In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.
People have this schizophrenic notion that the US should have the demographics of Brazil but the homicide rate of Sweden, and that aint gonna happen no matter what kind of gun control laws you pass. Same thing for measures of corruption, etc.
So you have nations with very low homicide rates, like Bangladesh, versus nations with high homicide rates, like Nigeria or Brazil or Jamaica. And the gun control laws don't seem to make much of a difference in comparison to ethnicity. Looking at Europe, you have wide variations in gun ownership rates but a fairly low homicide rate across the board. Looking at US states, again wide variations of gun ownership rates not well correlated to homicide rates. So stop pretending that the high homicide rates in the US, which are accounted for in urban centers are because of loose gun control laws in DC or Chicago. The US has exactly the homicide rate you'd expect just by using WHO intentional homicide rates per continent and comparing that to US demographics.
Yes. Everyone knows African Americans have more in common with Africans than Americans. Asian Americans are a monolith, and so is Asia. And Latin Americans speak Latin. Sigh.
Why wouldn't we compare the US to other places with similar GDP per capita?
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
I'm not sure if you're trying to claim that people commit violent crimes at different rates based on their genetic makeup, or if you're you trying to claim that multicultural societies lead to more violent crime, but both claims are preposterous.
London and Singapore are giant multicultural melting pots, and tremendously safe. Even New York City is safer than many major European cities. (Really, look it up.)
Violent crime in city is the result of poor drug policy more than anything, not the city's ethnic demographics, nor gun laws.
The test here would be to compare the violent crime rate in cities with high ethnic diversity and high economic inequality, with cities with high diversity but low inequality. Or low diversity but high inequality.
Because we want to compare the US to places that people find comparable and desirable and, gosh, maybe even slightly superior, rather than places that people find to be totally undesirable.
We also would like to compare the US to places that might have statisitical similarity. A good example of this is Canada: lots of people claim cause/effect in the US for laws about underage drinking, yet Canada had a similar decrease in underage drinking without changing any of their laws. This contradicts those who claim that public policy changes were responsible.
In addition, European countries help show that sometimes there are other solutions than just "more guns". And, what some of the fallout from BLM changes is showing is that disarming initial responders rather than always just sending in armed police seems to result in positive results to the system.
We look to Europe because sometimes they are exemplars and that while maybe we shouldn't blindly just do what they do, perhaps we might want to think about and emulate what they do right.
Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents).
I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-.
I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart.
Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem.
Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control.
edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2].
> many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-
> gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips
> firearm-related homicide or accidents).
This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
No, have you never lived in a rural area?
Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.
My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives.
A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives.
It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope.
So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible.
The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false.
> My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle
If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.
Each state has different firearm availability and laws.
Some states have very liberal gun laws, including automatic or semi-automatic weapons and concealed carry. Others have very strict laws, and with limited types of guns available and a loaded gun in a car or concealing a handgun would involve jail time.
People become criminals when there's few other options
Once you start getting enough gun ownership, you start getting the "Who's the bad guy?" problem when there are conflicts. And the cops won't be terribly restrained if the gun owners aren't white.
There are many non violent blacks and hispanics but their culture and values lead them in that direction.
The blacks and hispanics you are describing have a culture problem.
1) There are something like 300-600 million firearms in the US. Attempts to disarm only get the guns from those who are law abiding, you disarm the defenders without doing much to the criminals.
2) You probably increase the death rate as you have made people less able to defend themselves, but done basically nothing to most murders because you didn't succeed in disarming the criminals.
By increasing the supply their availability for criminals also goes up proportionally.
This isn't common today, but considering ongoing the efforts to make 3d-printing Glock and Hi-Point frames easier I can't imagine it will remain uncommon forever. These aren't exactly hard to find, see [0].
And for those who think you can just ban all other gun parts and fix the problem, I present to you the FGC-9 - a pistol-caliber carbine manufacturable in your basement with a 3d printer, metal bar stock, and some high-pressure pipe. Semi-auto, rifled barrel - the works. [1] Is it a trivial process? No. Is it going to get easier and produce higher quality results with time? Yes.
