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Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

"The police officer who visited Kuppalli after a second death-threat call suggested she should get herself a gun."

It is hard to overstate how bad this advice is, and how demonstrative it is of the broken policing system we have in the U.S.

Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide. In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

All of this is publicly available information, and the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."

We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.

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>Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners.

I'd imagine that people living in areas more prone to gun violence are also more likely to arm themselves.

>the cop's advice to someone facing substantial psychological stress was to "get a gun."

I don't think it's the worst advice, probably could have been delivered with more tact. Having the means of defense gives one agency and can be reassuring. Instead of lying awake hoping no one breaks in, you now focus on how you'd most effectively detect and stop someone breaking in - you're now a player instead of a victim. That said, responsible gun ownership requires knowledge and training, so probably not the best time to suggest gun ownership for the author.

> I'd imagine that people living in areas more prone to gun violence are also more likely to arm themselves.

I'm all for skepticism, but at some point people's willingness to assume that peer reviewed research is flawed in _the most obvious possible way_ and that the researchers made no attempt whatsoever to correct for _the most obvious possible failure mode of their study_ borders on insane.

Do you really think that nobody thought of that before just now?

The original claim doesn't cite any peer reviewed research.

Nonetheless, there are enough really bad peer reviewed studies out there (which get attention) that it's not insane to willingly assume the worst.

I'd just like some acknowledgement that maybe - just maybe! - confirmation bias is kicking in when people make these assumptions.

Maybe the reason for this particular brand of reflexive skepticism is not genuine concern about the quality of the research, but an attempt to rationalize their own actions and beliefs without actually doing any introspection or self-examination.

Flip it around: why aren't you the one engaging in confirmation bias?

Look at the comment down-thread. Only 44% of a set of highly cited clinical trials had been successfully replicated and 32% appeared to be wrong when replications were done. That's for clinical trials, let alone stuff like social psych! Given a random clinical trial it is in fact pretty reasonable to assume it's wrong, and might even be rational, given that you'd hope highly cited and impactful studies are more likely to be correct than not.

But don't take my word for it. Take it from a former editor of the BMJ:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

"Science" really is just that terrible, unfortunately.

44% replicability is a lot higher than the average right wing internet meme/argument about gun violence and gun safety.

Put yourself in the shoes of that police officer. What would you have advised?

Bear spray.

Also, increased monitoring on a vulnerable person with known death threats against them.

Also, if it were available, counseling.

Any police officer that recommends bear spray for self defense would be putting themselves in legal hot water as such products typically have warnings printed on them that say "Any other use of this product is in violation of federal law". I've never bought or seen a can of bear spray in person, but every can of wasp spray has such printing on it.

I agree with you on the points about increased monitoring and counseling.

Bear spray is indeed illegal to use on people, but so are high-velocity bullets. The courts tend to be fairly understanding in self-defense cases.

It is legal to carry in California, at least.

I agree with you. I would not hesitate to use bear spray, wasp spray, etc. for self defense when I thought that my life is in imminent danger. However, it would be foolish (IMO) for a law enforcement officer to recommend it. Also, if I were on a jury and the defendant used bear spray or wasp spray to save their own life I would certainly not vote to punish that person for what I would view as reasonable force for the situation.

You keep bringing up wasp spray, for reasons I don't really understand.

Bear spray is pepper spray in a different concentration, and with a different spray pattern. s/bear spray/pepper spray/ if it brings clarity to the recommendation.

Bear spray is not the more powerful version of pepper spray you might assume it to be. In fact, it's formulated to be weaker, because deterring a bear doesn't take as much effort as deterring a human assailant.

So recommend pepper spray. It's less dangerous and more effective.

I know what I'm recommending.

Bear spray creates a cloud, rather than a stream that must be accurately directed at an assailant (like, e.g. pepper gel). In a situation where the one goal is "escape, alive" bear spray is a reasonable choice for an untrained, likely panicked individual.

You may yet be right! I'm not a self defense professional. But I was not mistaken in my understanding of the products.

Whoever you've just sprayed is not going to be incapacitated to the point of no longer being a threat if that is what they want to continue doing. They may very well decide that their best option is to try and prevent you from calling 911 rather than retreat.

Bear spray is also a really crappy choice indoors. Good luck finding your phone and calling 911 in a sufficiently timely manner after that.

This is why you shouldn't ask me for advice! You should ask a professional. Unfortunately in this situation, the professional's advice was not just bad (as mine apparently was), but potentially deadly - and that's the problem I am lamenting in the original comment.

The default professional advice for people who are worried about being assaulted more or less starts at "glawk fawty" and goes up/down from there depending on what details you add and how they change the situation. The police officer basically gave her the canned default advice.

But like ... that's bad! That's exactly my point.

Not that this particular police officer gave particularly bad advice, but that this idea - that adding more guns solves public safety problems - is so pervasive and _so wrong_.

I'm not a security or safety trained professional, but off the top of my head a domestic security system maybe including video, top of the line door and window locks, advice on car security, who knows what else.

All that is completely beside the point though, because none of it is pertinent to whether the advice to get a gun was reasonable.

