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Comment by Mary-Jane | Hacker News Reader

Given the political bent of this forum, I'm curious how people would react to the fact that the same argument could be applied to the prevalence of guns in America, e.g. gun ownership has been steadily increasing since the 50's, but violent crime peaked in the 90's.

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Public debate on gun policy in the US is amazingly bad. On one side all regulations and restrictions are bad, on the other side proposed regulations and restrictions are extremely poorly targeted.

The former is probably obvious so here's some points for the latter:

Public debate centers around "assault weapons" high powered rifles and mass shootings.

- 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides (usually with handguns)

- The vast majority of gun homicides are with handguns

- The broadest definition of "mass shooting" I could find was 4 or more victims (excluding the shooter). That puts mass shooting deaths on par with accidental gun deaths; about 1% of total gun deaths and single-digit percentage of gun homicides.

Now, I'm not saying ending mass shootings is a bad thing, but it's as if everyone worried about traffic fatalities in the US was informed by watching "The Fast and the Furious" and wanted to ban forced-induction sports cars and was super worried about deaths from underground road races.

As another aside, California (with the harshest gun laws) is one of the only states to show declining gun deaths since 1981. I'd like to see the homicide and suicide numbers brought out separately, since (in most states) any decrease in homicides is completely shadowed by the huge increase in suicides. With coastal California having a much lower gun-ownership rate, I assume people committing suicide choose other means (nobody I know who killed themselves in California used a gun, while 2/3 of those I know who killed themselves in the midwest did, the third being a woman, who is much less statistically likely to choose a gun).

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