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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

Those numbers are, almost certainly, all within the US (or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?). Because the data globally points the other direction. The overwhelmingly largest factor, across every nation we have data for, in determining how many people get shot is how many guns there are, period. More guns means more shootings.

Again, I don't see how an argument that "crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny" can be anything but laughable given data points like "Japan" or "Belgium".

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> in determining how many people get shot

The argument is that legal guns increase gun deaths but reduce other types of crime, either by substitution (e.g. reducing knife crime) or by deterrence (e.g. reducing home burglaries).

That claim has its own burden of proof that it needs to meet before it can be accepted, but looking at other countries and saying "More guns means more shootings" isn't addressing the actual argument.

What is the "actual argument" then? Gun deaths are... pretty bad. Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no?

The point is that perspective matters. You want to treat "crime" as a single thing because it seems like "the actual argument" to you, and when I see that same argument it looks like senseless spin because it's trying to dilute the US's outrageous homicide rate in an analysis by comparing it to burglaries in Amsterdam or whatever.

> Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no

Yes, and I'm not advocating for that.

My only point is that "less gun deaths in countries without legal guns" isn't addressing the original claim that other crimes have decreased as a consequence of legal guns. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim is true, or what exactly they mean by that, which are both questions I also would like to be answered.

I think one part of the moral calculus that's missing here is who the "victim" is in each case. A substitution of somebody being shot for somebody being burled is obviously not a good outcome; on the other hand, a substitution of a burgler being shot for an innocent average joe being burgled is... still not great, but you must admit it shifts the scales.

Effectively zero gun violence is deployed in defense, either of person or property. No "burglers" are being shot, statistically. Guns are deployed in anger, or in escalation of existing violence.

The argument that more common access to firearms more frequently results in more gun deaths is misleading when considering many of those deaths are self inflicted injuries, such as suicide attempts. Obama correctly addressed this when he pushed for gun reform near the end of his tenure. In other words if disqualifying access to firearms on the basis of mental health concerns you simultaneously increase lawful access to firearms and reduce gun deaths related to those new purchases.

> The argument that more common access to firearms more frequently results in more gun deaths is misleading when considering many of those deaths are self inflicted injuries, such as suicide attempts.

Suicides don't count? For the record: I'm 100% in favor of public policy that results in large decreases in the suicide rate.

It’s not that suicides don’t count. The argument is misleading because suicides absolutely do count, but for many people the the subject of gun deaths incorrectly implies homicides.

They count, but they aren’t murders.

They also don’t count 1 for 1.

It’s much easier to substitute something else for a gun when committing suicide than when murdering someone.

> It’s much easier to substitute something else for a gun when committing suicide than when murdering someone.

That idea seems to be belied by the upthread assertion that gun deaths disproportionately represent suicides.

Gun suicides outnumber murders 2 to 1. That says nothing about what the suicide rate would be if you took guns out of the picture. Someone going the gun route isn't a cry for help and obviously they don't care if it's a mess.

What else is highly effective and messy? Jumping from someplace high. There are lots of high places. I'd much prefer they go the gun route because jumpers sometimes land on someone as most such places that are readily available are in urban areas.

Suicide is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.

There's evidence that the availability of the means of going through with suicide affects how many people do it.

> Suicide in the United Kingdom declined after coal stoves were phased out, removing a means of suicide by carbon monoxide that had been available in many homes. Tylenol (or acetaminophen) overdoses in England and Wales fell by 43 percent after legislation passed requiring that the medication be sold in “blister packs” where you have to pop out each individual pill; that simple switch from big bottles was enough to save lives. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18095174/pesti...

And if someone does decide to try to kill themselves, guns are more likely to be fatal:

> About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-...

This isn’t true, suicide isn’t zero sum. If you remove easy ways of committing suicide, that method drops substantially, but overall suicides ALSO drop.

“ In the early 1960s, asphyxiation with domestic gas accounted for nearly half of suicides in England and Wales.3 The conversion of the British gas supply to North Sea gas, which was free of carbon monoxide, essentially eliminated domestic gas suicides in England and Wales and, moreover, was accompanied by a steep decline in the overall suicide rate (a 30% decline in England and Wales between 1960 and 1971, and a smaller decrease in Scotland), driven by the fall in gas suicides.”

Additionally, in the case specifically of guns, they’re more impactful for suicides BECAUSE they’re so effective. In the US they account for 1% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths.

https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(16)30572-1/pdf

Ok - but this is a call for gun prohibition, which a lot of people keep saying nobody is calling for.

Literally no one here is calling for "prohibition". You inserted that term into the discussion yourself.

