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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Think of America more like 50 countries. Now take your school shooting example. A lot of states have made changes to their gun laws in response to this. Making federal (i.e. applies to all states) gun law changes is more challenging because you have to get 75% of the states on board with any constitutional changes. Without a constitutional amendment, any gun legislation ultimately must respect the existing 2nd Amendment so it's not possible to have Japan-esque policies without a constitutional amendment. Also USA takes up an entire continent so different regions of the us have different cultures and sentiment towards guns. People living in highly rural areas like Montana probably have favorable gun ownership sentiment. People living in highly urban areas like NYC usually have negative gun sentiment.

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And it's important to note that these different gun laws don't actually meaningfully affect crime, particularly something as exceedingly rare as a mass shooting.

Citation needed

RAND did a decent review.[1]

They do show supportive evidence of some gun laws having a meaningful effect on violent crime, so I'm not sure what they're referring to. For instance, it appears that child access prevention laws, specifically, are associated with a significant reduction in firearm homicides.[2]

RAND does complain that there is insufficient or limited evidence in a lot of areas though, like effect on mass shootings.

[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...

[2] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/child-acce...

The rate is about two mass shootings per day in the USA. I would not call that "exceedingly rare". The rate in the UK, a country with strict gun laws, is about 1-2 a year.

There are too many ways to define mass shooting. Wikipedia has approximately 1/day for 2025 so far.

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

1 a day, 2 a day... does it matter? It's still 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than a culturally similar country with strong gun control.

It matters if you care about being accurate, and having a reasonable definition. It's the same reason you don't include suicides in figures about gun violence if you're actually interested combating gun violence and not just scoring political points.

Half the definitions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... don't even exclude gang violence, drug violence, or organized crime. Statistically if you're not involved with gangs or drugs, you're not going to be involved in a gang or drug related shooting. The majority of those killed or injured are at least peripherally involved. So you should immediately question to credibility and motived of any organization that wants to talk about "mass shootings" which by definition are scary because they're random and unprovoked but then want to include a huge number of incidents are driven by crime, drugs, and gangs, none of which is random or unprovoked.

A lot of these state laws have also been rolled back because the Supreme Court declared them against the 2nd amendment.

The US being "50 countries" was sort of the original idea, but over time things changed significantly. Many aspects of life are controlled federally and have been for almost a 100 years. Yes, there is also state government but there is nothing special about that: many countries have some type of sub-national government with varying degrees of power. In the US state governments tend to have more power than average, but that does not make it "50 countries".

Everything is stuck in a weird dysfunctional limbo where none of the major institutions work as was intended at all. Endless discussion and navel-gazing over what some comma could perhaps have meant 250 years ago is not a serious way to govern a country.

> Also USA takes up an entire continent

Not even half.

Canada is slightly larger, plus there's Mexico and a bunch of smaller countries, which share the North American continent with the USA.

That doesn’t sound like 50 countries at all. That sounds like one incredibly disfuncional country.

How does it not sound like 50 countries? There are 50 countries (states) each with their own laws and government. Hence varying degrees of gun strictness depending on the country (state). Laws that change the federal constitution must be approved by 75%.

Sounds like a dysfunctional country where states seem like they have a lot of power but they really don’t because they don’t control their borders. And a few holdouts can ruin everything for the large majority.

If your states were like real countries, they could just ban guns, set up border controls, and turn away anyone bringing guns in. But they can’t, so they’re not countries.

I didn't say they are countries, I said they are like countries. Finding all the ways they are not like countries to prove they aren't countries just ignores all of the similarities.

States are like countries in the same way that I’m like a horse. We’re both mammals with 4 limbs, but that’s about it.

Plenty of countries have states with distinct laws and cultures. Canada, Brazil, England, Italy, etc. That doesn’t mean those states are countries.

Sounds like you’re letting US exceptionalism cloud your judgement.

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