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Comment by skinkestek | Hacker News Reader

About the gun part: I grew up in a gun owning family. On the other hand my dad wouldn't even let is have toy guns or water guns as he was afraid of us picking up the habit of pointing guns at fellow humans.

Much of my childhood I also shared house with an actual (full auto, large caliber) assault rifle, but my dad was always very careful to point out that war was not cool.

In fact, from my childhood, the gun owning part of the family were simultaneously the mild mannered, book reading part of the family.

My Swiss friend in town told me as far as he knew Switzerland still people keep fully functional assault rifles at home but those who have them need to show up for three weeks of training each year and show up at a shooting range twice a year. (He left a few years ago so anyone actually living there now should feel free to correct this.)

My conclusion has always been that the gun violence problems in US is largely a culture problem.

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"My conclusion has always been that the gun violence problems in US is largely a culture problem."

I would strongly argue against this. Swiss gun law is very different from US, please read my five points above. Do you think US gun violence would decrease if they adopted those points? In my opinion yes.

In my opinion the conservatives, nationalists and the National Rifle Association fight against any tighter regulations that would probably save thousands of lives.

I very likely agree with you on every gun ppoint, but i do have a question / counter often raised to me - that i don't have to answer to:

How would tight regulations like that look in a large country already flooded with weapons of all shapes and sizes?

I know multiple pro-gun people who seem to compose a large percentage of their pro-gun belief system around the foundation of the inability to remove them. Ie any bad guy who ever wants a gun will always have it (because there's so many), so give more guns to the good people.

What are your thoughts there? I don't really have a counter.

You need political will.

- Refuse sales of ammunition without proof of gun purchase and registration.

- Refuse gun purchase for specific gun types and if a person already has a certain number of guns.

- Mandate and enforce training before gun purchases, with obligatory re-training every X years. Checked at every purchase of ammo and guns. No training, no sale.

- Mandatory licensing for open carry. Mandatory army-level training for concealed carry. With mandatory re-training.

- Buyback and exchange plans for existing weapons.

- Huge fines (not jail time, fines) for non-compliance. Money is a much bigger deterrent than jail time.

You do all this and then find out that gun violence didn't decrease. Everyone will say it worked, but upon closer inspection it is mostly massaged stats. You'll find things like suicides being counted in the statistics for gun violence.

Then what? Do you think anyone would be willing to roll back something like this?

Europe: 500 million people.

CA has most of these already. They just instituted a requirement for a background check for ammo purchases.

One of the biggest problems is your last point - non-compliance isn’t really enforced. If you ask your friend to buy a gun for you because you’re not eligible, the dealer might stop the transaction, but there is a very low likelihood there will be any police follow up.

That is a federal crime and there are absolutely cases that have been prosecuted. I would not mess around with the ATF.

It is a federal law and occasionally they prosecute the most egregious examples, but I've heard from many gun dealers that when they suspect a straw purchase and report it, the ATF follows up maybe 1% of the time.

Or when both parties passed the background check. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abramski_v._United_States

Jeeze, they even went after a former police officer? Not saying former cops should get a pass, but you’d think they’d try and make an example out of someone involved in a criminal operation.

The ATF/DOJ loves to make examples out of people even when the case is pretty weak.

The first point is the key one, but I’d go further, no ammunition sales without passing the new regulations on gun ownership. You can keep your gun, and any ammo you have now, but no reloads until you’re properly authenticated.

Yes, I was thinking the same, too

All of that is repugnant to the constitution and our natural rights. It will also do nothing to stop violence.

One comment regarding the term "Buyback", the government never owned them they can not "buy" them back. It is simply a euphemism for confiscation. Moreover, you can go to pretty much any gun shop or pawnshop to sell a gun you do not want.

> All of that is repugnant to the constitution and our natural rights. It will also do nothing to stop violence.

Ahahahha what

I honestly don’t like U.S. gun culture at all, but I grew up across from Michigan in Canada and this argument always seemed true. It’s just such a hard problem because of the huge number of guns plus the number of owners the seem to indicate you’d have to kill them to take their guns. It seems like a blood bath waiting to happen unfortunately. I hope I’m wrong.

The bad people only need guns because the good people carry them around? How often does having a gun out and about save lives? Not prevent a robbery but save a life? How many times does it escalate a situation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use

A sibling comment has already posted a link to Wikipedia.

I couldn't see it mentioned immediately on Wikipedia and it kind of falls outside of the scope of that article too so I'll mention that in addition to people directly preventing crime by pulling a gun IIRC there also seems to be less attempts at crime in areas were there are lots of legal guns.

