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Comment by cgore | Hacker News Reader

Italy makes some really good firearms, I'm a big fan of Beretta. Too bad only criminals can easily have them in Italy itself. Life would be a lot safer for these people if people besides criminals and bribed cops had them.

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Italy has a homicide rate of 0.9/100k. The US, homeland of your argument 'if only X had a gun!' and where concealed carry is rife, has as homicide rate of 4.7/100k.

Seems to me that the Italians are doing better here.

The Italian homicide rate is mostly dominated by organized crime. This was particularly extreme at the beginning of the 90's where homicides related to organized crime where almost 40% of the total and the rate was closer to 3/100k.

You basically see the homicide rate spike up in conjunction with mafia wars, which can kill up to 1000 victims in the span of a handful of years.

New York State has a murder rate of 4.4/100k. New York State has fairly stringent, by American standards at least, firearms laws. Vermont has a murder rate of 1/100k, on par with Italy. Vermont has almost no firearms laws beyond the federal ones, and in fact anyone over the age of 18 can carry a concealed handgun with no permit required.

It's almost like there are different factors that affect crime rates than simple access to firearms :^)

That's beautifully cherry-picked data, given that Vermont's most populous city only has 42k people in it. My home suburb has 60k, for comparison.

Would that be considered one of your 'different factors', that it has no real urban environments to compare to New York (eg NYC 8M) or Italy (eg Rome 4M)? Hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.

By your logic it sounds like we should be banning cities rather than banning guns. Additionally, it makes the comparison of the US and Italy invalid, because the two are in no way comparable in terms of population.

Let's try Washington, D.C. (population ~600,000) with almost 22 murders per 100k vs Houston, TX (population ~2 million) which had 11.8 murders per 100,000. Both are urban environments, and in this case the more populous one did not have a higher homicide rate.

But let's back up for a second and see if these differences are even meaningful. Comparing the overall rates for the US and and Italy (and assuming that all people are equally likely to be murdered), you have a 0.00001% chance of getting murdered in Italy and a 0.00005% chance of getting murdered in the US.

I'm pointing out that Vermont doesn't have any dense urban environments. You should look at criminology more before making some of the crazy claims you're making. Yes, more crime happens in urban environments; criminology is pretty clear on this. But what you originally did was point to a largely non-urban area and claim it as a counterpoint to places that have dense urban locations.

you have a 0.00001% chance of getting murdered in Italy and a 0.00005% chance of getting murdered in the US.

Presenting the statistics this way? Yes, you really do need to study criminology a bit more to understand why this is a bad way to present data. In Honduras, you have a 0.0009% chances of getting murdered (per year). Still sounds tiny, yet that country is the murder capital of the world and very much not safe to live in.

It's also worth noting that I never said that crime was directly proportional to population.

Edit: the other side of the 0.00005% argument is: if you're making the argument that it's really rare to die from guns, then why bother with the 'if only X had a gun' argument? If it's that 'rare', why bother making that argument in the first place?

You (anybody in fact) can have them too in Italy. You have to get a license though - before you can purchase one. Mind you, having one and carrying it along with you is considered very different.

I don't think so. Criminals would have to get bigger guns and would be more willing to fire, police too. People would risk getting shot much often and won't get around firing to criminals anyway: I never seen that happen even in countries like the USA with free access to guns. It's lose lose for everybody unless for the ones that sell guns.

The non-bribed cops also have them.

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