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Comment by tim-kt | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting analogy. I'm opposed to guns in every household because we have the police which is meant to give security to people. There, we allow gun use, but under stricter conditions. The majority agrees that this is right, so the system works.

What is "the police" on the level of countries? There is no majority that agrees that, e. g., the NATO can serve as the police. It feels like on this level, we live in an anarchy with only very few actors who don't really want to live together. So maybe nukes are an option, although I don't like it.

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A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does: but not for a simple reason like “because we have the police which is meant to give security to people”

A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”

People in such a community lack guns but they do have things like a working public health system, decent education, daily encounters with other people that are positive and so on.

The threat of police shootings is not what makes a safe society safe.

Constructive, open and fair trade is the equivalent at an international level. Cooperative and trusting. Not staring down the barrel of each other’s guns.

> A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does

Except this isn't borne out in the data. Look at deeply conservative places where guns are literally everywhere, and you'll see very low crime rates compared to cities with strict gun control.

And why? Well, as a criminal, I'd be loathe to try something when there's a good chance the victim is armed.

In your perfect community scenario, a single armed criminal would wreak havoc, completely unopposed.

Sounds more like urban vs rural with respect to crime rates than guns or not.

These hypothetical places have "low" crime rates because they have low population density, not because people are armed.

Why do Canada and Europe have dramatically lower violent crime rates despite having a mostly unarmed population?

Canada is in no way "mostly unarmed". ~20% of households have a gun. Some countries in Europe also have high ownership rates as well (like Finland).

Rifles. For hunting. Not handguns and AR15s.

Grew up rural Alberta with rifles around the house all the time, in plain view. For shooting game. Not a word was ever uttered about "defending ourselves" with guns... From who?

Hell, we left our door unlocked when we left the house unless it was overnight.

Good grief. Nothing is sadder than people valorizing social/cultural breakdown.

"Peace, order, and good government."

AR-15 is relatively popular for hunting in the US though?

I don't lock my house or my car habitually, never had a problem, never felt the need to keep a weapon either, but I know plenty of people that live in the city that have been robbed or assaulted and do feel the need to carry though. I can't really blame them for not relying on police.

Sportsmen use long guns like 30’6 for big game hunting (elk, deer, antelope) out west. Shots over 100 yards require a large cartridge like that. AR-15 are used in the southern states for wild hogs and varmints, or coyotes. Not exactly trophy hunters. I’m just saying the popularity of the AR-15 is not driven by hunters.

.350 Legend is a rising hunting round for deer with upper receivers that can be slapped onto a common AR-15 lower.

Refers to data, doesn’t reference data.

I'm citation heavy, but it's also a fact I wouldn't cite as I think/thought it was fairly common knowledge. Here [1] is some random report on it. There's a huge difference in criminality rates between urban and rural, and this applies to most of everywhere in the world.

[1] - https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...

As someone with roots in a rural area, there’s a lot of crime in such places that is simply never found out (sparse population == fewer opportunities to be caught), is an “open secret” that never gets resolved, is quietly swept under the rug, etc, sometimes even involving local law enforcement. As a result, there’s plenty in the data worth questioning.

This is definitely true, and that report works to control for it. The reason there's no homicide data listed on that report is because it's based on the National Crime Victimization Survey. It surveys people on their victimization instead of relying on police reports. Police reports would make the differences appear even larger.

Although on this topic I'd also add that urban areas have a similar issue. Criminals know that the overwhelming majority of crime goes unpunished, while people have a reality deluded by shows like CSI. Homicides, for instance, have the highest clearance rate, by far. And it's 47.5%. [1] Vehicular theft has the worst at 6.6%. If you end up with your window busted out and everything that's not strapped down stolen, there's no real point reporting it to the police unless necessary for an insurance claim because you're never getting that stuff back, and the thief is never getting caught.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearance_rate#In_the_United_S...

Why are we assuming that rural areas have more gun per capita than urban areas? Nothing in that report goes into that topic.

Speaking of data: States with shall-issue conceal carry permits see higher rates of gun violence than may-issue states.

Source: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.3040...

> A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”

That's also not necessarily the point I'm making. Suppose you are in a society where a small part of people are bad actors, for whatever reason. They will break and enter, murder, and rape. You want to protect the rest of the society against these bad actors. You can now equip everyone with weapons so they may defend themselves. That also enables the bad actors to use said weapons because we don't know who really know who is a bad actor (at least not the ones that didn't commit any crimes yet). Or you give weapons only to a small part of society, where you enforce strict gun laws.

The alternative is to reduce the number of bad actors and this is, in part, fulfilled by the conditions that you are describing. But how do I reduce the number of state leaders that are willing to shoot each other? I guess it's what you are saying, namely constructive, open, and fair trade. But we're not really making progress in that direction it seems.

> I'm opposed to guns in every household because we have the police which is meant to give security to people

You're naive. The police (or whatever you call it) is meant for inward force projection of the state. Your security is not the main concern.

Besides the police works too slowly to truly protect you when SHTF. Sometimes even a minute or two is the difference between you being alive or dead.

> Sometimes even a minute or two is the difference between you being alive or dead.

This is especially true when you are likely to have guns in the home. I'm countries with virtually no private ownership of guns, it is extraordinarily unlikely to be in life threatening danger in your home.

Nobody has knives? Axes? Baseball bats? Where do you live, I wanna come visit.

> This is especially true when you are likely to have guns in the home

Citation needed, because I highly doubt you're correct.

People who rob you with baseball bats and axes, and don't even think about the possibility that you'll have a gun, don't feel the need to kill you at any suspicious twitch. The axes and knives and baseball bats are there to have clear superiority, and they know you can't really harm them. So, unless you actually try to fight, you're quite safe from a physical perspective.

Conversely, if people with guns think there's a decent chance you have a gun too, they'll be terrified of any move you make and have a high chance of misinterpreting any gesture you make into violence. So there is much higher tension.

Of course, there is a possibility that you're being attacked by a crazed murderer - in which case you're probably going to die either way. But this happens vastly, vastly less often that robbery.

You can take a look at crime stats from even the poorest European countries. The proof that lack of gun ownership in no way causes more violent crime is evident. Everything I just added above is an explanation of why this happens, but the fact it happens is not up for debate.

The stability of society and the law based facilitation of peace are absolutely within the mission of police forces and highly facilitative to the prosperity of a society.

I was once involved with a project that returned determination of land ownership from people's physical custody to the courts and the resulting drops in assault and homicide rates (for the entire country) was in the double digits over a period of months.

Wow, super interesting! Where was this if I might ask?

Sorry for the delay but this is such a public setting. The governments involved never approved the release of that information.

Out of curiosity, where do you live that your perception of life is one of SHTF constantly & unending murder in your city?

Hah ez. Syracuse or Rochester NY my boy. Sounds like it must be nice to live in a bubble and retort at your keyboard.

> Out of curiosity, where do you live that your perception of life is one of SHTF constantly & unending murder in your city?

If you re-read what I've wrote carefully you can observe I didn't refer once to my lived experience.

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