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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

> (c) lots of routine mass murder incidents,

Your other points are valid but this one has been so highly politicized that inner city gang violence is classified as mass shooting, which is a completely different social issue that’s being co-opted in with the political violence issue and the mental health crisis. All of those problems are complex and have different root causes, implications and magnitudes, but activists like Everytown want to lump them together to portray a “Gun Problem” to pitch their forced solution, which is making it harder for law-abiding citizens to own guns.

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> this one has been so highly politicized that inner city gang violence is classified as mass shooting

As a non American, I am unfamiliar with your inner city gang violence.

If it involves guns being used to kill multiple people in one incident, this seems tautologically "mass murder", even if it's specifically also gang war.

(Then again, perhaps I should add "gang war" to my list examples of things where people sincerely argue if it counts as murder, along with normal war, assassination, abortion, and meat).

American gun control discourse basically completely ignores the reality that a huge amount of it is driven by gang violence and criminality. It is focused almost entirely on school shootings and things that suburbanite white people are afraid of. You're correct, they are mass shootings, but so many people aren't actually interested in stopping mass shootings on the whole, just the narrow class of them that may affect them.

I mean it is a Gun problem. Or rather many Gun problems. If guns were better regulated and we had less of them we would have a safer less violent society. Those other issues would still exist but would lead to less violence. Instead we have activists who claim that any gun laws are unconstitutional going even further then our very activist supreme court.

We already have a safer less violent society, it's found outside the cities.

> If guns were better regulated

We can't stop drug importation. What makes you think that we can stop guns?

> and we had less of them we would have a safer less violent society.

"less of them"? We can take away all of the deer rifles and not change US violence at all. A collector with 100 guns is not more dangerous than one with 25.

The vast majority of US gun violence is committed by people who are already involved in other illegal activities involving other illegal substances. It is absurd to think that they can be disarmed by legal means.

It takes about 1% of the "by physical volume" drug smuggling to provide them with a new gun per crime.

If anything guns are harder to ban than drugs (because they're easier to make and smuggle), and that was true before 3d printing became a thing.

> We can't stop drug importation. What makes you think that we can stop guns?

Hello, I'm British.

Better solutions don't have to be perfect, as the country of my birth demonstrates: still has drugs smuggled in, sometimes even has firearms, even a few mass shootings.

But firearms are banned so effectively that even the police don't routinely carry them — the handful of officers I've ever seen armed in the UK, in person, were all in airports.

The four nations of the UK combined had around 700 homicides in total in each recent year, which is about the same as Philidelphia plus half of Baltimore. It's not just because the US is more populous, the per-capita homicide rate in the UK is about 80% lower in the UK than in the US.

I know the UK is unusual — I'm in Berlin now, and the cops here have what looks like a pistol, not that I'd be able to distinguish it in the holster from a taser or a pistol shaped pepper spray — but there's a whole world of other ways to do things than what each of us takes for granted, and we can learn from each other if we don't shut out the possibility.

Once I ran the numbers, and the part of the UK that had American Armalite rifles being smuggled in to fuel an armed conflict, Northern Ireland, which also had armed troops on the streets with rules of engagement that allowed them to open fire on civilians, resulting in dead women and children, was still less deadly than Detroit during the 80s.

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