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Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

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