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Comment by DominikR | Hacker News Reader

I once used to believe that the problem in the US is that guns are so widely available, but today I'm not so sure about that anymore, because there are many very safe countries that rank high in number of guns per capita like Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Canada and Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c...

In Switzerland every male has a military type machine gun and two magazines at home and in my country, Austria, there are regions that rival Texas in terms of gun ownership.

Today I tend to believe that this might be a problem of city planning (and preventing ghettos). The US has cities that are much larger than the largest cities in the countries cited by me. But I might be wrong here.

Anyways, I do not doubt that police in Austria and Germany would act no differently than in the US if they had reason to expect that they could be shot every time they stopped a car. Thankfully this is not the case.

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People in this thread forget - Europe as a whole existed for far longer than US. USA is home for booming business, and not only IT business. Unfortunately as a consequence - "bad" people use weapons to fight for their place under the sun, that's why police here works with high violence expectations first. This soaks into mentality, because humans are built this way. That's how you get officers who ready to taze/shoot for minor traffic violation.

So solution is not remove guns, but remove "bad business". How to do that - different question. Legalization vs Extermination - yet to see which one is more efficient.

The rules about every male having a weapon and ammo went away in 2007 or so. There is a lot of regulation there about who can have a weapon or buy ammunition.

Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world)

My point is that the mere availability of guns can't be the only reason.

This is most likely a very complex problem with many different issues that have to be tackled. Better police training, preventing ghettos, hopeless economic situation for people of certain race, racism - these are all issues that will have to be tackled to get this under control.

Just taking away the guns wont solve the problem I fear.

> Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world)

If you're insisting that the situation with firearms in Switzerland resembles that of the US you are either ignorant, obtuse, or dishonest. They are not even remotely comparable.

I'm not insisting in anything, I'm just saying Switzerland is ranked 4th place in the world in terms of guns per capita.

But it doesn't make any sense for me discuss anymore with you because you seem to believe that insulting others is a great way to exchange opinions.

I'm not sure city size is specifically the difference. The U.S. does have large cities, but the citizen-violence and police-violence problems aren't limited to those. For example, none of these states have any cities as big as Vienna (2.5 million), yet they are among the more dangerous states: Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Alabama, Indiana.

Here in Sweden at least the high number of guns are hunting rifles.

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