Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitmasher9 | Hacker News Reader

The whole concept of optimal levels of firearms ownership should have been expanded upon, as this premise is probably new to the audience and a cornerstone of their entire research.

View on HN

Agreed, there's not a lot of substance here. I read the article more than once and still don't know if "overarming" means too many individuals own guns or too many guns per individual. I assume the former based on context. Also interesting is that they focus on the US but two out of three groups studied are not in the US.

Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd

Well obviously arming babies would not increase safety.

I suspect the optimal proportion would be similar to the optimal proportion of the vaccinated to stop disease spread.

I'm willing to bet this is defined by some base levels in their equations as a default utility. So they aren't trying to say what the optimal level for the various uses of guns are, they are using math to prove that people are being driven to purchase more guns than that level, whatever that level is.

This is why it’s sometimes hard to take the soft sciences seriously.

I have no idea why you be dismissive of using an unspecified variable as a baseline. People do it in every subject.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com