Comment by dbrueck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbrueck | Hacker News Reader

Sort of interesting, but the whole setup is oddly misleading:

"Smoking and firearms are among the leading causes of avoidable premature death in the United States"

The statement is true for smoking but it takes some work to make it true for firearms. And then it describes tobacco and firearms as "both are legal yet lethal" - it borders on nonsensical to pair them that way (I guess possessing both can be legal, but it's worded to imply that the use of both, in the ways that resulted in death, is legal).

I'd love to see fewer firearm deaths, but it just seems odd to try and link a really high cause of deaths with one that is an order of magnitude smaller, while skipping over others that are very preventable causes of death. You are, for example, many times more likely to die from poor diet than from being shot. I mean, using their framing, automobiles are "legal yet lethal" and auto deaths are the cause of about as many deaths as firearm deaths - and that includes suicide (i.e. intentional) deaths.

I think the paper is purely political. Alcohol causes 140k deaths per year, and if there were any scientific goal here they would have included alcohol before including firearms.

Alcohol notably tends to quietly kill only yourself. Smoking affects everyone around you, firearms too.

Alcohol related non-drinker fatalities would be the relevant measure (and still too many, since it's going to be drink driving largely).

That’s not true for firearms. More people die from falling off ladders than die in mass shootings.

And if mass shootings were the only deaths that ever occurred from firearms then they'd be much less of a problem...[1,2] (there were >20,000 gun homicides in 2021, versus about 300 deaths from falling off ladders. There have been 351 mass shootings so far in the US [3])

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...

[2] https://www.lockjawladdergrip.com/blog/ladder-safety-usa-202...

[3] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shootings-days-2023-database-...

If you dishonestly expand the definition of a word, you can create any statistic you want.

Meanwhile, roughly as many people are killed in automobile accidents as there are gun deaths (of any kind, including suicide) every year.

Statistically, you likely don’t know a single person killed by a gun or a car. I absolutely do not.

Now, heart disease? Statistically you’re unlikely not to know someone who died from it.

In reality, you’re not going to be a random victim of gun violence. Gun homicides primarily consist of internecine violence between criminal elements who primarily use handguns.

Finally, there’s been a large rise in gun homicides over the last few years coinciding with a large rise in violent crime in general. Solve the crime issue, you solve the gun homicides.

Dishonest is your original assertion: that mass shootings must be the only type of gun violence in America (implicit by your comparison, rather then referring to any actual statistics).

And then you do it again: "what about automobile accidents?" Well that's a good question! Except (1) a great deal of effort is spent on reducing them, and (2) there are less drunk-driving related crashes then gun homicides in the US[1] - 13,384 in 2021.

And now you're onto just standard whataboutism about everything else. Maybe all causes of death are serious! Maybe one of these causes though has not only a historic lack of attention, but has been the unique recipient of legislation specifically designed to prevent the CDC even looking into it![2]

Because of everything you've listed, you know what's unique? No one is doing anything about gun-related death or injuries. Regulations are actively rolled back, and people like you work to shutdown any possible discussion of the problem. Literally no one is stopping you talking about cars, or heart disease, yet I seriously doubt you'd be bothering to "whatabout" those in any of the numerous studies which get posted.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

The Dickey Amendment was specifically because a certain set of activists would do "research" for the purpose of creating a record to support gun control.

> “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” (P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.)

The CDC wasn't banned from looking into it. They have looked into how guns may lead to deaths [0][1][2]. The were banned from using it to promote gun control.

Regulations are going to and fro. Some of them are getting rolled back, while others are progressing. Most of the ones that are getting rolled back have been useless at their intent. Or they violate the constitution. Or both!

0: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db241.htm 1: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/2011-0069-3140.pd... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6230a1.htm

Alcohol abuse affects people around you, as does abuse of any drug. Drunk driving kills more people than secondhand smoke. And alcohol has a multiplicative effect on violence and other forms of substance abuse as well.

Tobacco, smoked outside, is a minor pollutant no worse to people nearby than the SUVs driving by on the street, and certainly not as bad as what's in most Americans' well water or fast food packaging.

I don't have proof of this but I have a hard time believing that passive smoking kills anywhere near as many people as the behaviour of drunk people.

Nah. alcohol correlates heavily, like HEAVILY, for domestic abuse, rape, murder, assault, industrial accidents, and car-related fatalities.

nothin quiet about it. I can walk away from second hand smoke, but I can't just shrug off a drunk driver t-boning me.

Not to mention obesity, which overlaps nicely with county maps of tobacco use, firearms ownership, alcohol abuse, unemployment, abortion bans, and places that used to own slaves.

Still, I'd say calling a color-coded overlay of those things "political" is actually too kind.

To me this reads visually as a weak attempt to get some viral traction for posting something like those covid infection / vaccination maps, which wealthy city-dwellers clucked over while reveling in the schadenfreude of The Redneck getting his Just Desserts.

It's not political, so much as a kind of snuff porn indulged in by certain people. Nor has it lost its paternalistic "public health" overtones in this remix.

[edit] don't get me wrong, I'm all for bringing the backwards South into the 21st Century and putting an end to its reactionary BS that has no place in a modern democracy. My point is that shaming them has no effect whatsoever; it's just a sop to prop up the sense of superiority that's unhelpfully been cultivated by coastal elites.

[edit 2] I was a middle child.

> it borders on nonsensical to pair them that way

While I agree, the one government tasks one law enforcement agency (ATF) with managing them.

Then we ought to include alcohol related deaths. And explosives related deaths especially.

I think that's true, at least officially, but IIRC the ATF came about in the 1800s as part of the Treasury Department, i.e. "managing" those things in the sense of taxation/revenue first more than policing, the latter now belonging at least as much to the DEA and FBI maybe? I might be misremembering though. :)

There's another quality that allows to group cigarettes and guns together. They are both completely optional lifestyle choice. While cars and diet might be way harder to opt out given how cars are needed to get to work and stores and the most unhealthy diet is the cheapest and fastest one.

Do you also consider living in an area with high rate of violent crime to be a lifestyle choice?

In nearly all cases, no.

Even “optional” gets a little fuzzy when all these things are likely to be a cultural phenomenon; as in, influenced by your parents/family.

It’s like saying that Christianity continues to be the most popular choice of religion in the US. Sure it’s optional, but there’s a bit of inertia involved.

There's inertia in everything.

> They are both completely optional lifestyle choice.

Kind of like alcohol, right? (which has nearly 4x the annual deaths vs firearms)

Yes. Should be included in the group as well.

Don't they count fatalities due to assault? Is it optional to live in an area with high crime?

There's always some way to group things together, but I find it unhelpful in this case.

Even grouping all firearm deaths together is almost always unhelpful. Ordinary violent crime with firearms is very different from a school shooting is very different from suicide by firearm.

Then grouping firearm deaths together with a highly addictive and slow-killing vice like cigarettes just adds to the confusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com