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Comment by susijdjdjxa | Hacker News Reader

I’m a little confused on your overall point here - are you saying that it’s only good to reduce gun homicides, not suicides?

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It seems like the point is that different policies would affect suicides versus homicides, so grouping them into one category is not as useful as if they were separate.

It's just a weirdly nitpicky place to decide to start the conversation, just to state something that's already going to be obvious to anyone researching the subject, something that sure as heck seems to be coming from a place of not wanting the research to be done at all.

A better way of stating the point without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and thereby losing sight of the underlying need for further research, would be to say something like the following:

"This is great news. I hope the studies account for x,y, and z, and I look forward to their publication. I also look forward to supporting the legislation this research may make possible and to the safety benefits that stand to be gained. Anyone have any links for ways I can effectively pressure my local legislator and ask them to support even more funding in the future?" That way it's not ambiguous whether the research is supported. If, on the other hand, people just don't want more research, we would all benefit from having that clearly stated at the outset as well.

I think the poster is saying they don't like that some people conflate gun deaths with gun murders and use that as a justification for gun control.

The OP’s argument is basically completely irrelevant to the actual point. If we banned any research that could be misinterpreted or abused because they are on political issues, we’d might as well ban all research...at the very least, research on climate change, vaccinations, health effects of pollution, research on deaths due to obesity, causes of obesity should be banned immediately. But if we go back a few centuries it gets a lot worse, because almost all science today, especially that which went against what the church believed, should have been banned by this logic.

That being said, the OP’s specific point is also really bad. If gun control leads to reduced deaths, but the reduced deaths are entirely due to reduced suicides (they’re not...but hypothetically), that would still be an argument in favor of gun control, not against.

It may not be a good solution to reducing the mass murder of toddlers, but hey, we won’t know that until we actually do the research on it. Which is the whole point.

Both can be independently valid justifications for gun control without involving any conflation of one for the other.

(I know that you're just elaborating on what the poster is saying rather than expressing your own views, so treat this as a reply to their comment rather than yours.)

> Suicides accounting for the large majority of “gun deaths,” but bans on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines will have little effect on suicides. Likely red flag laws as well.

At the risk of sounding grim, if you're looking to commit suicide, a 12-gauge shotgun (very common for bird hunting) is probably your best bet. Nobody's looking to ban those.

Even then there is 15% chance of failure. Best option is a really tall building in the middle of a city far away from a body of water. That way there is less chance of your corpse being eaten by crawfish and crabs and birds.

It’s actually likely an inverse relationship to this. Suicides are more likely to be successful where guns are prevalent compared to where they are hard to get. Meanwhile homicides are rare so no matter what tool you have access to you can get it done.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/

The US and UK suicide rates are extremely comparable, and the UK has far fewer firearms. Let's not even touch on Japan.

No they aren’t. Most recent data suggests that the US has twice the suicide rate of the U.K.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...

Japan & Korea are interesting _because_ they are outliers.

The US suicide rate per the CDC is 14/100k (2017). The UK suicide rate is 11/100k per the office of National statistics (2018).

I'm not sure why the Wikipedia page dramatically disagrees with the UK's own stats.

The Wikipedia page uses WHO data, which is age-standardised. It's unclear if this explains the entire difference.

The WHO explanation is here: https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr... and their data is here: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDEASDR?lang=en

According your source in 2016 the US suicide rate was 13.7 per 100,000 people. The UK was 7.6, so about half.

But, France was 12.1 and Ireland 10.9, not much less than the US. I don't think we can conclude from this data that access to firearms accounts for all or even most of the difference.

To be clear, I agree with that assessment. My point is that banning standard capacity magazines and semiautomatic rifles will have little effect on suicide rates, since they aren't a very good choice for committing suicide in the first place.

There are two ways to reduce suicide - reduce the reasons to commit suicide, and increase the difficulty of committing suicide. As someone who views suicide as a bad choice - possibly the worst choice someone can make - I think the overall goal reducing suicide is good. But I don't think increasing the difficulty of suicide is the way to go about it.

Imagine a prison, where every prisoner is held within solitary confinement - no contact with others at all. A lot of prisoners commit suicide each year, and the warden needs to reduce this. Is putting every prisoner on suicide watch - removing shoelaces, toilet paper, strong sheets, anything that a prisoner could use to kill themselves - a moral option? After all, it would reduce suicide - sure, the desire for suicide might go up, but no one would be able to act on it, so suicides would go down! But to me... That's just prolonging torture, and that's NOT ok.

We've all got life sentences in this prison, and there's no hope of parole. I personally find life here on Earth to be great! But I can't support preventing people in worse situations from finding a way out. And when you reduce suicide by taking away a way out, instead of providing a better way...

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