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Comment by mmm_grayons | Hacker News Reader

> rural areas won't be safe from desperate people

At least for America, most city folk don't seem to understand just how armed their rural counterparts are. They'd be pretty darn safe.

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That's actually a pretty good pro to stay in cities.

Mass hysteria + lots of guns = not a place I'd like to be.

I don't know if rural folks may realize how well-armed we are in the cities. Nearly everyone I know has a gun, and none of us is the crowd you'd normally associate with gun owners in cities.

Well the the stats don’t lie. Gun ownership is significantly lower in cities than in rural areas/small towns.

Per capital is higher in rural, but there are going to be more guns in a N mile radius of you in the city, and a lot more armed individuals (ten people with one gun each are more dangerous than one person with ten guns).

Is it possible that the stats are of the flavor (total guns)/(total people) and inflate rural ownership because of a gun for small game, a gun for large game, a gun for self defense, and in certain parts of the country a gun for extremely big fish? Or is gun ownership when computed as (count of people with guns)/(total people) still inflated in rural areas?

As kortilla mentioned, while you may have a different experience, the statistics are pretty clear. Also, not all firearms are equal, and while I can't back this part up with stats, my general experience has been that rural folk are much more likely to own more effective firearms: many own a semi-automatic rifles chambered in an intermediate cartridge and some own semi-autos chambered for a full rifle cartridge. Both are a lot more deadly than grandad's pump-action shotgun or a 22 lr plinking rifle, which is closer to what most city folk seem to own. All that aside, most rural people use firearms more often rather than keeping them in closets "just in case" and therefore will be much more effective.

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