Scientific American’s gun error | Hacker News Reader

Scientific American’s gun error

election.princeton.edu

24 pointsoscarwao65 comments

As someone who lives in The Netherlands, I used to be a proponent of very strict gun control. Here in The Netherlands almost no one has a gun. Gun shops are hard to find. It seems to work out well for our country.

Then again, I visited Israel 3 times in the past and what's interesting is that lots of people, soldiers in the IDF have guns. You pretty much see guns everywhere. Yet at the same time, you don't have the fear that someone will randomly start shooting people.

Last week I came across the following article, that brings up some interesting points on why Israel has far fewer, if any, of the shooting incidents we see in the United States: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/119408/why...

In short, the article brings up the following points:

- "An armed society ... is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. It may be a bit odd to think of Israeli society as polite, but when it comes to guns it is. When everyone has a gun, guns are no longer seen as talismans by weak, frightened, and unstable men seeking a sense of self-validation, but as killing machines that are to be handled with the utmost caution and care."

- "Rather than spend fortunes and ruin lives in a futile attempt to eradicate every last trigger in America, we would do well to follow Israel’s example and educate gun owners about their rights and responsibilities, so as to foster a culture of sensible and mindful gun ownership. Go to any shooting range in Israel, as a soldier or a civilian, and the instructor is likely to talk about responsibility even before he or she begin to cover the basics of shooting."

- "In Israel, still a somewhat socialist country, mental health services are ready available, for free, to anyone. And because so many young Israelis undergo traumatic experiences in the course of their military service, a whole host of nonprofit organizations are on hand to provide counseling and treatment."

Perhaps the 3rd point is the most important one.

The thing that is easily overlooked is the mandatory military service in Israel. You have trained citizens who know what a gun can do, what the consequences of such an action would be and how to handle a gun in presence of an armed opponent. I suppose it's a state of mind that can't be achieved by going to the gun range a few times a month.

"Yet at the same time, you don't have the fear that someone will randomly start shooting people."

That the violence is not random does not make it any less violent. That the violence is more directed in a specific vector may contribute to one's feelings of relative safety so long as one is not identified as "the other."

Sucks being "the other." (Side note: Almost shot with AR at Israeli checkpoint.)

"An armed society is a polite society" is a nonsense aphorism. Look to the trouble spots in Africa for examples.

Also "fear of being shot for saying something someone might not like" != politeness.

First amendment, second amendment: go at it!

>Yet at the same time, you don't have the fear that someone will randomly start shooting people.

But if "an armed society is a polite society", you do presumably have to worry about someone shooting you if you're rude to them?

I think rudeness is to be discouraged in general, but I'm not sure it's an acceptable justification for gun violence.

the 1st point is the most important, because the "armed society" has a chilling effect on freedom of speech and creates new levels of social inequality. The NYT had a great opinion piece detailing these concerns: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/the-freedom-...

also it's not clear why, with your own experience seeing a successful gun-controlled, and then a successful non-gun-controlled, country, you want to pick the second. I'd pick the first - the successful gun control model is much more common than the successful non-gun-control model. Perhaps the approach needs to fit the society ?

Israel actually has rather tight gun control laws, and is tightening them [1]. To me, this is proof that a well regulated militia is compatible with strict personal gun laws.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2012/12/20/israel-lo...

This is a constructive way to frame the discussion:

" You pretty much see guns everywhere. Yet at the same time, you don't have the fear that someone will randomly start shooting people."

I would much rather live in a community where people owning or carrying guns was no more worrisome than them owning or carrying a pocket knife.

Perhaps one of the reasons there is so little gun-related violence by Israelis upon Israelis is that they all have a common external enemy to focus their fears on.

It's much easier to be friendly with your Nickelback-loving neighbour when you both have someone to focus your anger on. In a more polite society one might have to come to blows or shots to sort out the differences in musical tastes.

So who gets to play "Palestine" to the USA's "Israel"?

I don't mean to diminish the focus on mental health, but you could have used a better example than Israel as a model of a peaceful gun-toting society.

