Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

A bit perspective:

Germany has around 82 million people.

Estimated 45 Million shooting weapons are in possession. Many of them illegal (for example people inherited weapons from their parents but did not register them, weapons were imported from East Europe or illegally left behind by the leaving soviet army).

The ownnership is highly regulated. If you want to buy a weapon, you need a permission a Waffenschein and/or Waffenbesitzkarte (owner registration). A 'Waffenschein' is a permission to carry a gun in public. This permission is usually only given to Police, professional bodyguards or similar. A Waffenbesitzkarte allows you to have a weapon for sports (or similar) and you are only allowed to carry the weapon in a closed and sealed transport box without ammunition. To get a Waffenbeitzkarte is not that easy - for example if you are under 25 you need a psychological check.

Thus the only shooting weapons one ever sees in public is usually from the police or a forester.

Around 20000 crimes are done with weapons. This is 0.3% of all crimes. At 4500 crimes there is some shooting.

In the statistics cited by DER SPIEGEL ( http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/polizei-schoss-2011-se... ) it is mentioned that the police shot 8812 times at animals. Almost all these cases were animals who had serious injuries due to traffic accidents.

But many Germany use weapons for sports. For entertainment see this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyq90LEZe4k

lived for 3 years in germany; i was extremely clubbing. Forget shooting you don't see much fighting neither. In comparison, in my one year in England, I witnessed 5 club fights, and in Russia two gun fights. It seems mostly an attitude of the society towards violence and guns. On the other side, in Germany, you frequently see your neighbor calling the police if you make some noise.

In my experience, violence in the UK tends to be concentrated at very specific times and places - generally city and town centers between 11pm and 3am on a Friday and Saturday night.

Avoid these times and places and you'll never see a fight, go to the worst of these places and there will be multiple fights. As for culture - where I grew up (70s/80s, small town, North of Scotland, fishing and oil as main employers) there was a lot of fist fights but I never heard or saw anyone using a knife - I suspect that has changed.

> violence in the UK tends to be concentrated at very specific times and places

> but I never heard or saw anyone using a knife - I suspect that has changed.

Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to say that Glasgow is the "knife crime capitol of Europe".

Here's a map showing knife crimes, and arrests. (Read the numbers for offences.) There are about 570,000 people in Glasgow.

(http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=201273553307...)

There are considerable cultural differences between Glasgow and the rest of Scotland. For example, I grew up in rural Moray and had never encountered sectarianism until I moved to Edinburgh - and it's very tame here compared to the West.

Glasgow was also infamous for organised crime and territorial gang violence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_United_Kingdom#Gla...

The 'knife crime capital of Europe' thing is largely an invention of the tabloids. There have been a lot of posession offences reported, but in large part this is because of more police stop&search. What's more interesting is the violent crime statistics, and the way the press gets its knife/murder capital of europe headlines by abusing them.

One way they do this is by picking numbers from different reports, and combining them in ways that don't make sense. For example: one of the Daily Record's 'murder capital' articles was based on taking the number of murders in the greater Glasgow area, and dividing it by the population of the central Glasgow area (590,000 instead of 1.2m!) and then feigning surprise when the murder rate seems to be double the European average.

They've also used changes in the very small numbers involved to generate headlines; a difference of 5 murders from one year to another doesn't sound much, but it can when the change is 25%! (straight to the front page)

While there is violence - particularly around the Old Firm football matches and when the nightclubs spill onto the streets - its not as different as the local rags would have you believe; their job is selling papers, and fearmongering does it.

I spent almost 2 years in Glasgow. I read the frightening headlines before coming there, the headlines don't match the reality. Most of the violence occurs in the East side of town and on weekends around certain clubs. Frankly, there are many times I feel less safe throughout San Francisco. Glasgow has much fewer panhandlers and your really have to try hard to get into the more dangerous parts of town, unlike SF where 2 or 3 blocks in the wrong direction can create a fairly uncomfortable situation.

I think the UKs main problem is alcohol abuse, which has a tendency to fuel violence - thankfully the violence is mostly limited to pointy things due to guns being banned.

It's not so much alcohol consumption per se as the culture. In the UK, and in general in much of historically protestant northern Europe, there is a very deeply ingrained culture where Bad Things will happen if you drink; the flip side of that is that if you do drink, it is much more socially acceptable to go out and get in a fight (after all, that's what you do when you're drunk, right?). In many Mediterranean cultures people do not consume significantly less alcohol (normally in the form of wine, of course), but people are generally more relaxed about this, and as a consequence there is less binge drinking and fewer drunken brawls.

Here is a report on this: http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking7.html, or, for a less technical explanation, see Kate Fox's Watching the English

There's also a food culture there and alcohol gtts consumed with a meal, whereas in the UK people scorn having food when it takes up drinking time - "eating is cheating" I've heard from many a folk.

"In the UK, and in general in much of historically protestant northern Europe, there is a very deeply ingrained culture where Bad Things will happen if you drink"

Possibly the most inaccurate statement ever made on HN. :-)

Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not sure what you mean :). It's not like I'm making this stuff up, social anthropologists have known about "temperance cultures" for a long time. Ever notice how Mediterranean countries don't have a history of mass temperance movements, which have been very strong in Britain, the US and Scandinavia? Do you think it's a freak coincidence?

I think the op is making a joke about other things that happen when drunk...

I'd hardly describe temperance as ever having been the majority view across the UK. Indeed, even when districts were allowed to vote to be "dry" (under the Temperance (Scotland) Act 1913) relatively few did so.

Interestingly enough, one of the villages that did, Findochty, was close to where I grew up - and they only stopped being dry relatively recently.