0: https://www.defcad.com/library/60d6a735-4a8c-4b42-8dd7-33b13...
1: https://www.defcad.com/library/ac26b242-720f-4608-a202-0ecea...
In the UK and Europe, criminals modifying replicas or other close starting points is quite common.
You know where modifying guns with 3D printed parts is common? The USA, since you can turn many of the commercially available ones into automatic weapons.
People have done it, but it is not common at all.
Moreover, for the time being, 3D printed gun parts have an extremely short lifespan.
The real threat is ghost guns. It *used* to take a skilled machinist to make gun parts, but CNC machines at the home workshop level are now capable of doing it. Any reasonably competent adult can do it, you don't need to be a machinist.
Yes, those are even shorter, but even industrial 3D printers are ill-equipped to print anything other than the gun's frame. Even lower receivers are a problem.
The bolt carrier group on a long-gun does not fare well unless it is made of metal (or special ceramics, in some niche cases). Same goes for the gas-block on gas-operated guns (like AR-15s or AKs), or the lever on lever-delayed blowback systems (e.g. the LAI on the FAMAS), or the rollers on something like an MP5. The DIAS required to convert an AR-15 into a full rock-'n-roll model has to bear a lot of mechanical and thermal force as well, and the 3D printed ones are notoriously unreliable. They can chip, deform, or fray at the worst possible time, releasing the hammer. They can fail to retain the hammer, and neuter your weapon in a gunfight. Most importantly: they always do this. The good ones can barely get 100 rounds off.
Handguns and long-guns likewise need hard, heat-resistant materials for firing pins, ejectors, chambers and barrels. That's unlikely to change anytime soon, unless we suddenly discover new polymers with hardness and thermal properties on par with steel.
And here's the dirty secret: you can already buy plastic guns. They're called Glocks.
>The real threat is ghost guns. It used to take a skilled machinist to make gun parts, but CNC machines at the home workshop level are now capable of doing it. Any reasonably competent adult can do it, you don't need to be a machinist.
Any reasonably competent adult can buy an 80% lower receiver [0] and produce a fully-functioning AR-15 lower receiver with a hand-held file and a few hours of work. And this is legal. The rest can be legally purchased without any oversight, because the lower receiver is the only thing that qualifies as a gun.
3D-printed "ghost guns" are a myth invented by TV talking-heads to scare pearl-clutching soccer-moms in the 80's. The reason they are a myth is because it's cheaper, safer and easier to just build a real, usable gun that wont melt in your hands. And again: this is doable with polymer parts, too.
To reiterate, because it bears repeating: the world you fear has existed for at least 25 years.
[0] https://www.5dtactical.com/ar-15-80-lower-receivers-s/109.ht...
> a pretty good example how gun control saves lives.
It sounds like the door saved lives. He was still able to shoot people. It doesn't sound like gun control laws saved any lives; maybe the building codes did.
Especially since it sounds like his substitute gunpowder worked.
Out of approx 400,000,000 guns, only very roughly 12,000 are used in crime. There is less than 0.01% overlap.
https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html
If you include the number of persons shot but not killed directly you are looking at about 20x that number.
And that doesn’t include firearms used in other crimes of violence.
Again, I don't see how an argument that "crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny" can be anything but laughable given data points like "Japan" or "Belgium".
The argument is that legal guns increase gun deaths but reduce other types of crime, either by substitution (e.g. reducing knife crime) or by deterrence (e.g. reducing home burglaries).
That claim has its own burden of proof that it needs to meet before it can be accepted, but looking at other countries and saying "More guns means more shootings" isn't addressing the actual argument.
Suicides don't count? For the record: I'm 100% in favor of public policy that results in large decreases in the suicide rate.
They also don’t count 1 for 1.
It’s much easier to substitute something else for a gun when committing suicide than when murdering someone.
That idea seems to be belied by the upthread assertion that gun deaths disproportionately represent suicides.