Gun control advocates cite statistics of the kind "how many deaths are caused by guns" as justification for more gun control. Frankly, whatever the statistic is, it is too high. But that is not the point.

But in order to successfully make an argument along the lines of "more gun control will save lives", they must also cite statistics of the kind "how many lives are saved by guns". Obviously, if guns cause the death of 12000 people yearly and save the lives of 100000 people yearly, gun control is a bad idea. On the other hand, if they only save the lives of 100 people yearly, it might be a good idea after all. I have yet to see a single article on the internet citing such a number. Why is it so hard to find such a statistic?

The number of lives saved by guns (not counting police and military guns) is quite impossible to count. One might succeed in counting the number of cases where guns are used in self-defense, even though these cases usually go unnoticed. But how do you count the number of cases where the would-be perpetrator chooses not to commit the crime on account of a gun being present in defense of the would-be victim? Or doesn't even start to think about the crime?

This is a classic case of Bastiat's "that which is not seen". Because the statistic cannot be calculated, people do not take it into account. But they should if they want to make an effective argument for more gun control based on statistics.

Because the relevant statistics cannot be calculated, statistics should not be used in policy debates such as the one about gun control. Rather, let us reason about the unseen consequences of the actions of individuals as well as of the government. Without involving emotional arguments from either side.

It's also a classic case of selective reporting - you want to include all these invisible cases of defensive gun uses that don't get reported, but you're not mentioning criminal uses of firearms - muggings, holdups, gang activity. If you hold up a store with a gun, it doesn't necessarily follow that you must kill someone, so that stat doesn't get much press - in exactly the same way that defensive gun use doesn't get much press. Well... accurate press. It gets plenty of emotive press.

As for looking for such a statistic, you can start with Kleck in the early 90s, but you should also read criticisms of his - it was a shoddy piece of work with a wide number of fundamental flaws, but it was heavily used by gun advocates at the time. It put 'defensive gun uses' at 2.5M/year and 'lives saved' at 200k/year. The latter number has absolutely no realistic merit when compared against contemporary countries (it would mean that without guns the US murder rate would rise from 4.2 to ~50. For comparison, the current highest homicide rate of any first-world, industrialised nation is 4.2 (which itself is currently triple its contemporaries), and only four countries in the entire world have a rate higher than 50.

Hopefully the above paragraph would help suggest why saying 100k lives saved/year is also extremely unlikely. At 100k you're looking at a murder rate of about 25. Mexico with all its poverty, social troubles, and drug wars only manages 17. Does anyone honestly think that the social fabric of the US is so abysmally weak as to collapse that badly in the event of gun reform?

This argument in support of "lives saved by guns" is not a classic case of Bastiat's "that which is not seen". This is a classic case of intellectual onanism.

There is a high statistical correlation between gun ownership as a percentage of population and gun deaths as a percentage of population. Unknowable figures such as "lives saved by firearms" are already taken into account. Regardless of how many lives have been saved by potential criminals not committing a crime due to fear of consequences, there were far more deaths actually caused by firearms.

This is why the number of deaths got larger: there were more people dead from firearms than people still alive from firearms.

    "Based on this, framework, one model for the per-capita
    gun death rate D would be D = V * G * k, where V is the
    average tendency toward violence and G is availability
    of guns, with killing power k factored in."

Ah yes, the old "write an article based on a model that you made up apparently without validation and then accuse everyone else of not citing evidence".

Well, the Australian cases of drug laws / murders provides enough validation for his case.

Except that in both Australia and the UK the gun murder rates were already incredibly low before their respective gun bans. Their bans didn't actually lead to less violence than before their bans; in fact, violence actually increased post-ban.

This would only be scientifically defensible if there was another Australia, identical in every respect, with only one thing changed -- the thing being measured.

I read it that way at first too. But if you read a little further, the article centers on providing evidence for the model. Specifically he shows evidence that a a state with higher G has linearly higher D (which is exactly what the model states).

And then when the evidence does not match up, he fudges with one of his parameters, V, to "explain" it.

