Hacker News Reader

Comment by poisonarena | Hacker News Reader

I feel they dont work, countries with much harsher gun laws often have more illegal gun violence like brazil and mexico. Semi automatic weapons have been around and reasonably available for almost 120 years but these mass shootings are a new thing. It sounds like a cultural problem, not a gun problem. I live in Israel and almost 18-21 year olds has access to machine guns, many taking them home with them from the base and this type of thing never happens. And even if you do pass them there is still so many guns out there its redundant

View on HN

Comparing 3rd world countries to a 1st world country is ridiculous.

Look at Australia or Israel. Australia had shootings. Passed a gun control law and... No shootings.

In Israel we have draft law. Everyone knows how to use a gun. In the 90's with the Oslo peace accord gun legislation was reduced. Buying a gun became easy for "self defense".

Suddenly gun violence skyrocketed. Israel quickly changed direction and now even when a soldier goes back home from the army he often leaves his gun behind. Licenses are harder to get and are for a shorter period of time. There are many people with guns and a valid license but strict regulation when applied to the entire country worked.

The one exception is Arab cities which are riddled with crime. This is due to police incompetence and years of neglect. But that's a different subject altogether.

Now I agree that it's not a simple bit of regulation and the USA is a VERY different country. But when done right good legislation saves lives. In the USA you can't even have a computerized database of the gun licenses. You let people sell guns to one another. So many problems that I think most NRA members would agree need fixing. This is pretty toxic.

>Comparing 3rd world countries to a 1st world country is ridiculous.

Maybe 40 years ago, but I think '1st world and 3rd world' countries are more blurry than they used to be. I felt a lot safer in CDMX and Guadalajara than in parts of the Bay Area, and I lived in Mixcuac and Edomex too. Every country has problems.

20 years ago you could consider Israel a 'developing country', and the guns were flowing even more, even jobniks would take their guns home, and mass shootings in israeli society was not an issue. I remember coming back from the base and as a ritual my gf's father checked my gun when i came in his house and put it under his bed til I left on sunday.

See a "gun violence by race" chart and you will see why something that works in Israel or Australia won't work in the USA.

In USA there are 120.5 guns/100 people AND 3.4 gun murders/100000 people In Canada there are 34.7 guns/100 people AND 0.6 gun murders/100000 people In France there are 19.6 guns/100 people AND 0.4 gun murders/100000 people In Germany there are 19.6 guns/100 people AND 0.1 gun murders/100000 people In Italy there are 14.4 guns/100 people AND 0.3 gun murders/100000 people In England+Wales there are 4.6 guns/100 people AND 0 gun murders/100000 people

Sources: Small Arms Survey, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.·Ownership rates are for 2017. Murder rates for the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and Spain are from 2016; otherwise, the latest available rates are used.

Looks like a similar number of murders/gun, interesting!

Because these countries are cherrypicked. If your list included places like Mexico, Brazil, Finland and Switzerland you would have a very different idea of the relation between gun ownership and gun homicide rates.

Also, I personally do not care one whit about gun homicide rates. I care about overall homicide rates, and I think most everyone else does too.

> but these mass shootings are a new thing.

Look at the list before 2000, going back to the early 1900s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Then normalize that by the US population over time. There's nothing new.

> It sounds like a cultural problem, not a gun problem.

Heh... an apt handle and a sense of irony in what you wrote that you seem entirely oblivious too doesn't help either.

Its my old music producer name, just thought those two words sound cool together. Personal attack but no explanation? Maybe you would like a website called reddit?

Ok, I'll say the quiet part out loud [0], you have no basis to criticize anyone in the World about abject violence and about firearm discipline much less critiquing any Culture when your entire Society and Government is based on Crimes Against Humanity, and this isn't me saying it: it's one of your own pilots. He goes so far as to call you terrorists. Which is not entirely far from my view either, but I will defer to people who actually fought those battles muh more than my own on such matters.

The joke is ultimately on us in the US since we pay for it all in the end.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY3V8FC3VHs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com