Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdkee | Hacker News Reader

You are one and a half times as likely to be killed by someone’s bare hands or feet in the U.S. versus a rifle per the FBI.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

View on HN

He actually links to the 2018 version of the same data (which shows the death toll from hands and feet to be about 2.25x that of rifles), but conveniently ignores that fact.

Well, schools don't have "foot violence" drills, either.

He claims that he heard "somebody" make the meteor claim. Perhaps he did. I've heard a lot of people make a lot of bogus claims over the years.

I suppose writing lengthy blog posts to refute anonymous "somebodies" might be his hobby.

An alternative explanation might be that he went looking for an easily-refuted straw man to advance his political agenda.

Given the implication of his opening line that "gun advocates do not understand statistics and mathematics," this is an excellent example of a straw man.

I'm pretty sure that generalizing from a single anonymous "somebody" to "gun advocates" as a whole does not "demonstrate understanding of statistics and mathematics".

Parent's comment makes more sense if one assumes they are referring to the article.

Ah, so it does.

> Well, schools don't have "foot violence" drills, either.

No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death either. Why? Because you couldn't even if you wanted to. That's a completely illogical line of reasoning.

  No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death, either

"No one ever" is a broad claim. But certainly, killing 8 school kids with a knife or 7 with a cleaver is easy enough -- two examples in two months here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–...

> No one has ever walked into a school and punched or kicked multiple people to death

It's not a broad claim and not even relavent to your point. But while we're on the subject, we don't have a "mass knifing" or "mass cleaving" problem in America either.

You're also four and a half times more likely to be killed by "Firearms, type not stated" than someone's bare hands or feet, surely some fraction of those are rifles.

Also, a large portion of the gun violence attached to pistols (other than convenience) are suicides. They all get rolled into the same umbrella of "gun violence" and it's difficult to parce out the self inflicted violence from the violence inflicted upon others.

Suicide isn't violence and its ableist to claim otherwise, that statistic mangling needs to stop.

If you dig in, only 2700 homicides a year (including lawful shootings by LEOs) are comitted with firearms, and its dropping due to means other than gun control.

Isn't suicide inherently violent due to the intent to cause permanent harm to oneself?

>its ableist to claim otherwise I don't understand what you mean by this, can you explain?

Its ableist to say that someone's choice to exercise free will is somehow coerced or violent because they suffer from depression and/or pain.

I certainly don't like suicide but I don't get to make that choice for other people.

There should be a newline between "otherwise" and "I", but I don't have enough points to edit.

Police killed 992 people with guns in 2018 - ~37%

Interesting. A bit over 20,000 people complete suicide by firearm in the U.S. per year (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm). Where did FBI find over 50,000 annual bare-hands-or-feet deaths?

"Killed by someone" isn't "killed by yourself", so suicide isn't part of that. Also GP poster is referring to being murdered by someone using a RIFLE, not just someone using a firearm in general.

What qualifies as a rifle?

Firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, with a rifled barrel minimum of 16" long, and an overall length minimum of 26".

Rifles are defined more by what they AREN'T than what they ARE. "Shoulderable", "rifled barrel", 16", and 26" are the points where the federal government classifies a firearm as something different, such as a shotgun or a handgun.

When its classified by the ATF as a rifle.

I'm 1000% serious, their rules are byzantine (and stupid).

Yup. This image should make it as clear as mud.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0020/5370/1690/files/ar-pi...

IMHO this one is better :)

http://emptormaven.com/img/NFA_Pistol_AOW_SBR.jpg

Haha, that's pretty good!

https://franklinarmory.com/title-1/

This is pretty good too. Its not a rifle, its not a pistol, its "Any Other Weapon" apparently.

This is literally how arbitrary our regulations are. Criminals don't care about regulations, its proven over and over.

The term “rifle” means a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed or redesigned and made or remade to use the energy of an explosive to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2012-title18/html...

A rifled bore, for those not familiar with firearms is grooved to impart spin stabilization to the projectile. Pistols also have rifled bores, but are intended to be held in the hand when fired.

That's a surprisingly nuanced question actually. But most of the nuance comes from edge cases that aren't very common.

According to the ATF: >The term “Rifle” means a weapon designed or redesigned, made or remade, and intended to be fired from the shoulder and designed or redesigned and made or remade to use the energy of the explosive in a fixed metallic cartridge to fire only a single projectile through a rifled bore for each single pull of the trigger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com