This seems like a non-sequitur. The gp's criticism was that the article doesn't cite any evidence for the model, which he does.

Besides, he doesn't "fudge" V. He shows evidence: that violent crime decreased over the relevant period and argues that less violent crime implies lower average tendency to violence (V).

1) Am I crazy/ignorant for thinking that his formula seems like an arbitrary way to make his argument appear more technical than it is?

2) I really, really get frustrated when editorializers make the leap from correlation to causation without hard evidence.

"Fewer guns means fewer deaths from guns"

Note that the word "less" doesn't feature once in the linked article.

I must be missing something here. Fewer is a synonym for less.

Fewer is for things you can count, less is for things you measure

Fewer is supposed to be quantitative; less is supposed to be qualitative.

No, that's wrong. The distinction is between continuous and discrete, not quantitative and qualitative.

Yes, you are missing the fact that less is to be used with continuous (mass) quantities, and fewer with enumerable (count) ones.

Less sugar / fewer tarts, less gunpowder, fewer bullets, etc.

It's a made-up distinction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less

Well, sure. But all grammatical distinctions are contrived. It's still the standard way to distinguish between countable / non-countable objects.

literally noone cares

Three people cared enough to argue the point right here on HN.

Your claim is trivially falsified.

That was a subtle joke about how HN is already reddit.

I noticed people are downvoting my posts instead of the posts participating in the tangent of vague pedantry. What does the vague pedantry contribute to the discussion that my calling it out (in the same useless, non-specific way) doesn't?

Please stop participating. Just because others do, don't you also do it!

> 3 days ago

Very amusing!

You are correct of course. But, more is the opposite of both fewer and less so logically shouldn't fewer should interchangeable with less?

No, English isn't that simple.

No, because words are not necessarily transitive in this way (heck, even mathematical properties are not necessarily transitive, with the exception of well defined cases).

What if the causality runs the other way, and more violent social environments inspire gun ownership?

Are there other confounding variables that we aren't allowed to think about?

Also, fewer.

I love the articles and commentary comparing US gun laws to other countries in the world. There is no comparision and the US will never have gun laws similar to other nations. Any discussion on banning weapons is moot considering that the 2nd amendment exists and has been upheld by the Supreme Court numerous times in numerous ways. Given the high requirements to repeal a portion of the constitution that will never happen.

I even wonder if another "assault weapon" ban would hold up if challenged considering the Supreme Court overturned both DC's and Chicago's handgun bans?

The previous assault weapons ban was a joke anyway just labeling certain features as evil and banning them if you had too many evil features on a gun.

Maybe limiting magazine size could do some "good" but I find it hard to believe changing magazines takes any significant amount of time if the shooter has any experience with the weapon.

I don't think there's anything surprising about the stats. The more gun violence around me, the more likely I am to own a gun for self defense. I don't see evidence of causation in the other direction. (For what it's worth, I favor gun control, but I don't like seeing it pushed with bad stats)

This is a bullshit article. Why are we trying to minimize "gun deaths?" What the article doesn't mention is that most of those are suicides that would just do it another way if they were less readily available.

Violent crime in the UK is 4x what it is in the US yet there are less gun deaths because of the strict gun control. Who gives a shit if guns are involved or not?

For those that like citing stats: Murder rate in 2011 Montana - 2.8 New Jersey - 4.3

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-...

Violent Crime rates - http://www.infoplease.com/us/statistics/crime-rate-state.htm...

Please note DC, the place with the most gun control in the country, is also by far the most violent, with the most murders per capita by a huge stretch.

> Please note DC, the place with the most gun control in the country, is also by far the most violent, with the most murders per capita by a huge stretch.

It's worth it to note then that as gun control has increased in D.C., the murder rate has dropped tremendously.

http://news.yahoo.com/dc-pace-fewer-100-homicides-2012-09471...

from ~500 in the early 1990s to under 90 this year.

While true, all crime in the US has dropped significantly in the last 20 years. Many have suggested Roe v Wade had a big impact in this, but I'm not sure it's conclusive. From Freakanomics, the theory being that many would be kids in bad situations would have ended up as criminals 18 years later were instead aborted. This has led to a big overall crime drop.

