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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Mass shootings are rare but yeah, the only way you could tell that Warsaw is anywhere near a war is because of a large number of Ukrainians and all lower cost rentals gone from the market.

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> Mass shootings are rare

Yeah, but...

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People from Mass Public Shootings (U.S., Canada, and Europe, 2009-2015)

    United States — 0.058
    Albania — 0
    Austria — 0
    Belgium — 0
    Czech Republic — 0
    Finland — 0
    France — 0
    Germany — 0
    Italy — 0
    Macedonia — 0
    Netherlands — 0
    Norway — 0
    Russia — 0
    Serbia — 0
    Slovakia — 0
    Switzerland — 0
    United Kingdom — 0

Using the median analysis, the United States is the only country examined that shows a propensity for mass shootings. The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger.

Other ways to display this data would be:

- group Europe into 1

- split the US into states

- display error bars

- take 95% lower bound assuming a normal distribution

https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

> Using the median surely goes too far the other way though, discounting the fact that the US is far larger than any of those countries except Russia. Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years, it's far bigger.

The stats are deaths per million people.

That doesn't make the criticism invalid - even if the deaths are weighted by population, choosing the median is far more likely to give a non-zero value for larger countries.

Please explain. I really cant see how that might be the case.

Consider cutting the US into pieces whilst maintaining the overall mass-shooting rate. As it decreases in size the average time-between-mass-shootings will increase. As you continue to decrease the size, that time will increase above a year and you'll start getting zero mass-shooting deaths per year. Continue decreasing the size futher and you'll get >3 years with zero mass shootings, at which point these microcosms of the US will have a median of zero, and will be indistinguishable from the European countries in the table.

Note that this is true even though each mini-US continues to have the same per-capita shooting death rate.

But that's absurd, since each of those mini-US countries has the same problem as the whole US. Picking the median has just hidden the data. I suggested 4 alternative ways to express this.

It's the exact opposite.

Measuring smaller regions can lead to an increase of the median.

For example Norway only had one mass shooting in the past 10 years, while there have been 25 major mass shootings in the US in the same time span, in 2022 alone there have been 22 mass shootings in USA[1], but only 3 in the entire Europe - 746 million people -, including one in Russia and one in Ukraine, and only 1 (one) in EU[2] (so basically in US it's 22x more likely for a mass shooting to happen compared to Ukraine, Russia and the whole EU, at least in 2022, until now)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2022_mass_shootings_i...

But, being Norway so small (there are 5 million people there) if we count the median for Norway only it goes up to 1.888 deaths/million over the 10 years, even though it's been a single event, perpetrated basically by a nazi terrorist, it's not a systemic problem like in the US, where normal regular people buy a shotgun and start shooting at everybody, including kids at school.

Remember: we are counting incidents that kill people, so having consecutive years without mass shootings it's something all developed countries should try to achieve, it's not just stats and numbers, it's people lives!

In my country that counts 60 million residents (and over 9 million guns), there have been only 3 (three) public mass shootings since 1982! one of which perpetrated by the clan Casalesi (a mob family) in a conflict between Camorra and African criminal gangs, another was the attack on the Great Synagogue of Rome perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists and only one by a private citizen, with mental health issues.

Spot the differences with US.

> even if the deaths are weighted by population, choosing the median is far more likely to give a non-zero value for larger countries.

the reasoning is well explained in the link I posted.

The main reason, for those who don't want to read it or went straight to comments without reading my post in full, is that

*The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.*

If that doesn't scare people enough, maybe this[1] or this[2] will.

[1] https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/number-mass-...

[2] https://yubanet.com/usa/over-70-of-mass-shootings-in-develop...

Over 70% of mass shootings in developed countries happen in the US, international analysis shows

“Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem, particularly in relation to other developed countries.”

> it's far bigger

It's also the only country in the West were regularly every year there are a few mass shootings.

That's the real problem, they have normalized it, all other countries have usually zero mass shootings for many consecutive years.

What matters is that USA can't stop them.

> Of course the US is less likely to have shooting-free years

Not bigger than

Albania + Austria + Belgium + Czech Republic + Finland + France + Germany + Italy + Macedonia + Netherlands + Norway + Serbia + Slovakia + Switzerland + United Kingdom = ~363 million people

USA = ~330 million people

---

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People:

Team Europe (363 million people) = 0

USA (330 million people) = 0.058

p.s. read the study I linked

The thing is, individual states mostly don't have shooting free years.

