it show a specific result. Noteworthy data points would be the first derivatives of gun crime, non-gun violent crime and burglary rates before and after specific gun control measures were passed or repealed.

There is a fair amount of evidence that gun owners are less safe than non gun owners, and societies with higher levels of gun ownership tend to be less safe overall. But, changing gun laws don't alter the prevalence of gun ownership vary quickly so it's hard to such analysis with idential populations.

There's also the fact that correlation does not imply causation. The possibility of a common cause is fairly obvious here: people who are at higher risk of being the targets of crime may be more likely to buy guns for protection, and people who are armed may be more likely to become involved if they see someone else being attacked.

Yep, while hiding and calling the cops is generally safer during a robbery, the attitude that causes people to defend their property is the same one that results in gun ownership. Add in people being shot with their own weapons and the home protection benefit becomes very complex. There is an idea that gun ownership deters criminals but at the same time it promotes criminals buying guns escalating the situation.

PS: For a somewhat less contentious example, video games have been linked with a significant drop in crime. However, because that does not agree with their biases people focus on the direct effects to support their argument.

I think you'll find there tends to be a correlation between using [protection against bad thing] and being at risk for [bad thing]. As an example, I'm fairly certain you'll find a correlation between wearing a helmet while driving a car and being injured in car crashes because most people who wear helmets while driving are racing or doing stunts. I also suspect people with burglar alarms lose more money to burglary than people without if no other variables are taken in to account.

I don't think an unbiased study has been done that accurately identifies causes looking at gun ownership and crime. My suspicion is that it would be possible to do, as I described above.

Add in people being shot with their own weapons...

This is a pretty minor effect, unless you are including suicides. In 2007, there were only 613 accidental firearm deaths. For comparison, there were 1039 "transport, other" deaths (I believe this means plane/boat crashes).

All of these numbers are fairly low. Adusting for the percentage of gun owners and you end up with a higher rate than just 5% of all deaths from firearms being accidental. And when you start looking at low risk populations (for violent crime), accidental death from gun ownership is fairly significant relative risk.

All homicides Number of deaths: 18,361

Firearm homicides Number of deaths: 12,632

vs: Motor vehicle deaths 33,808

Death rate extrapolations for USA for Smoking: 440,000 per year (probably exagurated) http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/s/smoking/deaths.htm

At least one study purports to do exactly this.

http://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/...

(I haven't read it myself, so I'm not endorsing it. It's not exactly uncontroversial.)

In particular, its author got caught promoting his work with sockpuppets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott and (for a rather less staid take on the affair) http://www.whoismaryrosh.com/ .

Yeah, it looks like the author is a dickwad with a big ego. I don't plan to invite him to any parties.

However, the scientific criticisms of his methodology hardly look damning (according to wikipedia). It doesn't look perfect, but it doesn't look terrible either.

The criticisms wikipedia lists: he used cocaine prices rather than cocaine consumption as a variable, if you remove smaller counties +florida the drop in murders becomes statistically insignificant (drops in assault and robbery are still significant), and a couple of critics believe the model has bias and coding errors. As I said, I haven't read it in detail, so I won't comment on how significant these are.

I'm not sure it's clear that carrying a gun makes crime safer for the average criminal, though I think it is clear that armed homeowners make crime more dangerous for criminals. My impression is that when guns are hard to get, crime goes up, but the number of criminals carrying goes down.

Texas operates along a similar proposition. It is called the Sunset Advisory Commission and applies to policies, regulations and agencies.

http://www.sunset.state.tx.us/

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