> The conversion of the British gas supply to North Sea gas

There was a complete prohibition on CO containing gas. Go read the story again.

The term describes what is being discussed when people are reasoning by analogy with other things which have been eliminated from use.

> Because the data globally points the other direction.

Once you include multiple countries, isn't your data skewed by "countries at war import a lot of guns"?

> or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?

That's not spin. You want to minimize total deaths, not "gun violence". If banning guns meant instead of getting shot, the same number of people got stabbed instead, the ban would be pointless.

If someone wants to kill you, and has a gun, not only can they do so from a distance, but it was invented for that purpose. Stabbing someone is more of an act of opportunity I'd wager, and in a lot of circumstances you'd be less likely to die, therefore reducing deaths.

As I said, that is why you look at homicides, not "gun deaths" or "stabbings" - so you don't have to wager or guess.

Well, not quite. You said that the same number of stabbings would be equivalent to the same number of people getting shot, but didn't specify that the stabbings would be fatal. I'm suggesting that if total violent crime stayed the same, but you removed guns, you'd have less fatalities.

more people survive stabbings than shootings, and if someone was to say start stabbing on a school campus a lot less people would be stabbed than shot in a school shooting.

Which is, as I said, exactly why counting homicides is not spin, and better than counting "stabbings" or "shootings" or "gun deaths". You look directly at the metric you care about (people killed), instead of intermediate metrics (people stabbed/shot) and trying to figure out how that translates to number of people killed.

Canada probably has higher gun ownership per capita than the US and gun crime is very low.

Switzerland too.

It does not. The US has far more guns. But Canada has significantly more guns than other similar western democracies. And, in fact, Canada has an intermediate level of gun violence between the extremes of the US wild west and totalitarian Europe!

It's almost like, as I said above, the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons. That this obvious hypothesis is simply disbelieved by large numbers of HN posters (many of whom like to call themselves "rationalists") continues to astound me.

Most of the gun owners I know here also tend to just have hunting rifles or stuff they take to the range.

> the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons

Except that this simply is not true.

Gun violence in the us is not correlated with gun ownership.

It is correlated with poverty. It’s as simple as that.

This is because ‘gun violence’ is just violence.

Calling it ‘gun violence’ makes it seem like it’s about guns, but it really isn’t.

Less minorities too...

Yes, I was just speaking to reflections of law changes in the US. There are a couple of reasons why the data could point differently for the US compared to other locations, such as the commonality of firearms regardless of legal status and culture.

The problem is you are mixing up "being shot" with "being a victim". The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime far more than it changes the amount of crime.

The "problem" is that you (as I mention earlier) are insisting on treating any "crime" as morally identically to any other, which seems insane to me. Would you rather be shot or mugged? I know the answer I'd give.

The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime, on the whole, from largely survivable violence to presumptively lethal injury. And that's bad, thus the game-playing with "crime" statistics instead of shootings to try to obscure the clear truth.

True, but logic like this leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition.

That’s a fine perspective to have, but it completely contradicts the people here who are saying no one is demanding prohibition.

Exactly, it's a question of perspective. We had a rationalist essay on exactly this effect on the front page yesterday, in fact! It's a Trapped Prior.

If your prior is "gun rights are super important and any attempt to regulate guns must be resisted", then it leads you inevitably to ridiculous arguments like "AKTUALLY guns reduce crime (for some variant definition of crime that includes non-violent stuff)" or (and you fell right into this one) "[gun regulation] leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition"[1].

At what point will the gun folks come back to rational compromise? You know how you end up with inevitable prohibition? When it's the only option left to the majority.

[1] Which is just clearly false, look at the diversity of gun laws across the globe! CLEARLY it's true that you can regulate them better than the US without "inevitably" confiscating them. Look at Canada, for goodness sake.

Yes look at Canada, they just banned how many guns that include the most popular style modern rifles in America.

It’s not clear that there is anything in your response that is relevant to my comment.

The point I see you making is to say that all people who are against gun control are irrational, but it this appears to be a bare claim unsupported by an argument.

> Would you rather be shot or mugged?

Would you prefer to be mugged or a mugger to be shot?

The actual split on this is mugged, shoot mugger, attempt to shoot mugger and be shot instead, attempt shot miss and kill bystander.

Bad comparison. Few criminals seek to shoot you. The proper comparison is whether you would prefer to be mugged by a gun, a knife or a club.

And the proper answer here is gun. You're much less likely to be hurt by a mugger with a gun--the mugger is far more likely to rely purely on deterrence rather than actually use his weapon.

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