The US also has a larger population then Russia.

> https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

  phat = 1.0*pos/n

There is something disturbing about that line. While my wish to believe the article was strong, it makes me want to check the claims.

It seems a misdirection to use median across years as we have averages available. It's more precise and more readable but probably doesn't align with the policies you want to push:

    Norway — 1.888
    Serbia — 0.381
    France — 0.347
    Macedonia — 0.337
    Albania — 0.206
    Slovakia — 0.185
    Switzerland — 0.142
    Finland — 0.132
    Belgium — 0.128
    Czech Republic — 0.123
    United States — 0.089
    Austria — 0.068
    Netherlands — 0.051
    Canada — 0.032
    England — 0.027
    Germany — 0.023
    Russia — 0.012
    Italy — 0.009

Same website: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

But how else would you make the US greater than zero and all the other countries zero?

Also from the same website

Many statisticians believe the reason the CRPC study's results seem so counterintuitive is that they are incorrect. One of the more detailed analyses appeared on the fact-checking website snopes.com and concluded that the CRPC report used “inappropriate statistical methods” which led to misleading results.

Brazil would have a 0.25 average. So much better than Norway! Can't argue against "more precise and more readable" data.

"A more important oversight was the report's use of average deaths per capita instead of a more stable metric. Because of the smaller populations of most European countries, individual events in those countries had statistically oversized influence and warped the results. For example, Norway’s world-leading annual rate was due to a single devastating 2011 event, in which far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. Norway had zero mass shootings in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015."

On the contrary, median is a much better indication of central tendency here than mean. It is also not less "precise", both statistics are given to the same three decimal places here.

IMO I think the fact that the numbers are so low shows that people should stop giving a shit about death by guns by civilians. I wish humanity put as much focus about the obesity & diabetes crisis, car deaths, slipping in the bathtub, murder by government policy and war than they did about guns. Guns are flashy, but infinitesimal compared to the actual causes of early death.

The dirty secret of gun control policies is they do not much at all. Gun control policies that reduce actual human death are mostly about impulsive suicide prevention, and if you get rid of the guns, I'm guessing a substitution effect would start happening anyway. When you really dig into it, most non-government caused gun death comes from mental health issues, economic inequality, organized crime shootouts and suicide, and those things are not solved by making guns harder to get, beyond some suicide impulse prevention.

You are right. People care about things that most likely will never kill them while continuing to eat a diet that will very likely result in disease and an early death.

> IMO I think the fact that the numbers are so low shows that people should stop giving a shit about death by guns by civilians

They are usually zero in many developed countries and usually non zero in others(I mean one here).

So giving a shit about it actually have an impact.

It can make the difference between your kids coming home from school or not.

Gun violence in US kills.more people than soldiers at war.

Should we stop giving a shit about war too?

I think it's shows that the average US mentality is cynical about other people's lives exactly because people don't give a shit.

Obesity is a problem of quality of food, if McDonalds cost less than vegetables and poor people often can't afford healthy options of course there are going to be consequences. But the solution is not throwing money at the problem (food stamps) it's in a shift in culture, which US society is apparently not able to do, because nobody gives a shit. They are good at campaigning to deny abortion to women, but not to make healthy food available to everybody regardless of the census. Maybe it's too a socialist option for them.

> Guns are flashy, but infinitesimal compared to the actual causes of early death.

That's completely untrue. And, again, it shows the cult around guns that some people appear to be sucked in.

Guns Became the Leading Cause of Death for American Children and Teens in 2020

https://time.com/6170864/cause-of-death-children-guns/

To be fair livable probably means the nice parts of the American city. Most American city have nice parts and bad parts, where life in the bad parts can sometimes be as bad as living in a third world. Take Chiraq for example, or even Detroit. Schools have metal detectors to prevent weapons from being brought in, even if there isn’t a risk of mass shooting.

Third world cities tend to have "nice parts" as well. Chances are they are even nicer, by some metrics.

You're right, relatively rare.

However, the background threat of it and cultural acceptance of guns over there would be intolerable for me (from a liveability perspective).

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