I think rayiner hints at/mentions that somewhere above.

Compare the level of violence in the (religiously-motivated) swiss Civil War (mid nineteenth century) with the level of violence in the (slavery-motivated) US Civil War (mid nineteenth century). That's part of my argument for culture.

US gun violence probably would decrease if they adopted the swiss system, but good luck getting people who think a two-day hunting license course infringes their 2A rights to agree to a two-year process involving written, oral, and practical tests.

Your points are reasonable.

But remember: the US is what it is. There is an insane amount of guns floating around already.

My suggestion is the "Norwegian model" from now on and going forward: to get anything except a manually reloaded rifle or a (max 2 cartridge) shotgun you need a clean record with the police + (and here comes the interesting part:) you need a recommendation from a local shooting club. Oh, and before buying any hunting gun at all there's a mandatory 50 hours training.

I'd recommend trying something similar in the US: tell NRA "we want you to help us".

Parts of HN might hate NRA all they want but my understanding is a good chunk of the people in NRA would love to keep weapons out of the hands of crazy people as every criminal shooting hurts peaceful owners as well.

Most law-abiding gun owners do not end up misusing them. Aside from sensationalized media coverage, much of the gun violence in our most violent cities (Boston, Chicago, NYC, etc) would not go down with new laws, because many of the crimes are perpetrated by people who are already violating gun laws (not allowed to posses them, illegal modifications, etc).

Unfortunately, with police departments being defunded or restricted, illegal gun ownership and use will only rise over time.

> Most law-abiding gun owners do not end up misusing them.

Well, yeah. Most non-murderers don't murder, too.

In this context, it's pretty clear that law-abiding gun owner means someone who owns a gun legally, so the statement isn't tautological.

Murder has generally always been illegal, yet it hasn't stopped murders from happening. Making new gun laws about how many bullets you get from your military service or how you can transport them won't stop criminals from using them to commit further crimes.

As someone else pointed out, you can still buy ammunition in Switzerland. There's plenty of access to guns. The difference is absolutely one of culture, which is what my point was.

> Most law-abiding gun owners do not end up misusing them.

You should probably add that most US gun owners are law-abiding gun owners.

None of the three cities you mention are even in the top ten of most violent cities and only Chicago (at 17) is in the top 25.

Per capita, that is true. I mostly picked cities off the top of my head by how they are reported in the media, since we are discussing people's perceptions of gun violence.

Also, I think I meant to write Baltimore instead of Boston, but I think the point stands regardless.

> Most law-abiding gun owners do not end up misusing them.

Most people abide by the law until they don't:

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

And in a lot of jurisdictions in the US all you need to get a gun in the first place is a pulse, which isn't much of a filter in determining whether a person can actually safely handle one. I'd be curious to know the survey results of owners who could recite Jeff Cooper's Four Rules:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety

Personally I like the little mnemonic / acronym that is taught in Canada, A.C.T.S.:

1. Assume every firearm is loaded.

2. Control the muzzle direction at all times.

3. Trigger finger off trigger and out of trigger guard.

4. See that the firearm is unloaded [and P.R.O.V.E. it is safe].

* http://www.firearmstraining.ca/actsprove.htm

* http://www.prpc.ca/safety-first/

These are part of the gun culture that I mentioned upthread.

If people followed these or the classic military rules gun accidents would almost be a thing of the past.

Not that I think that will happen:

if people could just stop

- drunk driving,

- speeding

- driving while texting

- etc

that would probably save even more lives, but I don't see that happening either.

> that would probably save even more lives, but I don't see that happening either.

Your examples strengthen the point I was trying to make: The numbers on drunk driving over the decades, and auto safety in general, are an example of what government regulation with societal support can achieve. Perhaps some day firearm regulation and licensing will achieve the advances that the automobile has seen.

If only guns were licensed more like automobiles:

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

How do you square that opinion with the observation that some of the places with the loosest gun regulations (Oregon, Idaho) also have some of the lowest homicide rates? In Idaho, something like 60%+ of households own guns. But the homicide rate in the capital city of Boise is at Scandinavian levels, 1/10 of the US average. Utah also has high gun ownership and low gun homicides. (Note that this way of looking at the data gets around the notion that you can’t draw conclusions from homicide rates in cities with high control because guns freely flow into them from elsewhere.)

If your statistics are correct, that lends credence to the old saw, "An armed society is a polite society." But that's likely predicated on everything thinking that everyone else is armed (which in high gun control areas would not be the case). Sort of like nuclear weapons' "mutually assured destruction."