Whether it's actually because of this isn't the point though, crime has dropped a lot everywhere, and the violent crime in DC is still much much higher than other places with far less strict gun control.

FWIW, the strict gun control in DC started in the late 70's. It may have gotten stricter over time, but I'd say it's a stretch to say that it getting stricter 15 years later was causal to the crime drop.

I don't disagree. Like most large socio-economic issues, pointing to one thing is overly simplifying things. Growing up near D.C. I remember being terrified of going into the city. Stray rounds regularly found their ways into people's living rooms, and just a block or two from the national mall, one would have been ill-advised to spend any time.

I definitely subscribe to the national trends impacting local crime rates. D.C. today, while not an exceptionally nice place to be, isn't comparable to D.C. of the 1980s and 90s.

But there are other things that impacted D.C. w/r to very local issues. For example, I don't think it's a stretch to think that the end of Marion Barry's tenure as "mayor for life" and the reversal of decades of population flight which started around the time of his first term is all a big coincidence. The drop-off of crack-cocaine as a local drug of choice was also a major contributor.

The gentrification that followed, while often viewed in negative terms by many, has resulted in a city with large physical areas of relative safety and good maintenance. The only comparable city I'm aware of is New York, which had a similar dangerous reputation, and is now a pretty nice place to be.

Gun crime in D.C. was and is significant. In the interest of being mindful that correlation does not equal causation (gun control up and gun violence down in the same period does not mean that one caused the other), I'd probably argue that there's little evidence that gun control in either direction has had the majority impact on D.C. gun crimes, but that external factors that have contributed to improving the city and have had larger impacts.

Equally a bull shit post.

Suicide is easier and more irreversible with a gun. You can be saved from an overdose, for example. But its much harder to piece a brain back together after a bullet has ripped through it. A bullet to the head is pretty final, and overdose less so. Clearly you dont understand suicide or its psychology.

Next, violent crime is not murder or death. It can be robbery or assault. Your comparison is, to coin your phrase, bullshit.

Finally, "who gives a shit if if guns are involved". Well, what would you prefer to face, a knife or a gun. What are your chances of surviving a hair trigger lunge or trigger? I know I have a better chance of dodging a knife than a bullet. Just like a criminal knows he has more control over a victim with a gun rather than a knife. Can you dodge bullets?

Even so, the US is a gun based culture. International comparisons are the bullshit you crave. The US was formed with guns. It started that way and will remain that way. Taking guns out of the US is as unlikely as taking pubs out of the UK. Which, interestingly suggests why violent crime is maybe higher in the UK. We have an alcohol problem many other countries don't have. Which is another reason why international comparisons are "bullshit". Fact is, culturally we are very different. I am a Brit and I don't want US gun culture and we will never have it. Equally, I bet the US doesn't want our alcohol culture.

So, Americans should keep their guns, but equally not complain about other freedoms being compromised to compensate.

As for the suicides, who am I to say he shouldn't be doing it? He wants this to happen, so it shouldn't be included in any kind of gun control stats. It is not the thing we are trying to limit or stop.

As for what I'd rather face, I'll turn that around. If you are a criminal, which would you rather face? I'd rather not face someone trying to hurt me with either a knife or gun while unarmed.

I'm not sure why you consider my post bullshit. Is it just because I said the original was bs? He clearly used meaningless stats to argue his point and I was calling him on it. I even provided stats to back up my position.

>Next, violent crime is not murder or death. It can be robbery or assault.

Many gun deaths are gang-related or otherwise criminal-on-criminal. Also, with less strict gun control a robber is more likely to be shot dead by their intended victim, which is a good thing. Yes, I mean that; I'm not equivocating: it is a Good Thing when an attempted robbery fails because the would-be robber is shot dead. (Minor assailants should of course not be shot, but it's also a Good Thing when an assault bordering on attempted murder ends with the death of the assailant.) Hell, it's a Good Thing when gangbangers shoot one another dead. There's a Tupac line that goes "[something something something] give 'em guns, step back, watch 'em kill each other". Bearing in mind that I'm referring to gangsters ONLY and in no way black people in general, Tupac's darkly humorous suggestion is actually a good one.

