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Comment by Graphon1 | Hacker News Reader

> even in Japan somebody could make some kind of battery ignited home-made shotgun and kill Shinzo Abe

ok let's try data instead of feels. Per Capita, what is the number of mass shootings per year in the USA, and in Japan. I did't know the answer but asked Gemini.

The most recent year for which there is data, apparently, is 2023, during which there were 604 mass shootings in the USA, and 1 in Japan. Given the respective population counts, the per-capita rate of mass shootings in the United States was about 225 times higher than in Japan.

Given that, are you confident that your observation that "one guy made a gun once in Japan" is a strong refutation of the idea that the US could reduce mass shootings by strengthening regulations?

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I think you're basically ignoring my point - that increasing numbers of targeted assassinations are not really a gun control issue (today's was seemingly a single shot, so things being discussed in this thread seem pretty not related), but a sign of major societal problems that need to be addressed.

Your response seems very off topic in focusing on "mass shootings" which are at best an ill-defined marketing term created to lump family annihilation suicides with more public mass casualty events like the pulse nightclub shooting in order to launder dubious policies.

But my whole original comment said nothing about mass shootings to begin with.

> I think you're basically ignoring my point

You didn’t clarify that by “everything that’s happening” as the preface to your suggestion that gun control is pointless you specifically meant “political assassination and no other gun deaths”. It’s reasonable that someone would see you say that gun regulation wouldn’t have an effect on gun deaths and think that you were talking about gun deaths generally.

It would actually be bizarre for a reader to read “everything that’s happening” and think “the person that wrote this is referring to the first shooting at a school today and specifically excluding the second shooting at a school today”

Strong gun regulations have a couple of orders of magnitude impact on one type of gun violence, but you think that’s irrelevant and off-topic to whether strong gun regulations would have an impact on another form of gun violence?

How could that make any sense?

You’re quoting statistics that are irrelevant to the point. Mass shootings are not political violence.

I can come up with a multitude of political violence examples in countries with strict weapons laws - New Zealand, France, Japan. Then if you add in other weapons - cars, knives, bombs, the list gets even longer.

The point is - gun control won’t stop political violence. Perpetrators will use other means at their disposal.

> The point is - gun control won’t stop political violence. Perpetrators will use other means at their disposal.

Technically true. But gun control means political violence will have to engage much closer and is less likely to be as deadly. Do we want more or less death+maiming in our political violence?

You’re missing the forest for the trees.

The issue is political violence. Whether it’s done up close or far away is a distraction from the fact it exists.

Am I? The forest view is that political violence is an inevitable part of life. And that outlawing guns makes them less accessible and therefore less likely to be used in any violent interactions.

You are.

No, political violence isn't an "inevitable part of life".

Violence is part of human nature. So is politics. I'd rather they didn't mix, and we take reasonable measures to stop all violence. But I don't see how we can make violence impossible without changing human nature.

Just to be clear political violence is a broad umbrella of many actions, including violent protest and political assassinations. One can be more of an issue than the other. Personally, in my opinion it’s hard to political violence as a whole is an “issue” when looking from a historically context. However, I do think that political assassination specifically is something that has been an issue historically.

there are plenty of regulations already. what we need is to start enforcing them. and also mental heath destigmatization and assistance, since it's a mental health problem, not a gun problem.

Why cannot it be both? You definitely have a gun problem, and also a mental health problem. And you even have a mentality problem by thinking that gun is fine on you just to be safe, which is quite acceptable thought over there - the reaction of Americans vs Europeans to the fact that somebody has a gun on them in a friendly group is quite stark. But you have also a stochastic terrorism problem, a grifter problem, an inequality problem, an almost zero social net problem, many monopoly problems. All of these exaggerate your murder problem.

And you clearly have a “too few people want to solve these” problem. Most of you even voted to the person who campaigned that he wants to make these worse.

This won’t be solved, and will it be made worse in America for the next decade for sure.

This was not a mass shooting.

I think the fact that this wasn't a mass shooting makes it even worse.

What an unhinged thing to say.

Sorry, upon re-reading my comment, I communicated my thought incorrectly.

My intention was to point out that the not-mass shooting overshadowed the mass shooting in the news. Obviously both are bad, but 3 people dying in a single shooting incident is worse than 1 person dying in a single shooting incident, yet the 1 person dying is the one that gets the news coverage.

People aren't equal in the eyes of the public media. News at eleven.

I think that points out something even more horrifying about the American news cycle. A social media influencer being killed vs high school students being killed. Perhaps that's a bit reductive but I feel like the HS shooting ought to be a LOT more shocking, if it weren't a headline that we sadly have become somewhat blind to.

Asking geminy is like copy pasting a random reddit comment. Fine if it links the resource, not fine otherwise.

How come there’s no gun violence in prison but plenty of stabbings? Prison is the highest concentration of violent criminals and yet no gun violence. To quote the great Eddie Izzard, “you can’t just walk up to someone and yell BANG. The gun helps”.

I can't tell if your comment is serious. Did you know that if everyone lived in a 7x7 cell they couldn't leave there'd be no drunk driving deaths too?

There’s positives to cars that far outweigh the cost of drunk driving. Gun ownership does not “far outweigh” its consequences.

I will just casually ignore your reductionist argument, I’m sure you’ll understand. Reasonable people don’t argue that way as all arguments would just … boil down to nothing.

It's hard to take your argument seriously given that (a) prisons are an intentional police state and a generally unpleasant abode, (b) people are still violently dying in them anyway (well over double non-prison homicide rate even with somewhat effective dangerous property restrictions), (c) there's no sane way to apply prison levels of property restriction to the public at large outside of prisons (and we live in a world where the ability to fabricate weapons at home grows day by day), (d) whether gun ownership outweighs its downsides is as similarly complex and judgement driven a question as whether cars do: both have complex downside and benefits with situational and unclear boundaries. That people can with a straight face "why should anyone need a gun" in a country with food deserts and regions with deer overpopulation problems while often treating "why should anyone need a Lamborghini?" as an offensive or silly question only illustrates.

> US could reduce mass shootings by strengthening regulations?

How? without decreasing access for sane people or using any of the previous talking points that have been rejected previously. now’s the time to suggest real change that could have an effect but suggesting the tired “no black rifles” will still go nowhere.

New regulation: no private citizens can possess guns, and police must account for every bullet and firearm.

Granted, this decreases access for everyone. But I'd argue sane people would not demand private gun ownership in today's environment.

If every adult that could carry a gun did, there would be much less mass shooting. It would be minimized shooting, in fact.

This seems tenuous and directionally wrong based on priors. What evidence do you have for this?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/multimedia/collection/good-g...

Now, how about your evidence?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/5504/

https://rockinst.org/blog/public-mass-shootings-around-the-w...

The US is an outlier in how many guns we own, with about 1/3 of American adults owning guns, and we are also an extreme outlier in mass shootings unless you compare us to places that lack rule of law. How many more people need guns before that mass shooting number goes down to 0, do you think?

Given your link, I'd say every shooting where the bad guy didn't get shot is evidence in the opposite direction? Seems to me there's more of those than your 11 examples.

That would only be true in a world where every single human is able to regulate their angry emotions immediately. But that is so far away from human nature...

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