Yet some of what people commonly referred to polite societies barely have guns and the opposite can be said for those with lots of guns.

The exceptions for the latter category being countries with high external national risk or no standing army.

By treating statistics with respect (so no cherry picking), by recognising that violence involving firearms has more then one cause.

As to Oregon, consider this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umpqua_Community_College_sho... in the context of easily available firearms.

How do you go from "no cherry picking" straight to a wikipedia article on a single incident?

Maybe the sparseness of the population plays a significant role. Its a lot easier to develop conflicts in more populated areas.

That’s why I used Boise as an example.

> How do you square that opinion with the observation that some of the places with the loosest gun regulations (Oregon, Idaho) also have some of the lowest homicide rates?

Eye-balling this 2015 chart, there seems like there's a pretty good correlation between per capita ownership and per capita deaths (homicide+suicide):

* https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/gun-ownership...

* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/gun-owners-stud...

The main outliers appear to be MA and HI, the former of which has some pretty strict rules (very similar to Canada's):

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

RAND did a (meta-)analysis and found that some policies are more effective than others, specifically: safe storage, waiting periods, background checks, domestic violence history restrictions:

* https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html

Stand-your-ground laws seem to lead to not-good things happening (nothing about castle doctrine though).

Good laws / regulations can counter high numbers though, it appears. Canada has one of the highest per capita ownership rates, and yet has quite low firearm-related death rate (lower than Finland, the Swiss, France, Austria):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

There is no correlation between ownership rates and homicide rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

Injecting suicide rates into the discussion is a motte-and-bailey tactic. People make their legal case for regulation by invoking the right not to be murdered as outweighing the right go bear arms, but when confronted with the fact that gun control doesn’t appear to reduce homicides within the US, they shift the goalposts by citing numbers that lump in suicides. But the legal and moral justification for regulating guns to reduce suicides is very different than for homicides.

> There is no correlation between ownership rates and homicide rates:

So?

> Injecting suicide rates into the discussion is a motte-and-bailey tactic.

Or it's simply the fact that I don't want people dying unnecessarily, whether at their own hand or another's. Why should we only worry about homicides? What is your intent in removing suicide from the equation?

One of the talking points of the NRA is that the US has many gun laws that aren’t really enforced all that well.

The NRA agrees that you shouldn’t be able to buy a guy if you have mental problems, drug problems, aren’t in the US legally, criminal history, etc.

The only one restriction that is strongly enforced is the criminal history because it’s easy to do a check. But the system for mental health checks is a patchwork across states.

And to layer on, if someone does violate these laws, there is often no punishment. Straw purchases are a good example - it usually falls on the dealer to stop the transaction, but there is rarely any police follow-up.

Straw purchasers do get convicted when someone is killed.

True. They certainly do prosecute some straw purchases.

But I guess my point would be - if they actually followed up on all straw purchase attempts (even just a call from the ATF saying “yeah, that’s illegal, don’t do that”) you could at least say the law is being enforced.

Right now the most likely outcome is the dealer just refusing the sale. You’re free to tighten up your game and try another dealer.

I wonder how much of the US gun violence is a problem with guns, and how much of it is a problem with crime.

Despair and poverty without a perspective breeds crime. Switzerland doesn't have much of that.

"My Swiss friend in town told me as far as he knew Switzerland still people keep fully functional assault rifles at home but those who have them need to show up for three weeks of training each year and show up at a shooting range twice a year. (He left a few years ago so anyone actually living there now should feel free to correct this.)"

That's new law due to Schengen. If you had a gun before, you don't need to do this. Three weeks is probably the compulsory military service.

I would say that most social problems are cultural. The culture is what defines what kinds of options people think that have in their life. When something isn't part of your culture you're less likely to think of it. Ie gun violence being very common somewhere means that people are more likely to resort to gun violence. We observe this effect with suicide too. I believe that gun violence, stabbings, acid attacks, bombings, terror attacks with cars etc are all like this.

Also, if the army thinks someone is getting a bit extreme, they will say "congratulations! you don't need to pass the shooting test next year ... and, by the way, please return your service rifle."

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/extremism_swiss-army-t...

(fun fact: until the cavalry was disbanded, troopers would not only keep their rifles at home, but also their horse.)

I agree on culture. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23809211 , footnote 1.

Not entirely serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYJ5V2HYy4&t=222

(but then again, life should be sympa, gemütlich, simpatica, shouldn't it?)

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