Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not against gun control--I think there are a number of really "low hanging fruit"-type adjustments that could be made in regulation--but I feel that the amount of political energy liberals put toward it is low priority and loses us a lot of other battles.

It's low-priority because guns are much scarier on the news than their actual death counts warrant. More people die in car accidents every year than have died in the entire history of the United States in mass shootings--yet mass shootings are disproportionately used as a talking point. Yearly motor deaths are an order of magnitude more frequent than gun deaths, and that's if you count the more than half of gun deaths which are suicides--if you want to protect yourself from guns, simply not owning a gun is an effective measure. If liberals took proportional action with regard to harm on car safety to how we act on gun safety, we'd be pushing for frequent re-testing for licenses, lower speed limits, easier loss-of-licenses for repeat bad drivers, stricter drunk driving laws, etc. But that's not what's happening.

It loses us a lot of battles, because it alienates a lot of potential allies. True libertarians, for example, tend to be fairly pro-choice, but don't feel strongly about it, but very pro-gun, and feel very strongly about it. We'd have them on our side in votes relevant to abortion a lot more often if we didn't alienate them with regards to gun rights.

Everyone knows someone who was killed in a car accident, and many of us know someone who died of an opioid overdose, but do you know anyone who died of a gunshot? It feels like we do because of the way the news sensationalizes it. Imagine if the news did little vignettes about every person killed in a car accident the same way they do for mass shootings? I think the news "stands up" to the gun lobby not because they are strong but because they are weak. Standing up to the auto industry or big pharma might actually face serious pushback, possibly even from another branch of their own corporate structure.

Or even from their own lifestyle. Standing up against guns is easy because almost nobody needs to own a gun, and none of them work in the media.

People only need to own cars because our development was done carelessly. It could have been and can be done differently.

I think in the US, yes, a similar number of people will know someone who has died of a gunshot, whether from suicide, homicide, or accidental death. When you reflect on it, you probably did know someone who was killed by a spouse or child, or who took their own life with a gun. In fact, it's so commonplace that, like with car deaths, you only hear about it when it is a particularly sensational story. A big difference is people are conditioned to think "gun deaths" means a criminal activity they or their neighbors don't partake in (until a suicide or an intra-family murder occurs).

A quick review of the wikipedia pages puts those two figures in the mid 30,000s per year. Perhaps the methodology is off but it doesn't seem like the gun figure could be off by an order of magnitude or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> A quick review of the wikipedia pages puts those two figures in the mid 30,000s per year.

Mass shooting != gun violence. Roughly the same order of magnitude of people die from motor vehicles & firearms in the U.S., but very few people die from mass shootings.

I was replying to the part about annual car deaths exceeding cumulative gun deaths. The parent comment has since been edited. It now says (inaccurately) that motor deaths are an order of magnitude more common, which is untrue in the US. Perhaps in the whole world, because gun deaths are relatively infrequent outside the US, Latin America, and war zones.

It's interesting to me that you bring up abortion, since to me, as an outsider (I'm not from the US), the mainstream US debates about abortion and about guns have a lot of parallels. The "against" side tends to paint their proposals as "reasonable, common-sense regulations" but their more extreme arguments tend to be full of misinformation, misunderstandings and emotional pleas to the sanctity of life. On the other hand, the "pro" side either believes that all those "reasonable regulations" are just a transparent attempt by the other side to get their foot in the door, to move the overton window a little bit, so they can enact harsher regulations later, or that those regulations are not reasonable at all and will never be implement correctly.

For example, whenever the pro-choice side hears someone from the other side propose regulations about requiring permits for clinics that perform abortions (something that in principle they might agree to), they fear that the person proposing the regulations isn't really pro-choice but only says that because outright banning abortion would not be politically feasible, thus they fear (rightfully so, since it has happened) those regulations will be so onerous or badly implemented that it will result in a de-facto ban on abortion, maybe those permits will be very hard to get or maybe the organization handing them out will be understaffed and underfunded (or both). Similarly, whenever someone who is pro-guns hears someone talking about mental health checks before owning guns (also something they might agree with in principle), for example, what they fear is that this system will be abused to deprive as many individuals as possible of their rights without due process.

Thus, in this situation, neither debate will move forward because pro side does not believe that the anti side is proposing any legislation in good faith, and the reason they believe so is that in many cases that has blatantly been the case, leading to farther spreading of the divide.

Additionally, as you say, someone might be both pro-choice and pro-guns but the political situation is such that they have to choose one or the other, and thus they choose the one they hold dearer to them, usually one that affects them more personally. Unfortunately for the pro-choice crowd, gun control laws seem to personally affect more people in the US than abortion laws.

> For example, whenever the pro-choice side hears someone from the other side propose regulations about requiring permits for clinics that perform abortions (something that in principle they might agree to), they fear that the person proposing the regulations isn't really pro-choice but only says that because outright banning abortion would not be politically feasible

To be fair, when speaking freely, the pro-life side admits that this is their goal. That is, most pro-life advocates proudly admit that outlawing abortion is their goal. The pro-choice side is so wary of these additional regulations because (as they are currently proposed) (a) their only possible outcome is to close lots of clinics, and (b) the argument that these regulations improve patient care is laughable.

Contrast that with the gun-control debate, where the mainstream gun-control "side" is not advocating for a ban of all guns. Yes, they are in favor of banning some forms of guns (i.e. guns which were banned in the late 90s in the US) and things like mental health and better background checks, but a complete banning of guns is not something that they are arguing for.

A big difference is that there are numerous gun owners who believe in the right of self defense, hunting, and bearing arms generally, who support control in an incremental fashion and do not support confiscation. These people are being honest when they say their ultimate goal is healthy regulation of guns.

In the abortion debate, the "reasonable regulations" are always proposed by abolitionists. The goal is never to make abortion safe and available, it's always to make it burdensome and difficult for both the provider and the patient. Newly empowered by the Trump administration and the sense that they have a new supreme court that will agree with them, they're dropping this tactic and have resumed pushing for abolition.

The United State has average traffic deaths compared to other countries but much higher number of firearm-related deaths than comparable countries. Something is out of wack in the US so it makes sense to put political energy into it.

I think I would agree liberals may overly focus on mass shootings because handguns are killing most of the people but gun violence is a real problem.

Compared to other countries in the region US gun violence doesn't seem much higher. Gun violence is high in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, etc. I'm not sure it's fair to compare the United States to some nordic country on another continent rather than its own neighbors.

Our rate is 10x higher than Canada though.

Only counting the mass shootings does not sound like a good argument to me.

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