To put it bluntly, if I could push a button and reduce violent crime by 75% across the board but it meant that gun deaths would quadruple--but 80% of those new deaths would be violent criminals--I would do it.

>So, Americans should keep their guns, but equally not complain about other freedoms being compromised to compensate.

I don't even own a gun and have only fired a gun a few times (when I went trap shooting just for the hell of it). Still, I wish you would try to take some freedoms from the "gun nuts" as "compensation" just so I could watch you get your ass handed to you.

> Less guns means less deaths from guns

(groan) s/less/fewer/

Use "less" for continuous quantities. Less water.

Use "fewer" for enumerable things. Fewer gallons of water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less

Is this supposed to be some kind of revelatory finding? Let's say there were only one gun in the world; how would that affect deaths from guns?

"Revelation?"

No, it's pretty much duh.

However, it does need saying every once in a while because there are many who deny this obvious connection, and in the US at least they seem to control much of the discourse.

For a look at more data (and different conclusions) see: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_Kate...

The other side: More Guns, Less Crime - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime

"Lott examines the effects of the Brady law." "The third edition of the book is the first study to examine Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws." "Lott spends some time discussing gun ownership rates and crime rates in other countries, such as the United Kingdom."

What an informative and illustrative article explaining the other side.

Where are the figures for government-caused deaths by guns?

Here's an idea. If we want less guns, perhaps we should stop manufacturing them to sell to government.

An assault weapons ban will do little for the murder rate in the US. The US has 17k murders annually, 13k of those are committed with firearms, and 11k of those are committed with handguns. Only 2k out of 13k are committed with longarms (which aren't just assault weapons) - this assault weapons debate is a waste of hot air for both sides, and isn't going to have a meaningful affect on either the real issues or the security theatre.

the theory is that decreasing access to large magazines and/or 100-round drums would decrease the mass-murder rate. Considering we're talking about mentally unstable suspects, a little bit of resistance to being able to get a large magazine might mean they can't fire off 30-100 rounds without reloading when they go off on their spree.

Mass murder is highly visible, but makes barely a dent in the annual toll. Not to mention that the two biggest school-based mass-murderers in the US did their massacres with legally obtained handguns, not assault weapons. Even if there were ten mass-murders the size of Sandy Hook a year, that'd still make only 300 homicides out of 13k firearm and 17k total. And according to this page [1], there's actually only been about 75 mass-shooting homicides in the US in 2012, including Sandy Hook. 75 is three orders of magnitude less than the annual toll.

Also, 'mentally unstable' doesn't mean 'frothing at the mouth and barking at the moon'. Simply because a mentally ill person might have troubles with moral judgments doesn't mean that they lose the capacity for forethought - look at Cho chaining the doors shut before starting.

Assault rifles are just simply not the problem in US homicides.

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/14/1337221/a-timeli...

regardless, there's not much of an argument for 30-round/100-round magazines to be legal. Just like there's not much argument for pipe-bombs to be legal (anyone can make one, right ? is the illegality of easy-to-build bombs "security theater" or just common sense?). These devices have no legitimate uses by civilians.

I completely agree. I'm for gun reform of pretty much all kinds except perhaps hunting rifles and longarms for farm/rural use. The problem is that the assault rifle are not even a sideshow to the main event. It's going to run counter to gun reformists desires because after long, drawn-out arguments where they finally wrest some concessions, those concessions are going to do absolutely nothing substantial, leaving the opposing side with a hard-to-argue-with "I told you so".

my numbers are a few years out of date. The US currently has 14k homicides annually, but the proportion of firearm homicides is around the same (~two-thirds)

base stats http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c... homicide methods http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...

After reading this, I remain unconvinced that legislation like "limits on magazine capacity and regulation of ammunition sales" will make Alaskans desire gun ownership, and shoot each other, at rates more like New Jerseyans.

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