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Comment by colpabar | Hacker News Reader

This is totally off topic, but aside from the numbers being lower, we do the exact same thing with gun deaths.

I have a few friends that think the stats I show them are a complete lie and fabrication, but the truth is: more people from pistols than 'assault rifles'. In fact, in the US, more people die from knives than rifles. (not just the 'assualt ones' Heck more people per year in the US die of 'hands, fists, and feet'. [0]

But guess what is always in the news, and talked about by politicians on both sides, until their constituents are whipped in a frenzy, donating to their campaign, and can no longer see the other side as humans anymore...

[0] https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-are-m...

[1] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...

The banning of assault rifles is because it’s easy and doesn’t detract from peoples lives at all. Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own?

Pistols and other Guns aren’t very effective at stopping deaths, but they’re perceived to be good defense, so banning them en mass is less palatable.

NYC banned pistols once because it was often the source of gang violence - and violence went down. Smart legislation used to address statistic use not headlines. But any ban will save lives and make people safer (and feel safer) so that’s why politicians today are clawing for whatever legislation they can pass.

>Assault rifles are for assault and we don’t need more assault. So why have them? Because a few people think it’s cool to own?

People who think this should have a grizzly bear run at them at least once.

Having seen it from a car I became pro-minigun instantly.

Let's see how a place like Romania manage it - lots of bears in the Carpathian Mountains, _very_ strict gun laws.

Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived at the scene, mostly to control the traffic and protect the bears from all the people in the death machines, as well as tourists "making selfies with the bears" ... after some minutes the bears tired of the situation and left the road.

I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

Like in tech sometimes its worth it to implement a big refactor that would enable faster / better code, even though it might lead to some edge cases that need to be addressed. Its tricky of course but such a _massive_ win as gun laws just can't be ignored I think.

It's like complaining that if you change your lead pipes to copper / plastic is too much work, and who cares if some people die of lead poisoning now and again, but leaks are much easier to fix with lead ... and you already have so much stock of pipes just not worth it ...

P.S. I'm truly sorry if this leads to a flame work and I know its a sensitive topic, but from a European perspective the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around. Like if your system is designed in such a way that violence is a "check" on something ... is it really a good system? Like sure governors feel a bit scared of loonies with rifles killing them for their transgressions, but wouldn't it be better that people actually rely on safer and more gentle political transitions rather than coup d'état? And I don't think gun laws ever prevented disgruntled constituents to kill government officials - e.g. Abe in Japan.

> the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around.

How are things in Ukraine? 20 years ago do you think anyone in Ukraine would have imagined Russia would be bombing their cities?

You never know when a situation changes and you need an armed population.

You do realize the grizzly isn't the European brown bear right?

European brown bears are cuddly lovable puppies by comparison, grizzlies are murder machines with an attitude which can outrun and out climb you.

>I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

This is a prime example of being confidently wrong and making moral judgments from ignorance. It's easy to put down "those people" living in the mountains when you've never been there. It's even easier to make laws that kill them since they are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them and you'll never have to see them.

Federalism is a good thing, and not just when you can smoke weed.

I love hiking into remote areas, including "bear country". I have seen black bears and grizzly bears while hiking.

You do not need assault rifles, this sounds silly and over the top. You just need to be aware of your surroundings, follow the rules and have a bear spray : https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm

A bear charging at you at full tilt gives you all of half a second to get it with the 9 meter range of bear spray. That's roughly how long it takes you to hit two keyboard keys in a row.

This is such a ridiculously specific situation most people won’t ever be in.

It’s such a small portion of the population that would have such a need for a gun that it can be handled as a special case in laws. No reason the rest of society can’t be safe.

You claim people have assault rifles to shoot suddenly attacking grizzly bears? And keep shooting ready?

What a ridiculous argument. Most of the artic guides I've seen are running around with beat up 12ga pumps and slugs.

I think its rather arrogant to think that we have perfected government to the point that we can willingly disarm ourselves of one of the most effective forms of defense...

I think it’s arrogant to think a few privately owned guns can actually compare to the massive armory of the US government.

Also, it’s funny that when people actually fight back against government abuse (George Floyd protests) the gun owning demographic seems to find it wrong to be violent despite claiming guns are meant to be used against the government.

