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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> “I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.”

And yet, there does seem to be a strong correlation between “countries with stricter gun control laws” and “countries that have low rates of gun-related deaths and homicides”.

Canada has between 6-8X fewer gun fatalities per capita compared to the United States - both homicides and unintentional/accidental gun death rates are much lower. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...

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Removing suicides from the stats, a large amount of gun violence is done around gang activity. Looking at the stats for Chicago should sadden anyone.

Finding and fixing the causes of these is a much harder problem. NYC did a lot under Giuliani in Bloomberg to lower their crime in murder rate, but those have started rising again. Chicago hasn't done anything to fix their crime problem in the last 30+ years.

Dealing with gangs and mental health should be topics we are looking at.

Btw: getting rid of guns doesn't stop mass casualty events. The number one mass casualty event in the United States was done with box cutters. The number three was a van full of fertilizer. (The number 2 was a collection of many different weapons and methods)

Edit: if you want to read a good study about mass shootings in the US and their potential causes and statistics around them, check out this: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-da...

Box cutters for airplane hijacking was a once-off event that would simply never be repeated even if cockpit doors hadn't been hardened against hostile takeover. Now, passengers simply would fight. The expectation was, I believe, that they would be taken as hostages, not killed in a suicide attack.

Agreed, that vector won't happen again. The #2 hopefully will never happen again (Tulsa race massacre). But the #3 (Oklahoma City bombing) could happen again with a sufficiently dedicated person.

But people are creative, and some other method could be used in the future. The Boston Marathon bombing was only 3 deaths, but 264 injured, and that was just a pressure cooker. The Trollhättan school attack was 3 killed with a sword.

Guns are a tool, a very deadly tool, but a tool none the less. Removing them from the US would be near impossible at this point (with the 2nd and 4th amendments getting in the way). It's also not all that popular in this country. Stricter gun laws don't seem to help (see the Buffalo shooting, in a state with red-flag laws).

One interesting point I heard raised is that the phrase "going postal" was born from an era where workplace shootings became common, but have since near disappeared (with background checks being a large part of the reason). Figuring out why our younger population is doing down the route they have the last 25'ish years is something that has yet to be corrected.

I think the thing with guns is that they tip the power balance too far in favor of the shooter. They are hard to defend against. They can do damage at range. Not a lot of skill is required to cause a lot of damage. You don't need a lot of creativity or even the ability to think clearly enough to execute a plan. You just have a gun laying around, decide "today's the day", and go live stream the next national tragedy. Not great.

You're right that we'll never ban guns in the US, but if we did, I think we'd see a lot less mass casualty events. People will still kill each other, of course, but it moves that breakpoint farther away from the average person's means, and moving that breakpoint means less innocent dead people. Seems fair to me.

Basically, I agree that people are creative, and a person who wants to kill someone (or many people) will find a way to do it. But if you make it harder, people will give up. Doing stuff is hard! Let's make it harder.

The weapons used in these shootings are inevitably AR15 variants. That's a rifle that is designed to put lethal rounds in targets as quickly as you can hit the trigger, with a 30 round magazine (and with a modicum of practice you can reload almost without interruption).

Even the the ubiquitous glock can sustain similar rates of fire, although the survivability may be greater.

If the average person is facing someone with any intent to do harm with a modern firearm then there is no power balance.

AR-15s are also effective for self-defense purposes.

You can also build an AR-15 with a block of metal, a CNC machine, and plans that are freely available on the Internet. There is no effective means by which you could prevent an AR-15 from ending up in peoples' hands.

A golf club is also effective for self defence purposes. In any case, those same tools are available globally and AR15s simply aren't ending up in people's hands, or the hands of school shooters.

> A golf club is also effective for self defence purposes

I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.

Point me to any other country in the western world where the concept of self defence is predicated on the possession of an AR15 capable of discharging 30 high-velocity rifle rounds in fifteen seconds.

Presumably, as your idea of self defence is overwhelming firepower, you spend your days campaigning against the ban on automatic weapons?

> Point me to any other country in the western world where the concept of self defence is predicated on the possession of an AR15 capable of discharging 30 high-velocity rifle rounds in fifteen seconds.

Prohibitions on such weapons do not reduce the overall violent crime rate, so I don't see why it matters.

> Presumably, as your idea of self defence is overwhelming firepower, you spend your days campaigning against the ban on automatic weapons?

What you imagine I think or do has no bearing on the arguments at hand.

>There is no effective means by which you could prevent an AR-15 from ending up in peoples' hands.

>a block of metal, a CNC machine

Try not to argue in bad faith as a gun owner challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

Half of your arguments are "regular men need to defend their houses" and "but black people shoot eachother in the ghetto too". Hint: these are in complete opposition to "Having enough time, money and access to a CNC Machine to make a homemade shitty AR15". Making guns less accessible means less shootings, period.

> Hint: these are in complete opposition

They are not. Black people have a right to self-defense the same as everyone else. The point is that gun violence in the United States is not uniform or random, but rather connected with specific set of social conditions. Ameliorating those specific social problems would reduce violent crime rates without the need to disarm peaceful civilians.

Most mass shootings reported in the past few years have been committed with guns that were legally purchased by either the shooter or a family member. Surely illegally manufacturing your own gun (or finding someone willing to illegally do it for you) is a barrier to most would be school shooters.

