Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Should be obvious. Violent areas need to create more laws to control the violence. Peaceful areas don't need to tell their citizens not to have guns.

View on HN

The point is those additional laws don't control the violence. Good/law-abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do.

> Good/law-abiding/upstanding armed citizens, however, do.

If your area is filled with good law-abiding citizens, you probably have lower crime rates.

I think armed citizens can be a tenuous curb on violence but that still wouldn't solve the roots of violence.

A civilized society with low levels of poverty, good economic mobility, a good education system, a fair and effective judicial system and no drug war would mean there'd be less people committing violent acts in the first place.

When you're at the point where an armed citizen has to regularly thwart crime, you probably have major unresolved socioeconomic problems.

Not that I'm against a citizen's right to bear arms. Just saying that the goal should be to have less people motivated to commit crimes in the first place, not a bunch of would be criminals calculating whether or not they're going to encounter armed resistance.

I'd love to see a citation for that.

Maybe its just the sad fact that bad news tends to travel more widely but I have yet to hear (on UK news) of a situation were an honest law abiding citizen has stopped a tragedy. I realize that their very intervention may have stopped a tragedy, making it not news worthy but I'm sure there should be more instances to justify that argument.

Well in the UK law-abiding citizens can't arm themselves so you'll never hear that story. The law in the UK even goes so far as to prohibit citizens from carrying an 'offensive weapon' without a good reason.

So if you happened to be walking down the street with a knife and you were not a chef on the way to work, you could be arrested.

Even using "more force" than the assailant is illegal. Even if both are examples of deadly force, e.g gun v. knife. Done by the courts in the '50s, the Parliament in the '60s, so even the habits of self-defense are a distant memory.

There are a LOT of would-be mass murders which were cut short because someone was armed and stopped the attacker either before killing started or after just 2-3 deaths. They don't enter the mass murder statistics precisely because they didn't happen despite intention thereto. The info you want is easily found on the web.

It happens an estimated 2.25 million times a year in the US. Needless to say, the vast majority of these involve neither the gun being fired or publicity.

My favorite independent site was taken out by the Righthaven copyright trolls, but you can start with this: http://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/armed-citizen.aspx ; each item is from the media.

Someone recently stopped a bank robbery in Michigan. I'm actually not sure whether intervention was wise, but the outcome was good - no one injured, thief arrested.

http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/06/customer_foils_ba...

Here's one instance: http://www.azcentral.com/news/free/20121218flagstaff-gun-tot...

This study is not evidence that armed citizens control violence, just that areas with less of a violence problem don't feel a need to enact gun control.

Oh, so peaceful areas don't have guns?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com