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Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

You can have a high amount of gun ownership and low gun related crimes. But the countries hailed for high gun ownership and low gun crime like Switzerland have some hefty gun control. You can’t buy guns without going through hunting training, getting certified and then they keep registration which links your hunting rifle directly to you. You also can’t buy stuff that’s meant to kill humans and it’s illegal not to lock your weapons securely away when you aren’t hunting.

So criminals actually don’t have easy access to guns in these countries, and post terrorism our secret police forces and Europol tracks guns rather well, typically leading to arrests before anyone get to use their guns.

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> You can’t buy guns without going through hunting training, getting certified and then they keep registration which links your hunting rifle directly to you

In Switzerland, it's very easy[0] to acquire a weapons, the requirements are:

  - you must be at least 18 years old,
  - you must not be subject to a deputyship or a supervision order,
  - you must not give any cause to assume that you could harm yourself or anyone else with the weapon,
  - you must not have a criminal record for violent or dangerous offences or repeated felonies or misdemeanours.

[0] - https://www.ch.ch/en/acquiring-firearm/

> But the countries hailed for high gun ownership and low gun crime like Switzerland have some hefty gun control.

Middle of Nowheretown USA (and Canada for that matter) tends to have astronomically high gun ownership rates and astronomically low "gun crime" or any violent crime other than domestic violence and people who are known to each other engaging in fisticuffs over preexisting disputes. I don't think it's the mandatory class you need to pretend not to sleep though and bureaucratic red tape that's keeping people from shooting each other. It's the lack of a society and economy (victim supply) capable of sustaining a "large enough to show up in the statistics" number of career violent criminals that keeps violent crime and therefore gun crime low in both places.

EU has almost twice the population of USA and it has several countries with high gun ownership and no border control between these countries and the rest of the EU (Schengen Zone to be exact, but it doesn't matter here).

The crazy high crime, murder and incarceration rates in USA aren't caused by population size. They are caused by inequalities inherent in American system.

If a whole class of your society can't hope for their kids to get a white collar job, and have to fear losing their house if they ever get seriously ill - that's not a stable basis for a peaceful society.

You seem to be reading an implied meaning I wasn't intending into my comment. My point, which you seem to be agreeing with while somehow also disagreeing at the same time is that it's not the ease of access to firearms that's driving violence, it's other societal factors. Nowhere did I say anything about overall population being a driver of violence.

I really hate how I find myself having to go to greater and greater lengths to disclaim my words around here to not have them twisted or stretched to imply something.

US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs. Once you remove people who are involved in the manufacture, transportation and sale of illicit substances from the crime stats the place looks a lot like the better parts of western Europe.

Yes, wealth equality, social mobility and healthcare have a hell of a lot of room for improvement but they are not the driver of violence in the US. Forcing a multi-billion dollar industry to exist outside the law is what is driving violence.

I disagree with the part about population size being a factor, so that's what I responded to. I also admit I misread you comment a little (sorry, not a native speaker and I wass reading it on a coffee break at work).

> US murder and incarceration rates are more or less solely caused by the war on drugs

That's what you would expect if drug trade is the most profitable crime, no matter if drugs are the reason these people went into crime in the first place. If you can't afford your expected lifestyle within the system you go outside the system. Once there you choose the crime with the highest profit per risk factor.

There's plenty of countries that penalize drug ownership that have order of magnitude less crime than USA.

My state has basically no gun control. You can buy an AR-15 with no background check from a third party and not get it registered. No registration necessary for open carrying rifles or pistols. We still have one of the lowest crime rates in America. I fail to see the correlation between gun control and gun crime in America.

Poverty, education, inequality, institutional problems are much more likely to be correlated with crime, so it's not exactly that surprising. Now of course the problem is that what should the states/regions/counties/cities do that have gun violence. Eg. if I remember correctly Chicago/Illinois tried various forms of gun control, but it made an impact next to nothing because it was pretty easy to just get guns from out of city/state.

My state is one of the poorer states and worst educated states in America.

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