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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

>Sweden

There are weekly shootings and bombs exploding, just from this week https://sweden.postsen.com/local/117122/Large-police-operati...

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Switzerland has very liberal gun laws similar to the US but one of the lowest murder rates. It’s not just gun control.

Doesn’t surprise me as Gottsunda is a properly miserable area.

The amazing thing about Sweden is that very few people want to acknowledge that it has problems just like any other country. There is crime, racism, poverty, housing crisis, alcoholism, etc.

Seems stupid to me since it’s hard to improve the situation if you can’t acknowledge the problems.

Cool, you know a lot about Sweden, in which part of Sweden do you live?

I lived in Göteborg for six years, and Stockholm for a year. Also lived in Halmstad for a shorter period. I’m fluent in Swedish, and I’ve traveled the country a fair bit — including to Gottsunda. A [severely disabled] friend of mine lives there, so I’ve visited a few times. It’s a total ghetto.

I’m assuming your question is friendly curiosity, and not an attempt to disqualify my opinion.

>I’m assuming your question is friendly curiosity, and not an attempt to disqualify my opinion.

Yeah, everyone else assumed the same, too.

Your opinion was disqualified when you categorized an entire country as stupid. We have a lot of problems and one of them is an abundance of people with inflammatory opinions that are keen to authoritatively describe what "the real problem is". But I guess you lived here too long to get infected by the stupidness. Sorry!

Sweden had a total of 360 shootings and 62 firearm homicides last year. In a country with 10 million people. That's roughly the size of North Carolina where they have an average of 1,300 shootings and ~530 firearm homicides. Their gun control seems to be pretty effective!

The US is the 32nd worst country in the world for gun violence, with 4.12 incidents per 100k population per year. That's a terrible comparison.

You should compare it to other countries instead. To me, an Irish person (ranked 157 at 0.18 per 100k) living in Vietnam (ranked 173 at 0.12 incidents per 100k), the gun violence in Sweden sounds shockingly high.

Although it's actually only a bit higher than Ireland at position 149, 0.25 per 100k.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country...

Primarily due to demographics and not gun laws.

Look at the rates of homicides by firearm for White Americans and they’re within the same order of magnitude as European nations.

This is a conversation that is verboten in the US because people assume that it means you believe that crime must be intrinsic to race, even though this statistic is actually fully compatible with the liberal orthodoxy regarding the disparate impact of government policy on American Black people.

Is the divide black/white or rich/poor? Inequality seems a driver for badness.

There is always a gap between rich and poor on violent crime like homicides but the cross racial gap persists (in the US) at any point along the continuum of SES.

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