Guns and Violence | Hacker News Reader

Guns and Violence

rajivsethi.substack.com

12 pointsneehao12 comments

> Rational deliberation and cold calculation may be relevant for property crimes, he argues, but violence results from decisions that are far more impulsive and spontaneous

After watching about 100 hours of various body cam footage on YouTube, I totally agree. In so many cases the interaction with police escalates absolutely spontaneously, without any sort of clear intent to escalate from either side.

"There are more guns in America than people, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. But this doesn’t mean that gun violence lies outside the scope of feasible public policy initiatives."

The problem is, nobody is really supporting those other initiatives either. For decades we have seen interventions like Operation Ceasefire in Boston produce dramatic results. Someone had to fund it, but very few want to. Everytown for Gun Safety doesn't seem to contribute to these programs from what I see on the website. Likewise, the Bill Gates supports various charities and donates millions to support gun laws, yet I'm not aware of any work done on funding these initiatives that show empirical evidence of working.

Nobody actually wants to fix crime.

We know there are a bunch of interventions with meaningful impacts on the crime rate. This ranges from actually keeping repeat offenders in jail to making preschool freely available.

Nobody does them. It isn't cost, there doesn't seem to generally be an ethical outcry, etc.

Just nobody actually wants to address the problem. They instead want to leverage crime to achieve some other goal. Actually fixing crime harms the ability to use crime to achieve other ends.

So it goes.

> in low income neighborhoods, shootings go down by something like thirty percent in the vicinity of those scary vacant lots turned into pocket parks compared to similarly scary places that weren't fixed up

> the importance of foot patrol as a source of paid eyes on the street…this role may be played by “agencies other than the police.”

Has anyone studied construction sites? If we have a crew of workers, non-police “paid eyes on the street” for several months while they’re redoing a road, and this idea works, then would we see lower crime rates temporarily while the construction job is active?

fun fact total chicago pd officers ~ 12k total arrests per year ~ 48k arrest per officer per year ~ 4 Jens has a figure of 3 from 2022: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/02/the-ori...

Well, being a "pathological pragmatist" one could have thought that he would advocate to lower gun violence by getting rid of the guns, rather than trying to demonstrate that people who live in nice and clean places are magically less violent.

So... meh.

Switzerland is packed with guns to the brim. Gun violence there doesn’t exist.

Why?

Because they usually don't get to keep the ammo at home.

And if they do, there are strict rules about counting it when taking home, and when bringing it back to e.g. annual shooting contests, etc.

Source: Spent my first 30 years in CH.

The ammo thing is for the service rifle. Switzerland also has a very high private ownership level at least compared to the rest of Europe, and by they can keep ammunition at home (but secured, like the weapons).

What you are saying applies to militia/military-issued weapons. Private citizens with gun permit can buy ammo freely.

Here: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/many-guns-few-shootings...

Scroll down to “ I’ve heard that there are strict limitations on ammunition in Switzerland. Who can buy ammunition and how much can they acquire?”, the answer to which basically boils down to: anyone with a valid permit.

> What you are saying applies to militia/military-issued weapons

Which is what the 2A ding-dongs are usually referring to when they pipe up with the usual "Switzerland has lots of guns!" nonsense.

> which basically boils down to: anyone with a valid permit.

Plus restrictions on what kind of ammo, and the seller can request they perform a background check.

> Which is what the 2A ding-dongs are usually referring to when they pipe up with the usual "Switzerland has lots of guns!" nonsense.

No. It applies to weapons issued by the state.

> Plus restrictions on what kind of ammo, and the seller can request they perform a background check.

Man, it’s as easy to buy ammo in Switzerland as in the US. You can argue on all these minor points about background checks etc (btw majority of high profile shootings in the US are done with legal arms!), but it has nothing to do with reality.

Something else is at play here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com