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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, everyone I know in the US who owns firearms - which is basically everyone I know here - takes safety and knowledge of the laws around storing/carrying/brandishing/firing them very seriously. But the sheer scale of the US population and the absolute number of guns is just difficult to conceive of from a European perspective. We have something like 60 privately owned guns in this country for every person in the Czech Republic. So even if only 1% of our gun-owning population were irresponsible or criminal with them, it would still add up to a lot of deaths every day.

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Oh another “The US is big” post.

The EU has 30% more people

There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.

There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.

There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.

Does that include places like Switzerland, where every male is issued with a gun as part of their national service/canton militia?

I think the cultural problem is everyone wants to be like Stallone or Arnie, which would suggest the US population has an inferiority complex towards the old world.

No. Switzerland isn’t in the EU. Include non EU countries and the population and number of guns is even larger, but gun homicides don’t change much.

Even gun suicides are far higher in the US per capita and per gun than in the EU.

The US has a gun fetish. People sleep with them for crying out loud!

hey now, if i don't sleep with the thing, how am i gonna grab it when i'm asleep?

I took “sleep with” as a sexual thing but you’re right, it’s probably referring to nightstand guns or the famous bedshotty.

Worth noting, it is impossible to both have a gun for home defense, and be a "responsible" gun owner. Being a responsible gun owner implies the guns are properly locked up, away from ammunition, because kids regularly play with daddy's guns and kill each other and themselves, but if your gun is locked up in a safe separately from it's ammo like it is often legally required to be, there's no way you can actually use it for home defense.

But everyone still claims they are "A responsible gun owner" because all that actually means to the gun culture in the US is that you are white or rural or conservative.

> There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.

> There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.

gonna need a fact-check on these claims, please, because initial googling reveals these are, at the very least, false or misleading

I live in the Northeast US and very few people have guns here.

Incidentally, even if it is difficult to purchase a gun, it's trivial to order a crossbow or airbow, which has just as much 1-shot stopping power (although, of course, after that 1 shot, reload can be a problem, less so with the airbow)

Depends where in the Northeast you are! Half the people in Vermont own a gun, New Hampshire and Maine aren’t much different. NY/RI/MA/CT/NJ have relatively low gun ownership rates, for sure.

What did you find in your search? At least, the gun count seems pretty close, as far as I could tell.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/05/which-european-country-b...

> Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.

> The European Union's 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017.

And the “20 times as many murders” is not right, but seems to be pretty close if they were just taking about firearms homicides.

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-....

> Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole.

I also live in the Northeast, but that’s a point against when talking about this stuff; when you live in the only reasonably run part of the US, it is easy to misunderstand how ridiculous things are in much of the country.

Gun ownership is not evenly distributed. Their are as many guns as citizens in the US, but out of ten people, 8 have no guns, 1 has a single handgun, and 1 has 10 guns.

That isn’t really a fact-checking issue, though, it is an alternative interpretation of the data. I think your post is a fine way to begin a reasonable argument.

I actually don’t care to argue back. I object to the argument-less fact check request and insinuation that the figures are misleading, on principle. It is annoying to give your conversation partners homework for no reason.

Nobody really lives in Montana so that's not a big surprise.

I think it's playing a similar argument as the GP with US-guns-per-Czech-person. OK, Czechia is a bigger part of Europe than Montana is of US, but it looks as if Montana was picked to show how the original argument is invalid.

just some dental floss tycoons

Same, but I suspect there's a bit of selection bias going on there in both our cases. I just don't think I'd be able to sustain a friendship with the kind of person who owns guns and handles them irresponsibly, and I expect the same might be true of you.

You’re spot on - everyone who I know who “does gun” has an extremely hostile reaction to people who handle them irresponsibly.

And those people are often irresponsible in many other ways, too.

Except everyone who "has a hostile reaction to people who handle guns irresponsibly" has a story of a range or person they know who does exactly that, and their response is simply to stay away, instead of narcing on them and making the community safer at the expense of being a tattle tale.

So there are plenty of people who call themselves "responsible gun owners" but turn a complete blind eye to bad behavior.

Or they will keep a loaded gun in their bedroom for home defense, something that is outright NOT responsible gun owner behavior, yet is the primary cited reason people own guns in the US.

