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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.

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This whole thread is a just list of people eliminating confounding variables

> Social media

>> All countries have that

> Violent video games

>> All other countries have that

> Media reporting on violence

>> All other countries have that

> Mental illness

>> Other countries have it worse

> Lack of Religion

>> Some other countries have that

At some point we are left with just one variable that is different from these other countries

Lots of other countries have firearms and don’t have school shootings. Switzerland and Israel come to mind.

Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole.

If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck

Per wikipedia[0], the US has an estimated 120 guns per 100 citizens. Switzerland, the number is 27.6, Israel the number is 6.7.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset

https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-r...

The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables

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