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Comment by dewfaced | Hacker News Reader

If you compare firearm & vehicle deaths Firearms Deaths per 100,000 population: 14.7 Motor vehicle traffic: Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.7. You only have a 1 person improvement in outcome with another severely regulated segment.

I doubt putting in a licensing regime would significantly improve anything.

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I'm not taking the other side, but that's a really bad argument. You're missing a reason for us to think that traffic deaths put any kind of floor on firearm deaths. Given the very different usage patterns, I would expect the two numbers to be basically unrelated. If we try to get at the impact of licensing and regulation by looking only at cars (and we can get very different answers if we look at other things) we see that comparing US historically to US today or US today to some other countries today, safety improvements are probably saving more like 20 people per 100k - bigger than the entire problem that remains with either cars or guns (and "bigger than both combined" is well within the error bars).

And finally, if we can reliably save 1 person per 100k, that's a significant improvement for the 3k people we've saved and the people who love them! Whether it is worth what we have to trade away, and whether we can actually get a reliable improvement, is a separate question (whose answer likely depends on the particular policy proposal under discussion).

Both of those are significant outliers over our peer countries, however, which tells us that this problem could be easily solved if we wanted to. Licensing would help if done properly, as would restrictions on type, storage, etc. – Switzerland has tons of guns but they also have those kind of restrictions and a much lower rate of death or injury. All we need to do is roll back some judicial activism earlier this century and agree that the preamble to the second amendment still has the meaning the founders intended.

Similarly, America has reversed the declining vehicle death trend by subsidizing massive trucks which are designed to maximize the harm they inflict. Some of them would not be legal in other countries due to poor visibility or safety, and others are dangerous due to our culture of not enforcing traffic laws and designing unsafe roads.

All of these are choices and we could simply copy what our peers do to save thousands of lives per year. We have chose not to, but we could make better choices.

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