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Comment by tjs8rj | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t square with the fact that many of the most gun dense states have the lowest violent crime rates. New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries.

I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty.

I put culture and social cohesion ahead of income because plenty of poorer asian countries do much better than richer european countries.

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New Hampshire doesn't have a city of the size of Stockholm, Oslo, or Helsinki in it. Large cities almost always have higher crime rates than rural areas. Clearly class and culture are part of the equation but I believe so too is the ready access to guns.

Ready access to guns, also ready access to alcohol, ready access to knives, etc these are all part of the equation, but I contend that they are so dwarfed by the other factors that focusing on them seems disingenuous and otherwise random except as a result of knee-jerk politics.

So maybe cities have the same order of magnitude effect in increasing crime as guns do - what would you suggest we do about that? Should we lower violent crime by banning cities and banning guns, or should we focus on the root problems of culture, social cohesion, and poverty?

Also: Switzerland also has a ton of guns and major cities, violent crime rate is near the bottom - is suspect because their culture, social cohesion, and efforts to minimize poverty.

I don't suggest anything other than what I wrote. Specifically, that comparing the crime rate of a rural American state that has no major metropolitan centers to the crime rate of Scandinavian countries which do have major metropolitan centers is not apt.

Switzerland has a ton of guns but not a ton of ready access to ammunition. Also according to this article [1] the U.S. has far more guns per person than Switzerland.

According to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, there are about 89 civilian-owned guns for every 100 people who live in the United States. Switzerland ranks third in terms of gun ownership, the Survey estimates, with 3.4 million guns among its population of nearly eight million.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21379912

You are absolutely right that culture and inequality is the key decider on violence. The US worship guns and the military to a degree I have never seen in any other western country. I am not surprised at all that individuals in the US believe they can fix things by shooting a random number of people or blow up federal buildings. I have lived and worked in western Europe, USA and Australia so I have seen the differences in culture up close.

HackerNews isn’t for “scoring points”, your comment doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion. Make your snappy clap backs on twitter

All of what you said are true. But when you add gun to the mix it makes matters far worse. Gangs in the UK typically resort to stabbing, which leads to far fewer deaths

Absolutely. If nukes were legal it wouldn’t just be cinemas and churches being attacked by crazy individuals but whole cities. Crazies would kill hundreds of thousands. Not “just” a few dozens.

It is both but I believe the comment you were replying to was saying violence prevention programs are harder due to the number of guns.

So NH having a high amount of guns isn't really a counter example. The point wasn't that guns are the sole cause, but that their prevalence makes it harder to resolve a violence problem (that stems from many sources).

Or if I am assuming too much about the original posters view, I can instead just say this is my view.

Sure, but access to alcohol has the same effect and I’d imagine has the same level of magnitude impact in increased violent crime. There are a million factors, but singling our access to guns - which is way down on the list of factors - sounds less like a genuine interest in solving the problem and more like a gut reaction “solution” that actually solves very little.

So making nukes legal would be OK in your mind because it isn’t nukes that kill people but people?

This is an interesting point. I thought about it and concluded that for me there’s a gradient of any freedom between the harm it causes and the liberty it grants. Making nukes accessible at Walmart is a little bit more freedom with likely much more harm. Allowing gun ownership is much more freedom with an increase in harm, but as I see it the increase in freedom is much bigger than the increase in harm.

On the other end of the spectrum of marginally more harm but dramatically less freedom, would you suggest that we go into a covid shutdown every flu season? Or compelled speech laws? Or banning cars because the harm they cause? It’s all a balance between freedom and harm.

Yep I agree that everything is a balance between freedom and harm. As for your examples: Cars are necessary for a modern society to function. Gun’s aren’t. Australia (where I live) have very few COVID deaths because of strict shutdowns. The US decided to let close to a million people die for “freedom”. Clearly our perceptions of harm is different. So our conclusions will also be different. Having lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Australia, it is clear to me that the US (in general) value human lives less than other Western nations. So the outcomes will be different.

> New Hampshire has tons of guns, violent crime comparable to Nordic countries.I’d say in order the biggest determinants are: culture, social cohesion, and poverty.

This sounds like borderline race theory or something Charles Murray would argue... So basically you’re saying that richer white people in homogeneous states are less violent than the states with poor, more diverse populations? I don’t think it’s based on race or culture, but income and class are definitely factors.

Income is probably the biggest predictor of who will go on to commit violent crime, but guess what also correlates to income? In the US, non-white people are mostly poor.

Counter-point: highest income earners are actually Indian-Americans: https://gulfnews.com/world/americas/indians-in-america-make-...

No he didnt basically say that

What? I justified why I put culture and social cohesion first explicitly in my comment: because many poorer asian countries do much better than many richer white countries on average. The culture variable is overriding the income one.

Culture is so obviously a factor: why does Switzerland have so many guns and similar average income to New Hampshire but much less violence? Clearly culture has an effect.

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