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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.

Is it that simple? The is little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/27-years-recorded-crime-vict...

That same link shows a slight negative correlation between stricter gun laws and sexual assault.

Looking at the numbers it's really hard to call any solution "obvious".

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I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people". No idea why you say that.

Sexual assault has gone up, according to the graph, about which you say "shows a slight negative correlation between stricter gun laws and sexual assault". Uh what? That graph is nothing to do with gun laws, is it?! Strange. Hmm I can only guess maybe that where you live, sexual assault is usually/often done by someone with a gun? I would guess that's very rare in Australia.

> I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people".

The decline in dead people is not correlated with fewer guns.

The decline is a trend going down over time that did not start when the guns were taken.

The argument of "fewer guns == safer society" needs to show that when the guns were taken, a decline in corpses resulted. That did not happen.

Ah ok thanks. Yes, from the graph seemed like it was always going up, then 5 years after Port Arthur peaked and has been going down ever since. I wouldn't call that "little correlation" but sure, who knows.

Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone.

> Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone and where people are straining hard not to see the obvious.

Well, that's because it isn't obvious. I limited my data lookups to Australia because OP presented Australia as an example of where it is obvious that fewer guns == safer society.

In the example that is provided as evidence (Australia), the data does not support the assertion. Maybe it will in other examples, but the OP presented this example and so I only checked the stats for this example.

As I mentioned in my other comment, the gun related deaths halved 2 years after the gun laws [1]. Furthermore, in 1996, the gun deaths per capita were 2.84, the homicides were ~650 per capita. So of course you will barely see a difference with the homicide graph. The real difference is that there have been no mass shootings for 20 years.

So yes, it really is that simple and completely obvious.

[1] https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_a...

Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.

> Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.

It shows exactly what I think it shows: just how much safer (or not) a place is after enacting stricter gun laws.

The whole point is that the parent tried to imply that stricter gun laws make the society safer. The data for his example shows no real correlation.

Yes it is that simple. Denying there is a link between shooting and gun laws is he problem. It's that simple.

> Yes it is that simple. Denying there is a link between shooting and gun laws is he problem. It's that simple.

The data just doesn't support that view. Simply asserting "because I said so" is not a good way to convince people of your argument.

"The data" is showing that there's only one place in the world where this shit happens this often.

> "The data" is showing that there's only one place in the world where this shit happens this often.

You presented Australia as an example of stricter gun laws making it safer for everyone. The data for Australia shows that this is not true.

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