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Comment by timmytokyo | Hacker News Reader

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

An accurate statement. In places where guns are difficult to come by, you'll find knife crime in it's place. Take the knives away and it'd be fists.

>In places where guns are difficult to come by, you'll find knife crime in it's place.

By how much and how consequential exactly, and how would we know?

There were 14,650 gun deaths in the US in 2025 apparently. There were 205 homicides by knife in the UK in 2024-2025. [0][1]. Check their populations. US gun deaths per capita seem to exceed UK knife deaths by roughly 15x.

[0]

https://www.thetrace.org/2026/01/shooting-gun-violence-data-...

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04...

Good question. Canada has twice as many registered firearms as the US (though the number of unregistered firearms is likely greater in the US). It's certainly not difficult to purchase guns in either country. And Canada experiences an order of magnitude fewer gun deaths per capita than the US. The US is somewhat unique among western nations in how it handles mental illness, and crime, and I would suggest those are more fruitful avenues of inquiry.

So I'll stand by the stance that individuals are responsible for their own actions, that tools cannot bear responsibility for how they are used on account of being inanimate objects, and that all tools serve constructive and destructive purposes, sometimes simultaneously.

isn't that the point? the estimate is that the US has 1.2 gun per capita (compared to 0.34 for Canada)

and since the US handles guns so lax they are a problem

a vocal minority is making a lot of problems (but the US is not even enforcing its existing gun control laws sufficiently)

individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.

and hence the recommendation is to have better control of who gets the tool (and not emotionally charged "scary rifle" ban)

I mentioned the estimated unregistered firearms, but they are just that, an estimate. I went looking for some references and found the following: household gun ownership is down over the last 50 years, hunting is down, gun ownership among men is down, gun ownership among women remains steady, gun ownership by race has not appreciably changed: https://vpc.org/studies/ownership.pdf Gun ownership declining would be consistent with increased gun control.

Yet gun deaths by suicide and murder per 100k people hasn't varied widely between 5 and 7 over the same period: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-...

I also found the stats on this site interesting (many are estimates):

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Murder...

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen...

> individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.

Individuals are responsible. No buts. And there is no solving violence on any scale without understanding and addressing the reasons someone might commit it. This is a rabbit hole of difficult and uncomfortable truths we must address as a society.

Responsibility is a very complex topic. Sometimes it seems straightforward. People training child soldiers are more responsible than the child soldiers, right? The USA financing, training, and arming this or that group seems to be also responsible if those groups do bad things. (Hence all the protests in the US against the way the IDF wages war in Gaza.)

People voting for or against gun control also have some responsibility. (Australia's National Firearms Agreement comes to mind.) Similarly people who (continued to vote, or) voted in the EU to use cheap Russian gas even after 2014, and even after 2022 share again certainly share some responsibility. Maybe even more than the conscripts coerced to be on the front.

I think structural effects dominate in many cases. (IMHO local crime surges are perfect evidence for this, and even though the FBI crime data is slow and not detailed enough, the city-level data is good enough to see things like a homicide spike after a "viral police misconduct incidents" -- https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324 and this is even before George Floyd -- and https://johnkroman.substack.com/p/explaining-the-covid-viole... which shows how much of an effect policing has on homicides.)

Tool availability is an important factor, and in the US it's a drastically huge effect, because the other factors that could counteract it are also mostly missing.

We can simply apply the Swiss cheese model for every shooting and see that many things had to go wrong. Of course focusing only on guns while neglecting the others would lead to increase in knife-deaths.

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