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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves?

It could also be related to how many Americans are afraid to trust others to have guns.

An intriguing hypothesis. It would seem sensible to suppose then that Canadians are a people so paralyzed with fear that all their children are homeschooled and they communicate with each other only over the Internet, looking at the gun laws in that country.

From your snarky remark it would seem sensible to conclude that you are not aware that Canadian schoolchildren don't seem terribly more likely to be walking to school than their American counterparts.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/131723.php

You are aware that your link is of a study that covers only two municipal regions, both in Quebec. Not to say that Canadian children definitely walk more (I don't have the evidence to state that), but this is hardly representative of Canada as a whole.

Gloob, can you expand on this?

Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US. The impression I received from the post I was responding to was that the poster was suggesting a positive correlation between the general level of fearfulness in a population and the strictness of the gun laws in the region. Canadians would presumably be much more fearful than Americans in that case. I don't have any statistics to compare, sadly, but at the very least I would think it safe to say that any such relation is decidedly less than linear (or my neighbourhood would be overrun by paranoids), if such a relation exists at all.

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