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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Banning guns will reduce mass shootings, and gang shootings (somewhat - well organised criminals will still have guns, but the stupid ones who cause the most damage won't). It can also reduce suicide rates (since guns don't give people time to change their mind).

However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc.

US murder rates may be partly driven by guns. But they're mostly the result of education, prison sentences, and other social factors. The US is a developed country with the welfare system of a developing country (and a bunch of very expensive bandaids to catch the people who have fallen too far to really recover).

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/However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc./

Do you have data to back up this claim? I hear it quite often in these debates, but have never seen anything to back it up, and it seems suspect: It's pretty easy to imagine that even if the number of assaults were the same per capita, that the lethality of the weapon involved in the assaults will have a bearing on the total number of fatalities.

(As for me, I would be happy with a sane approach to prisons, better mental health treatment, AND better gun controls... These need not be mutually exclusive.)

You can find cherry picked data here: http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/12/murder-and-...

They don't mention Australia, because the murder rate gradually decreased (though it was on a trend down anyway).

Or you can find cherry picked data about how gun related crime falls if you ban guns.

The only reason this debate keeps going is that there's bugger all hard evidence on either side. Sometimes overall crime rates drop. Sometimes they rise. So both sides just cherry pick stats, and call the other side idiots.

If the occasional mass shooting is acceptable, there's no reason to either ban guns or keep them. "Guns cause crime" and "guns stop crime" are both red herrings.

Whether the freedom to have a gun (which won't make you statistically more or less safe) is more important than stopping mass shootings is a value judgement. The statistics are a wash.

I'd say something similar to Australia is a good compromise - allow single-shot long guns (for sport), and ban semis / handguns (unless you have a really good reason). There's also laws about gun safes, safety tests, etc.

The most well-known mass shooting in Australia since guns were banned left three people dead - a shooter with a double-barreled shotgun, and two victims. Australian style laws do a good job keeping mass shootings from causing too much damage.

I think that sounds completely reasonable.

Regarding Australia, there's an analysis here from 2006, 10.5 years after the gun law reforms:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704353/

Here are the key points from the paper:

> A radical gun law reform occurred in Australia after a gun massacre (35 dead and 18 seriously injured) in April 1996. Semi‐automatic and pump‐action shotguns and rifles were banned; a tax‐funded firearm buyback and amnesties saw over 700 000 guns surrendered from an adult population of about 12 million.

> The total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides had been falling in the 18 years preceding the new gun laws. In all, 13 mass shootings were noticed in the 18 years preceding the new gun laws.

> In the 10.5 years after the gun law reforms, there have been no mass shootings, but accelerated declines in annual total gun deaths and firearm suicides and a non‐significant accelerated decline in firearm homicides. No substitution effects occurred for suicides or homicides.

edit: it is interesting that they looked for substitution effects. Like `sdenton4` commented, the lethality of the weapon matters.

If it is difficult to access firearms and there isn't really a similarly lethal alternative to easily kill someone else or yourself, it seems intuitively reasonable that we might expect to see less death.

"Banning guns" would likely lead to a massive spike in shootings due to armed resistance to said ban.

Not really. They'd ban them. Then they'd spend the next 10 years gradually enforcing it. People who really wanted to keep the guns would just hide them, and say they sold them in a private sale.

You could 'ban' them but what would the plan be, to go door to door and collect the 300-400 million guns already in the hands of citizens?

(Obviously you would need a constitutional amendment first)

Ban the sale of new guns to the public but allow secondhand sales. That cuts off the gun manufacturer money to the NRA; leave it a few years to bed in and the politics change. Then ban moving guns across state lines, and allow states, cities and counties to impose their own bans or permitting regimes. That would probably suffice.

Problem is, the vast bulk of the NRA's money comes from gun owners, since it's our group, the manufacturers' group is the Nation Shooting Sports Foundation (http://www.nssf.org/). The NRA's membership would at minimum double, and donations to them would rise exponentially; there was a hint of that after Sandy Hook.

I don't see how you and wisty deny that people on my side would turn our current cold civil war into a hot shooting war. We've read our 20th Century history, we know the potential end games for us and our families. We haven't been buying guns and ammo at historically unprecedented rates just to bury them.

Then again, you at least acknowledge a constitutional amendment would be required to do this legally, and that's not currently foreseeable. E.g. starting in 1986 with Florida, about the same number of states that would be required to pass an amendment enacted legal "shall issue" concealed carry regimes, which now cover 42 or so states, with the Federal courts only forcing Illinois and maybe California and Hawaii (that's still being litigated), see the first two country maps at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_...

We've read our 20th Century history, we know the potential end games for us and our families

My favourite trolling suggestion for getting popular support for gun control would be to find a couple of extremely brave people to restart the Black Muslim Gun Owners organisation. It would reprint all the gun advocacy material that talks about defending against state violence but with "black" or "muslim" inserted at key points. It would require extremely brave organisers because the chances of getting jailed as terrorism suspects or having your HQ burnt down by racists would be extremely high.

This is a popular canard but the bulk of the NRA's money comes from the membership dues, donations of its members and selling branded merchandise.

Roughly 85% of the NRA's money comes from sources other than gun manufacturers.

It's harder to blast the NRA when you're actually talking about millions of law-abiding, rights-exercising citizens.

The big, bad, evil gun companies are a much easier target to lambast. Never mind the fact that many of those boogieman companies turn a profit by arming those same millions of citizens.

It's just another avenue for hoplophobes to attack something they don't like.

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