How many mentally ill school shooters would actually build an AR-15 out of a block of metal? 1%? 0.1%?

I'm guessing you need a 4 or 5 axis machine to make a gun. These cost more than the buildings that you need to contain them. (OK, there's this guy, but probably not big enough: https://pocketnc.com/.)

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you need to own and know how to operate a CNC mill in order to do a mass shooting, mass shootings are going to decrease. CNC is not "hit print", it's a skill that requires training and development. (Looking at /r/3DPrinting, I can tell you that many people manage to screw that up. CNC is like 3D printing, but about 10x harder. Some may argue that you need some more zeroes on there, actually.)

The technology is improving all the time. The "0% receiver" from Ghost Gunner only came out within the past year.

It is also not necessary for a every person wanting to build a rifle to own a CNC machine.

As it is, it would be both legally and practically infeasible outlaw and confiscate AR-15s.

>>>The weapons used in these shootings are inevitably AR15 variants.

False. The Virginia Tech shooter killed 32 people with a pair of pistols. It remains the deadliest school shooting in the US, and surpassed as deadliest mass shooting only by Orlando (49 dead, 2016) and Las Vegas (60 dead, 2017).

2015's second-deadliest: pistols and a revolver. He had a rifle but didn't use it (Umpqua College)

2014's deadliest: knives, pistol, car (Isla Vista)

2013's deadliest: shotgun (DC Naval Yard)

Review the list for yourself below, sort by death toll, then go to each shooting's page, which lists the weapons used.

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

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

I don't know how I sound saying this but I think airsoft is a great hobby. It's basically guns with every scary features, except it can't cause physical harm. I think it could be employed to create a gradient of lethality proportional to population density.

Guns are a tool, a very deadly tool, but a tool none the less.

Really tired of seeing this argument. They're made for killing, period. Fertilizer, box cutter, automobiles all have other uses. Killing is not one of them. For guns, it's in the top 3. And I say this as a gun owner.

> And yet, there does seem to be a strong correlation between “countries with stricter gun control laws” and “countries that have low rates of gun-related deaths and homicides”.

I don't like the argument that relies on separating out gun crime from other crime to show how you get more gun crime when you have more guns. That's like saying you get more drownings in places that have more residential pools.

It's perfectly correct but only serves to further an anti-gun (or anti-pool) argument.

What I, personally, care about and what matters to the voting population, is whether we are safer in a place where the citizens are legally armed (or not, as the case may be).

Separating the crime into different buckets just to show larger numbers is intellectually dishonest.

Mass shootings are much, much rarer than home invasion and resulting rape, murder or serious assault, and as such deserve a proportionate response.

Let's be honest, if burglars decide to break into your house while you are in it they are not doing so to simply take your stuff. If they wanted your stuff they'd break in when the house was empty.

This scenario is much more frequent than the mass shooting scenario.

Guess which one scares voters more.

the article you quoted says: “Homicide figures may include justifiable homicides along with criminal homicides, depending upon jurisdiction and reporting standards”

Why don’t we talk separately about “murders” vs “suicide” vs “justifiable homicide”? Each of those terms is fairly clearly defined in most people’s minds (maybe the last one a little less so), and then we could focus on the different mitigation that might be needed for each. I feel conflating them doesn’t actually help move the discussion forward given how different they are. On a moral basis, I think the situation where a law enforcement officer killed the recent texas school shooter is very different from that of that shooter who murdered innocents. So when people conflate such very different things by using terms like “gun deaths”, it makes many gun owners like myself suspicious that people are not arguing in good faith. Or am I missing something? Is there some benefit to doing so that isn’t just political?

A valid point. However, the number of justifiable gun homicides relative to criminal homicides is pretty insignificant:

“In 2016, for every justifiable homicide in the United States involving a gun, guns were used in 37 criminal homicides”

https://vpc.org/studies/justifiable19.pdf

Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners.

If you care about working together with your fellow citizens who think differently than you do, you'll pursue such laws and push back on laws that have a bad relative effectiveness.

For instance, did you know that, in California, you cannot buy a new model of a pistol? The most recent model you can get, from a roster that diminishes every year, is from 2013. Why? By what mechanism is that effective? For the same level of annoyance to gun owners, surely there is something more effective? Therefore gun control activists should oppose and overturn that law.

But they don't, because either they are ignorant or because they are more interested in winning than working together.

>Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners.

I'd like to point out that any Peaceful Gun Owner is capable of becoming violent in the future, for a multitude of reasons that can be undetectable at the time of purchase. This is why I find any policy that attempts to "weed out" certain people to be inherently pointless. The only thing that would work is to repeal the 2nd amendment, but that's never going to happen.

>For instance, did you know that, in California, you cannot buy a new model of a pistol? The most recent model you can get, from a roster that diminishes every year, is from 2013. Why? By what mechanism is that effective?

Hint: it causes, over time, gun ownership to decrease. People will not be tempted by that brand new Sig Sauer ad they saw to buy a gun at Walmart for the fun of it. Keeping only older guns accessible means that these guns break over time, and lowers the amount of freely accessible guns. Roster diminishing means that fewer people buy fewer guns.

Is there something more effective ? Sure, complete bans. Unfortunately, that would go against gun nuts like you that argue that having a .50 antimaterial rifle at home is important because MUH FREEDOMS.

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