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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

It's really the only variable differentiating the US homicide rate from other developed countries. The US homicide rate is 4 times the UK, 5 times more than Germany, 4 times that of France and thrice that of our neighbor to the north. While Mexico has a higher homicide rate, the gun crime rate in the US is 6 times higher. (All numbers are round approximations. Different sources and ways of calculating the data may result in variances but the relative rates don't change that much.)

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Be very careful about comparative gun death statistics. Suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are.

Your argument is not to worry as much about how bad the numbers are... because it’s just people choosing to shoot themselves?

Most suicide victims choose the most convenient method available to them and it isn't a deciding factor in their choice to suicide to begin with...

Guns are also more reliable with other methods having a less reliable outcome. Additionally, other methods may not be as convenient as “pull trigger and dead” (e.g. someone intentionally OD’ing & then having a change of heart & calling 911).

Can't you say the same thing about any violence? Guns don't cause the violence in the first place. If you didn't have a gun you'd be violent with a knife instead, if you'd already decided to be violent.

Yes, in fact. :)

So how does 'suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are', which is what this thread was about?

Certain advocacy groups just report gun-involved deaths as a single statistic. Not if they are homicides or suicides.

This should be plainly obvious.

What point are you making? Other than perhaps unintentionally backing the pro-gun lobby idea that guns are just tools.

> What point are you making?

That if you're worried about the harmful effects of guns, don't discount suicide just because those people aren't harming you.

But we've just established that those people are going to kill themselves anyway. This is circular reasoning.

Means Matter https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/

yes, I worry a lot less about people shooting themselves than shooting me.

Care to prove? Here is the link to the relevant data:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Homicide rate in EU is 1.7, US is 5.8 or 4.3 (Firearms only).

Perhaps worth considering is the rate of sexual assaults alongside the rate of violent crime.

It's a culture problem. America has a violent culture.

It's weird to me that we so often discuss firearm violence without also considering the prevalence of other forms of violence; these are symptoms of an underlaying concern.

The politicians talking about firearm violence don't actually care about fixing it, they just say things that their base wants to hear. For example, the democrat congressman from my district in MD sent out an email talking about trying to fight the epidemic of gun violence by banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines, even though pistols are used in the vast majority of shootings. A few years ago the MD state democrats also blocked some laws that would have imposed harsher punishment on people who use handguns in crimes because they said it would disproportionately affect minorities. They didn't want to look like they weren't doing anything about gun violence though, so they banned bump stocks, even though they have never been used to commit a crime in MD, and the ATF says the functionality can easily be replicated with a rubber band or belt.

You should care less about the murder rate by nation and more by city or neighborhood. Chicago and Detroit are thousands of miles away from where I live - what relevance is the murder rates in those cities to me? Someone living in Alaska would have to cover a quarter of the surface of the globe to reach Key West Florida...why would they feel impacted by the crime rate there?

Go look at a heat map of per-capita gun homicides in the US. This is not a "national" problem. Communicating this has been very challenging for people who live in Chicago in particular - everyone thinks the entire city is a killzone, when in fact there are perfectly safe neighborhoods, and other neighborhoods that are a warzone. But if you were to only see the citywide statistics for Chicago murders, you wouldn't even leave the airport.

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