So I would personally regard "temperance" as being the view of a small, but highly active, minority. We don't have a temperance culture but a drinking culture.

Sure, temperance has never been a majority view. But that is not the issue: the issue is that the culture is conducive to viewing alcohol consumption as something that will inevitably lead to the breakdown of social order. This is something that Mediterranean countries tend not to have.

"This is something that Mediterranean countries tend not to have."

Last time I checked a lot of Mediterranean countries frown upon the consumption of alcohol - even if they tolerate visiting Europeans consuming it in large quantities.

In many Mediterranean cultures people do not consume significantly less alcohol (normally in the form of wine, of course), but people are generally more relaxed about this, and as a consequence there is less binge drinking and fewer drunken brawls.

Unfortunately, that seems to be changing, both here in Portugal and, from what I can tell, also in Spain. Newer generations have changed their drinking patterns from wine to distilled drinks and from the couple of daily glasses to the full bottle on weekends, with all the issues (including health related) that carries.

It's a nice theory, but falls to pieces in say traditionally Catholic Ireland (history of powerful temperance movements also) and a cultural approach to alcohol which is if anything even more damaging than Britain's.

Ireland is a temperance culture as well (not surprisingly). Protestantism is not a necessary factor here, it's just that historically temperance cultures have tended to appear in Protestant countries, along with pietistic movements. I don't know enough about this to say whether religion has played a major role or if it's just a coincidence.

I grew up in a Mediterranean country and live in Northern Europe now and I think your observations about the different attitudes towards alcohol are very accurate.

Drinking is very common in Southern Europe, but there feels to be a very negative attitude towards drinking to the point where you lose control and do utterly stupid things. In Northern Europe, I have witnessed young people in many settings openly sharing stories of binge drinking, getting in fights, getting kicked out of bars etc. and laughing about them. When I was back in my hometown and shared some party stories they were generally encountered with shock.

Yeah, I've seen both sides as well; in the Netherlands we have this 'coma drinking' thing going on which is young people drinking until they pass out/fall into a coma. In southern Spain, people on average, during the week/weekend drink far far more than Dutch people drink, however they don't binge. It's just drinking from morning to night a few liquors, beers and bottles of wine, every day. While in NL a lot of people drink nothing all week and then go insane in the weekend. In the UK that's even worse. No idea why. Anyone?

Really? You use an article from an alcohol industry PR group to try to found your assertion that alcohol consumption doesn't impair judgement and raise the likelihood of destructive behavior?

Of course it does, it would be preposterous to contend otherwise. That doesn't mean the findings are null and void.

>Really? You use an article from an alcohol industry PR group to try to found your assertion that alcohol consumption doesn't impair judgement and raise the likelihood of destructive behavior?

No, mr knee-jerk-reaction, he used to it show something entirely different, namely different cultural ways to handling the issue.

Your "alcohol-is-the-devil" reaction is part of the problem, and indicative of the American/protestant attitude.

But they do seem to consider having a regular riot with the police as almost a tradition.

I'm led to believe that societally they are repressing their anger and aggression in reaction to WWII. The lack of bar fights and the number of shootings are strangely low. I think this is the most compelling explanation. It is known that the atrocities committed by their people during WWII weighs heavily on their psyche.

Down voting without providing a response to my comment or a without furthering the conversation in any way is the type of meaningless emotional response that down voting was meant to combat in the first place. You have not helped the conversation in any way and have not provided me with a reason to reconsider my assessment.

I did not downvote your original comment (only this one), however, here is why I think it might have been downvoted:

a) Your comment does not make sense: People only very few people who commited any war crimes in WW2 are even alive anymore. Germans these days learn about it in history class. While it still has some influence on their attitude towards nationalism, it is unlikely that it has any influence on their general aggressiveness.

b) This is a sensitive issue. It might have been considered offensive.

That's probably the dumbest thing I've read this year and the year is far from over. Congratulations.

Again, comments like these are why the down vote was created. Please be constructive with your feedback. Where do you think my assessment falls short?

It falls short by being rather incredible to start with — it's just plain weird to imagine that drunk Germans are spoiling to fight but are stopped by the thought of National Socialism — and lacking evidentiary support to lend it any additional credibility.

Despite what you may think, the war crimes during ww2 were not the result of a culture unique to Germany. For example, in my country, Holland, relatively more jews were killed, because the dutch people gave them less shelter than the german peope did, and were more likely to rat them out. Nazis got to power in Germany, but as a cultural movemet was a lot larger than just germany. And nobody cared about the jews: for example, not a sinle rail road track was targetted by any of the thousands of bombings by allied forces.

What happened should be in every euopean nations consience, and generally is.

Yes but I believe that psychologically these other European countries and peoples aren't as haunted by the identity of being vicious killers or conquerers. They see themselves as mere sidelines players and thereby sidestep the psychological burden that looms over the Germans, of being active and causal forces in the war and in the murdering of millions.

You do realize that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Germany citizens were not alive during World War II, right?

Are the numbers strangely low? In many parts of Europe the numbers are similar.

Generally in the German society there is a wish for security. The local authorities are made responsible for it. Other forms security are similar important: Not being poor, staying heathly, having enough to eat, ... These are also typically the more important topics at elections.

There is some background influence from WWII. The wish for security (not the security where the individual is responsible) and good government is a reaction. Another reaction is the work ethic.

> Estimated 45 Million shooting weapons are in possession.

Why are you suggesting that police should only shoot someone who has a gun?

Why are you suggesting that I'm suggesting that?

Because you start posted about gun ownership in Germany in response to "German police shot N people".

What is the relationship between German gun ownership and the number of people shot by German police?

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