That's a fun thought experiment: imagine you're a police officer tasked with helping a woman being anonymously threatened.

I suppose for the police officer, solving the problem of "a stranger is making death threats" is to take a proactive defensive measure and arm yourself.

----

What if you were to imagine the advise from some sort of other professional? Maybe a social worker who helps victims of domestic violence ?

What other professionals would have good advice to offer the scientist ?

----

I did think it odd that the article mentioned the "go get a gun" response. Was the author's intention to drive home the point that the police were unhelpful ?

With all the creepy surveillance of America's phone system, internet, etc. that seems to be happening - is "we'll try to trace those death threat calls" even on the table?

> In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

That sounds like some backwards causality to me. It seems way more likely that people own guns when the likelihood of murderous break ins is high, rather than the idea that the same break in situations are happening and they're just getting into firefights and losing.

> It seems way more likely that people own guns when the likelihood of murderous break ins is high, rather than the idea that the same break in situations are happening and they're just getting into firefights and losing.

A person with a gun may feel like they can "handle" the intruder more than someone who is unarmed. If you're unarmed you may take the less risky action of barricading yourself in a room and calling the police.

>Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide.

It is disingenuous to conflate "gun violence" with suicide.

>In the event that someone does break in, gun owners are more likely to die than non-gun owners.

I've never heard of this statistic and I suspect that the relevant literature is an interpretation based on questionable assumptions. Do you have a source?

>We are so, so far away from a sane, functioning public safety system in this country it can be depressing.

Allowing responsible gun ownership is neither insane nor an indication of dysfunction. In fact if you remove a single demographic from gun violence statistics, the US becomes one of the top 5 or so safest nations, in spite of the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

Do tell, what is that one “single demographic” which is allowed to be removed from counting in the US, friend?

It's a correlation with poverty and gangs. If you take out gang on gang and suicide, assumung neither is relevant to you, it's true that the numbers become much better.

Do these people deserve to die?

If you join a gang you know what you're signing up for, and I find it hard to argue that an individual doesn't have the right to end their own life.

"people who's primary source of earned income is the sale of transportation of illegal substances"

Usually this group shows up in stats as "gang related crime" or something like that.

Basically it's all the violence that lawful businesses don't need to use to settle business disputes because they can use the courts and threat of state violence to settle their disputes instead whereas the drug industry needs to bring it in-house.

But why remove that demographic from the US statistic, before comparing with other nations?

Isn't that a bit disingenuous?

I'd imagine you'd see similar improvement in other countries stats, if you remove the poorest and the drug gangs.

So if you remove drug-related crime from the statistics, suddenly US look a lot less violent? That is a great way to solve the problem!

Your downvotes show why this problem will never be solved. Getting rid of guns is not going to solve violent people.

That isn't the argument here. The argument is that giving people guns is not going to solve violent people.

In the same vein, adding more guns to the equation isn't going to solve violence/crime either

> Getting rid of guns is not going to solve violent people.

I do not understand this "the proposed solution is either a panacea of don't bother" attitude to major problems in society. The whole point of guns is to make it extremely easy and simple to apply lethal force instantly from a distance onto multiple targets and without any chance of defense. Don't you think that taking that away from practically all attackers improves everyone's chances of surviving an attack?

The 'proposed solution's tramples on a fundamentally more important right.

Why do you feel that the right to own a gun is "fundamentally more important" than the right to live your life without the risk of being gunned down?

Because all life has risk, and the purpose of government is not to eliminate all risk to life. Such a government would be immensely awful.

Gun ownership, self defense, and most importantly, the maintenance of real armed power in the population at large discourages a worse outcome, than the loss of any particular life.

I think that the downvotes are because it's pretty disingenuous to remove criminals and poor people from US statistics, before comparing with other nations.

Like, I imagine that my country would the greenest & cleanest in the world, if we would get to disregard all factory and car emissions, from our stats.

And I'd be rightly downvoted for making that claim.

I'm not talking about allowing responsible gun ownership.

I'm talking about the fact that a person whose ostensible role in society is enforcing laws and ensuring public safety told a psychologically stressed out person facing death threats to take an action that increases their risk of death by suicide by 3x.

This is not a criticism of responsible gun ownership. This is a criticism of the idea that "owning more guns will solve public safety problems," which is demonstrably false.

Are you sure it isn't that suicidal people attempt to purchase firearms? Seems like a pretty obvious correlation/causation problem, like blaming home alarm systems for burglaries.

> In fact if you remove a single demographic from gun violence statistics, the US becomes one of the top 5 or so safest nations, in spite of the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.

Did you also remove "a single demographic" from these other nations gun violence statistics?

If you remove the poorest segment of the US population form all statistics, I'm sure the US is going to look a lot better in many ways compared to the full population of other nations.

>>Gun owners are substantially more likely to die of gun violence than non-gun owners. Gun owners have a 3x higher risk of suicide. > >It is disingenuous to conflate "gun violence" with suicide.

They were called out separately, and distinctly in their own sentences and one of them had a specific statistic. That is not conflation.

Your reasoning is flawed.

The average gun owner has not received a death threat.

Do you have data to support this?

You are absurd.

Right.. so no evidence or data. Show yourself out

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