What else is highly effective and messy? Jumping from someplace high. There are lots of high places. I'd much prefer they go the gun route because jumpers sometimes land on someone as most such places that are readily available are in urban areas.
Suicide is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.
> Suicide in the United Kingdom declined after coal stoves were phased out, removing a means of suicide by carbon monoxide that had been available in many homes. Tylenol (or acetaminophen) overdoses in England and Wales fell by 43 percent after legislation passed requiring that the medication be sold in “blister packs” where you have to pop out each individual pill; that simple switch from big bottles was enough to save lives. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18095174/pesti...
And if someone does decide to try to kill themselves, guns are more likely to be fatal:
> About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-...
“ In the early 1960s, asphyxiation with domestic gas accounted for nearly half of suicides in England and Wales.3 The conversion of the British gas supply to North Sea gas, which was free of carbon monoxide, essentially eliminated domestic gas suicides in England and Wales and, moreover, was accompanied by a steep decline in the overall suicide rate (a 30% decline in England and Wales between 1960 and 1971, and a smaller decrease in Scotland), driven by the fall in gas suicides.”
Additionally, in the case specifically of guns, they’re more impactful for suicides BECAUSE they’re so effective. In the US they account for 1% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths.
There was a complete prohibition on CO containing gas. Go read the story again.
The point is that perspective matters. You want to treat "crime" as a single thing because it seems like "the actual argument" to you, and when I see that same argument it looks like senseless spin because it's trying to dilute the US's outrageous homicide rate in an analysis by comparing it to burglaries in Amsterdam or whatever.
Yes, and I'm not advocating for that.
My only point is that "less gun deaths in countries without legal guns" isn't addressing the original claim that other crimes have decreased as a consequence of legal guns. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim is true, or what exactly they mean by that, which are both questions I also would like to be answered.
Once you include multiple countries, isn't your data skewed by "countries at war import a lot of guns"?
> or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?
That's not spin. You want to minimize total deaths, not "gun violence". If banning guns meant instead of getting shot, the same number of people got stabbed instead, the ban would be pointless.
It's almost like, as I said above, the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons. That this obvious hypothesis is simply disbelieved by large numbers of HN posters (many of whom like to call themselves "rationalists") continues to astound me.
Except that this simply is not true.
Gun violence in the us is not correlated with gun ownership.
It is correlated with poverty. It’s as simple as that.
This is because ‘gun violence’ is just violence.
Calling it ‘gun violence’ makes it seem like it’s about guns, but it really isn’t.
The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime, on the whole, from largely survivable violence to presumptively lethal injury. And that's bad, thus the game-playing with "crime" statistics instead of shootings to try to obscure the clear truth.
And the proper answer here is gun. You're much less likely to be hurt by a mugger with a gun--the mugger is far more likely to rely purely on deterrence rather than actually use his weapon.
Would you prefer to be mugged or a mugger to be shot?
That’s a fine perspective to have, but it completely contradicts the people here who are saying no one is demanding prohibition.
If your prior is "gun rights are super important and any attempt to regulate guns must be resisted", then it leads you inevitably to ridiculous arguments like "AKTUALLY guns reduce crime (for some variant definition of crime that includes non-violent stuff)" or (and you fell right into this one) "[gun regulation] leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition"[1].
At what point will the gun folks come back to rational compromise? You know how you end up with inevitable prohibition? When it's the only option left to the majority.
[1] Which is just clearly false, look at the diversity of gun laws across the globe! CLEARLY it's true that you can regulate them better than the US without "inevitably" confiscating them. Look at Canada, for goodness sake.
The point I see you making is to say that all people who are against gun control are irrational, but it this appears to be a bare claim unsupported by an argument.
* crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally, but by far less than most firearm advocates claim.
* though, the most dramatic of that decrease is related to violent crime as some arguments might claim.
* when firearms become more lawfully common police are slightly more likely to be victims of violent crime.
* the numbers related to crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny even for high population density large cities indicating many arguments on the subject are exaggerated to fit a narrative.