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Comment by jstalin | Hacker News Reader

Considering that rifles are used to kill fewer people in the United States than knives, fists, hammers, or bats, Mother Jones' attempt at scaring people about those who build their own guns rings a little hallow. But I get it, AK-47s look scary and so we should all be outraged.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...

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Here's a summary of the 2011 data from the linked statistics:

  8,583 - Homicides by firearms (all types)
    323 - Homicides by rifles
  1,694 - Homicides by sharp objects (knives, etc)
    496 - Homicides by blunt objects (clubs, etc)

The full table for firearms (2011) is:

  Handguns                      6220
  Rifles                         323
  Shotguns                       356
  Other guns                      97
  Firearms, type not stated     1587

So, er, yeah. GP is correct in their statement that rifles (indeed, it would seem, all longarms) are less favored for homicide than sharp and blunt objects.

Not really, type not stated just means unknown some of those are clearly going to be Rifles. If 200 of those where Rifles then it would be more popular than blunt objects.

But with 1.5 orders of magnitude difference in the officially known enumerated types we can be pretty sure the officially unknowns don't wildly vary from knowns. Plus the number of rifles used is so small people who track of this sort of thing would likely have an idea if something weird was happening.

My only caveat is bodies found without a recovered bullet; almost all centerfire rifles have greater energies and sectional densities than normally used handguns, so the bullet is more likely to exit. To get a handle on this we'd need breakdowns on where they happened (e.g. city, almost certainly a handgun, rural, a rifle is more likely, if only because of concealment issues). Or talk to coroners, the wounds will be somewhat different.

You presume too much... these are the conclusions the data support--anything else is just handwaving.

Look scary? Just the media-hyped name alone is enough. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of Americans couldn't distinguish between an AK-47 and a Glock by sight alone. (I'd concede that it may not be a majority, but at least a surprisingly large number.)

AK-47s scare me about as much as any other gun.

It's "good" that rifles are used to kill fewer people than other weapons, and we should choose our battles accordingly.

That doesn't change the fact that I want to make it as hard as possible for crazy people or people on a power trip to be able to fashion machines designed to efficiently kill people like me. That seems like a simple principle.

Maybe the best way to achieve that here is to let these things stay in obscurity. Maybe not.

I want to make it as hard as possible for crazy people or people on a power trip to be able to fashion machines designed to efficiently kill people like me.

I would worry more about cars, corporations, and governments. :)

None of those were designed to efficiently kill people like me. The OP's point is that I should be worrying more about handguns, and he's right - but that doesn't mean I can't worry about other things designed to pose a threat to my person too.

As the quarter billion disarmed people killed by their own governments in the 20th century, plus all the combatants killed in two "World Wars" and many many others show, there is no single better instrumentality for "efficiently" killing people than governments. In more than a few cases, and most of the deaths, this is by design (Communists and Nazis).

It's true that some governments have killed their own citizens unjustly and en masse. I don't think that my own government poses such a threat to me. If you're a US citizen who feels like their government was designed to efficiently kill its citizens, and if you think that you can prevent that, then we probably can't have a constructive discussion.

I don't know if people just want to start a interesting conversation, or if they feel like disparaging government somehow refutes my point. I hope it's the former, because it doesn't. If you understand why I don't want people to have access to tools designed to kill people like me, but consider government to be an existential threat, it should still be pretty obvious that the list of priorities is something like 1. handguns, 2. rifles, ..., N. governments.

"I don't think that my own government poses such a threat to me."

The stakes, for you and yours, are terribly high if you're wrong, now or in the future.

Our government was explicitly designed to be "inefficient" at doing anything internally (externally the President/Executive has a much freer hand), but I do believe that we armed citizens can stop it from mass murder (I am making certain assumptions about the culture of the military and who goes into it WRT to nuclear weapons, of course). If you aren't familiar with the maxim "Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals logistics", you should check that out before seriously considering the overall issue. Or just note that all those 20th century mass murders were preceded by disarming the targets, those governments certainly thought guns made a difference.

But it's undeniable that governments are an existential threat to their peoples; if you learn nothing else from 20th century history you should learn that. And to take my country as an example (are you one of the few foreigners who has a benign view of it???), our current President launched his political career in the house of two '70s "revolutionaries" who, while fecklessly bombing and killing people, estimated that they'd have to kill around 10% of the population after they succeeded, that many would be totally resistant to reeducation.

I'm not trying to say so much about Obama above as I am about our ruling class, which celebrates such figures, rewards them with professorships in higher education instead of reading them out of polite society, or in one very special case, the man (Bill Ayers) with a big picture of him stomping on an American flag on 9/11/2001 in our preeminent "paper of record" newspaper (!!!; a singularly ill timed article in the New York Times).

We know what such people would try to do if they gained enough power, and we have throughout this nation's history made very sure they wouldn't get very far. Heck, do you believe in insurance? I didn't expect to make a big claim when it first started paying renters insurance decades ago, and even if I hadn't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado) I'd still be paying.

And, BTW, rifles are the alpha and omega here, handguns have never made much of a difference unless that's all you had and you needed them to procure better arms.

As the Apollo program, smallpox eradication, and many many others show, there is no single better instrumentality for efficiently carrying out great tasks than governments.

Government is an amplifier, nothing more.

This is bullcrap. When someone has a rifle pointed at you, you don't care what the statistics are. You know your life is in danger and much, much more so than if someone had a knife or "blunt object". How is it supposed to make me feel safe that anyone can have a rifle? I'll just trust in their goodwill and hope they won't kill me with it if I piss them off?

The question is, how likely are you to end up with a rifle pointed at you? Not very.

Note as well that, as far as I can tell, he did not build an AK-47. He built a copy of the semi-automatic version that is available to gun enthusiasts. He did not build what your average user of an AK would call an AK: a fully automatic machine gun.

Are you sure its not a semi-automatic AKM? Also I don't think any user of an AK-47 would call either a machine gun, more likely a rifle. A user of an AK-47 would probably call a RPK a machine gun though.

That makes a lot of sense -- rifles are very hard to conceal compared to handguns. I imagine if you wanted to kill someone, you'd want a weapon that's easy to conceal, easy to dispose of, and quiet. Rifles are none of those things.

Yeah, it'd be awesome if everyone knew about this so we could really drive that rifle number up and make it competitive with other kinds of guns. Think of how many people could be brandishing their own unmarked AK-47 instead of having to resort to killing people with bats! So barbaric!

I guarantee just the cost of parts for what was built in the article exceeds the budget for most guns used in crime. On top of that it's not at all concealable which makes it even less attractive for crime.

In places where you can walk down the street with a rifle and not draw attention, and the markets are flooded with kalishnakov based designs are very prevalent though, and were the market to get flooded, then they would be more common.

I don't think enough people are going to hand build these to make that the case in LA though.

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