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Comment by teawrecks | Hacker News Reader

Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK. Meanwhile, Japan has incredibly restrictive weapon laws (including knives and swords), and they have a fraction of the rate of everyone else.

And before you point to Switzerland, I am all for gun ownership by certified, well trained, responsible citizens. But the US doesn't have that. Either decrease access to guns, or enact 2 years of compulsory military service where you are trained to respect your weapon and know precisely when and how to responsibly use it AND store it. If you do neither, you get the US.

And in either case, we need to improve the mental wellbeing of everyone in the US by giving more people access to "free" healthcare and not stigmatizing mental health.

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Some people seem to be blind to the fact that access to a firearm lowers the cost of killing (by making it easier to do so); and what lowers the cost of something will encourage that behavior at the margins. But Switzerland! Sure, they've managed to thread that needle through education and regulation. But just relaxing gun laws without counteracting that in some way will of course increase homicides (and suicides, similarly). The US is case in point.

Making it easier to kill (access to a firearm) doesn't necessarily lowers the cost of killing. The cost of killing lies on the consequence of killing.

Some people seem to be blind to the fact that less penalty and defunded/broken police and justice system lowers the cost of killing (by making it hard to bring murder to justice and the due penalty) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/world/europe/anders-breiv...

> Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK.

That isn't germane. If the rate of something fluctuates without connection to the action taken to change the rate, then the action isn't effective or is confounded by other more significant factors.

Izzard's implicit conjecture is that if guns are not present, then murder is less likely (please let me know if I am misunderstanding it). Izzard's country of primary domicile is England which has a recent history of making guns less available. However, the murder rate in England appears to increase and decrease without regard to the timing of key legislation. Since a murder may or may not be performed with a gun, if murders do not decrease in the absence of guns then it follows that a gun may be a particular method but is not necessary for the commission of a murder.

I suppose a counterfactual could be asserted: the murder rate would have been even higher without England's gun laws. I suppose that is possible and would be plausible with more information about the natural variation in murder rates of various methods. Maybe something like Narwal tusks aren't a replacement for guns but have their own natural rate of usage in murders.

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