Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by datashow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

datashow

How is malaria comparable to guns? Is malaria in the Constitution? Does Americans have a malaria culture?

View on HN

The point is they both harm people; so it's no great surprise for a public health agency to have concerns about them.

Gun use is overwhelmingly defensive.

citation needed

(1995) Kleck & Gertz estimates of 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year: https://americangunfacts.com/pdf/Armed%20Resistance%20to%20C...

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13/602143823/how-often-do-people...

>In fact, Cook told The Washington Post that the percentage of people who told Kleck they used a gun in self-defense is similar to the percentage of Americans who said they were abducted by aliens. The Post notes that "a more reasonable estimate" of self-defense gun uses equals about 100,000 annually, according to the NCVS data.

I don't understand how people believing in alien abductions can be used to criticize gun ownership.

It's solid numerology. Like if you add up all the ASCII values for Bill Gates III, you get 666.

They're both beliefs that are unsupported by evidence:

https://psmag.com/news/keeping-a-gun-at-home-can-mean-a-high...

https://slate.com/technology/2015/01/good-guy-with-a-gun-myt...

Two numbers are similar. Obviously they must both be fictitious. Such a sound argument of the highest caliber.

Or maybe it was just money laundering for an ad hominem.

There's a better estimate right there in the second sentence.

There's an even better estimate in a response to your comment: (1997) 1.5M https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf

(1997) 1.5M https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf

If it did, im sure there would be plenty opining about the wonderful benefits of malaria, how it stops government tyranny from invading the swamps of our forefathers, and how you can always rely on it to dissuade thieves and criminals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com