It's been shown time and time again that you do not need to, nor do you go toe to toe with the "entire armory of the US government."

It's possible to want to ability to defend yourself while also thinking violence for the sake of violence isn't right. The issue most people had with the protests were that so many innocent people got caught in the cross hairs.

You obviously have no idea what an assault rifle is, just made an assumption from the name.

An assault rifle is a normal rifle that because of a few cosmetic features looks like a military gun. None of those features make it more deadly than any other gun.

Semi auto high caliber rifle capable of holding a magazine over 10 rounds. Happy? Don't split hairs.

Actually, I'm not sure why I get sucked into these discussions time after time. Nothing will ever change without a constitutional amendment. The left needs to make its peace with that.

Semi auto with a folding stock, bayonet mount, or one of several other things that make it look ugly.

> more deadly than any other gun.

Any other gun is still plenty deadly that my point stands.

But a lot of headlines talk about banning assault rifles so I used that term.

There’s a somewhat valid claim that pistols are good for self defense because they’re easy to carry. Will anyone use it for self defense? Statistically no. But the perception is there. Rifles, cosmetically altered or not do not have such a feature.

I think politicians fixate on rifles because angry constituents armed with rifles are what they personally fear the most. It's not about the general population stats at all. They don't really care about interpersonal/domestic violence or random street crime being committed with pawn shop revolvers or knives, even though these together account for the overwhelming majority of murders.

Neither the post you respond to nor anyone I've spoken with make claim that assault rifles represent a significant portion of gun deaths. That politicians gravitate to 'banning assault rifles' is lazy governance. Much tighter regulation of all guns would be making a difference.

Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.

The question under dispute is what is to be done.

Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally).

The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0].

[0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...

As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths

Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter

> Removing guns from law abiding citizens

…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.

People want to prevent violence not punish it more.

I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.

That mindset feels reminiscent of the ever-increasing size of vehicles on the road. You avoid the smaller vehicle for fear of being run off the road (or worse) by an oversized truck and so instead of the subcompact you go with the midsize, then crossover, then SUV, ad infinitum.

Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

As others have mentioned, we're already one of the leading countries in terms of imprisoning people. You're saying the gun violence problem is therefore because we don't imprison enough people?

What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?

Hello, the US is the world leader in imprisoning people. It clearly doesn't work very well.

It's also illegal in the USA per the 2nd. That's one of the few things the current SCOTUS is getting right.

As an extremely cynical american, my view is that we don't do anything because guns are a big industry in america, and industry controls our government in all the places that matter.

But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs, and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.

The entire US civilian small arms industry is tiny. The largest publicly traded gun company has a stock market capitalization of about 0.05% of Apple. The entire gun industry has an annual revenue of only $70 billion, which doesn't even register as a significant line item in our $20 trillion GDP. Any political influence the industry has is more to do with cultural factors than with size.

I think there's a hint of truth in his supposition though. The gun lobby enjoys significant popular support from the general public who want to buy guns, but they also receive support from the gun industry that want to sell guns. The intersection of these two interests is protecting Americans' right to buy guns from American gun manufactures. In this, the gun lobby has been effective.

However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.

It takes very little money to buy your politicians. Tens of thousands of dollars to sway their opinion, a few hundred thousand to buy it outright. The gun companies own a lot of your politicians.

Which bulk of the aggregate number? The number 1 cause of gun deaths in the US is suicides.

He wants to talk about black on black crime. As opposed to white on white crime which is not talked about as separate issue. Because, most murder by large number are among people who know each other - are friends, family, do business. And those groups tend to have same race.

TIL that people think "black on black crime" has any meaning. I would have thought he wanted to talk about gang violence, which is probably #3 or #4 on the list of gun death causes, behind domestic violence and maybe accidents (with suicides eclipsing both of these).

That's an interesting point, so I did some digging. I'm using 2007 as the reference year, because I can't find any more up-to-date sources on domestic murder.

There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.

There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.

There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.

Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.

Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]

CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).

Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.

1: https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis/measuring... (scroll to the bottom, couldn't get a direct link)

2: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf

3: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

4: https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/userfiles/file/Childr...

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