I guess that seems reasonable, but now it makes me wonder about the graph - it can't be that the people who take gun ownership and security safety only know people who do likewise - how many people who take these matters seriously still have friends they hang out with who take it less seriously.

Why? Well bad apples and stuff, it's hard to believe perfect discipline is maintained when some of those around you have less than perfect discipline.

It seems like a question that one could probably get pretty close to answering (although not perfect).

Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances - and anyone I meet who I chance to talk about guns with - there is a very strong self-reinforcing culture of safe handling and responsibility. People will come down incredibly hard on anyone who seems inept or who they even hear speaking about some kind of irresponsible behavior. Now, I'd say about half of these are ex-military people, but they set a standard and keep other people in line. Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country. But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult. People are well aware that it's their life or their freedom are stake if they mess up. I know guys who get drunk as skunks and get in bar fights, but who would never carry their gun when they go out drinking, or anywhere besides the woods.

> But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult.

"Everyone"?

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

> Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances

This is significantly biasing your perspective, and I don’t think you quite realize by how much.

There are many, many gun owners who are incompetent and irresponsible. There is an entire spectrum, and it’s not a purely bimodal distribution with 95% safety-conscious owners and 5% hoodlums.

>Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country.

well ok, I don't know but there are stats on how many adults have guns, and there are stats on misuses of guns. I suppose a clever statistician would be able to get to some potential overview of how many people who own guns have decent discipline?

Not saying that's you but someone on this site. It is difficult to find anything with a query on Google nowadays, but the things I do find - like https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ implies to me that the amount of the population that maintains your level of discipline is very low.

The reality is that nearly every "responsible gun owner" knows gun owners who are not responsible, and usually just ignore that unfortunate reality. None of my family members, including the ones who "take safety seriously" and lock up their stuff from their kids, would EVER narc on the family member who thinks shooting up their back yard while drunk or high is okay. They rationalize this through all sorts of "but they aren't hurting anyone" wishful thinking, ignoring that being irresponsible with a gun in one way usually means they are being dangerous with firearms in other ways.

So many people provide direct evidence that they do not respect the danger or power of firearms, and most gun owners just look the other way.

>takes safety and knowledge of the laws around storing/carrying/brandishing/firing them very seriously.

What matters is what happens when their friend does something dangerous with a gun, and they don't seem to care. My entire family is "responsible gun owner" including my brother who definitely seems to care about safety, but all that goes out the window when another family member brings out the guns at a family BBQ while absolutely drunk. You can bet your ass nobody said anything. If you aren't willing to narc on irresponsible gun behavior, you ARE NOT a responsible gun owner.

Also, Kyle Rittenhouse took a gun across several state lines, possibly stirred up shit, got shot at, and killed the person doing so. While the actual event of shooting was ruled "self defense", how is it "responsible" to take your firearm to a protest with the intent of being a counter protester. If "Anti fa" did such a thing, these people would riot, but Rittenhouse was invited to talk at fucking CPAC.

That's the kind of person these people lionize. They are envious that he was able to kill someone with a gun and get away with it. They want to be him.

> In fairness, everyone I know in the US who owns firearms - which is basically everyone I know here

You are not representative, as only one-third of individuals, and 42% of US households, own a firearm:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...

* https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

Gun owners are in the minority of the population.

Drill down to state levels, or further to local areas, and those numbers change tremendously. In many parts of the country gun ownership is almost universal.

And you might not even know; not everyone tells everyone that they own a gun.

Assume those numbers are wrong. Many gun owners lie on various polls and surveys when asked about firearms ownership. The reason generally being a certain level of paranoia about firearms and firearms owners being cataloged in a way that could support a hypothetical future confiscation effort.

Firearms owners may well still be in the minority, but there's probably a fair bit of error there.

Does that include children in the population?

Yeah, my father keeps everything locked in a safe, but the other day, some cops knocked on my door asking if I knew anything about a gun that was stolen from the passenger seat of an unlocked truck parked across the street.

I'm sure everyone says they take these things seriously, and I'm sure you're a fine upstanding citizen who mostly interacts with other fine, upstanding citizens. However, we do know, due to the number of offenses made public thanks to Florida's Sunshine law and other public sources, that we simply can't make the generalization that people take these gun safety measures seriously.

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