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This is an incredibly sensationalist and politically-motivated title. It should really read "Automobiles now immensely safer in the US". As the article's own graph shows, gun violence hasn't really changed much in the last decade and a half, but cars have gotten a lot safer!
Good point. It looks like gun violence is down ~30% since the mid 1990's.
Also, how do they define "gun violence"? Does that include accidental shootings? Suicides? From what I remember, suicides account for almost half of all deaths due to guns.
Let's drop things down and say there is only ~500 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm per year in the US. That seems reason enough to discourage gun ownership.
Lets drop things down and say there is only ~500* deaths due to accidental drowning per year in the US. That seems reason enough to discourage pool ownership.
*=http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/wa... There are closer to 3,500 accidental drownings per year.
Your joking, but I actually agree with this. I also almost drowned at my parents pool while really young (under 3).
Note, discourage != prohibit. Regular PSA's about the dangers of pool ownership higher taxes, and or required fencing could all save lives.
By that logic we should get rid of swimming pools...http://www.poolsafely.gov/drowning-deaths-injuries/
Probably ladders as well...
Don't put words in my mouth, discourage != get rid.
Mandating they all be panted in iridescent reflective coatings would discourage ownership, but not actual use.
PS: Ladders are covered in safety warnings (which may be ridiculous). Guns, not so much.
Don't forget buckets! Those have resulted in more than a few drowning deaths over the years.
You've reminded me: The CPSC introduced stop-sale regulation on magnets (remember Buckyballs?) for even fewer deaths than that, and where most of the non-fatal injuries were the result of poor decisions by adolescents. Worse, in my opinion, the relatively small number of deaths that occurred were almost all traceable to irresponsible adults leaving magnets in places where toddlers could pick them up and swallow them.
That's still a sore point for me.
The article says "Today, suicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths."
According to the article it includes accidents, homicides and suicides. I have also heard a figure of 50-70% of all gun deaths are suicides.
The argument of the article is that consistent government regulation has helped curve motor vehicle deaths downwards and that consistent gun regulation might be able to do the same.
"Due to guns?" Do guns make people suicidal?
It lowers the bar before people succeed. Take some pills and many back out, pull a trigger and your generally out of options.
Even if you take that to be true (I gather there's plenty of ways to quickly off yourself at any given hardware store), does that make the guns "responsible" for those deaths? Are those deaths "due" to guns? Or are we using our political biases to slant something to meet our agenda, like this article, which shows gun violence isn't really increasing at all.
Exactly. When Australia changed their gun laws, the suicide rate went down by 65%.
Yet Japan has one of the highest suicide rates and almost no gun ownership!
Also, prior to enacting gun control, Australia's non-firearm suicide rate doubled (1980-1996) while firearm suicide was cut in half.
Not sure there is any correlation.
You may not be sure, but the researchers that study this subject are sure - http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf
And for the US - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/1...
It's not just me, it's other researchers as well.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia#Measurin...
"The results of these tests suggest that the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates."[61]"
"The implemented restrictions may not be responsible for the observed reductions in firearms suicide. Data suggest that a change in social and cultural attitudes could have contributed to the shift in method preference.[60]"
I wouldn't assume that it's settled.
Freedom, by definition, includes the freedom to be stupid[1]. This is kind of the point of having a free society; the people that do helpful things that you approve of don't need to have their activities protected by law and constitution. It's the people that do things you don't approve of that need those protections.
To test if people are actually free, you study how the unpopular people and unwelcome ideas are handled. If they are restricted "for their own good", then any claim of being "free" are jut marketing.
The solution is better education and more communication (and better healthcare, including a lot more funding/availability for mental health services). Going after guns doesn't address the actual problem.
Oh, and "take some pills"? That really depends. You may survive, but hours of hypoxia from an overdose of respiratory depressants can be incredibly damaging, especially to the brain. If the overdose wasn't strong enough to cause that kind of damage, it may not even be a fatal dose. There is going to be a lot of variation, and "backing out" only apples some of the time.
[1] As someone who strongly supports the right to die, suicide is a complicated subject, and is not "stupid" in some cases. However, for the purposes of this thread, that is really off-topic. The "stupid" subset certainly exists and they would be the people who would benefit form the "backing out" you mention.
This seems like the 'one true way' fallacy. If doing Y is vastly more expensive and harder to pull off and nobody is trying to do Y, then it's not an excuse to avoid doing X which is a vastly cheaper partial solution.
When you include external costs guns are massively subsidized. EX: Homeowners insurance generally does not ask about gun ownership even if it increases risks.
PS: The 18th may have allowed the sale of beer, but that does not mean the government can't discourage use though taxation.
There's quite a difference between "guns make people suicidal" and "guns enable impulsive suicide"
That isn't the main topic of the article though. From the opening sentence: "For the first time in more than 60 years, firearms and automobiles are killing Americans at an identical rate". The headline simply points out the article's main data point of automobile and gun deaths converging.
The article's headline and banner strongly promote this concept that guns are an increasing problem. While the title and opening sentence aren't false, they ARE misleading.
That's purely subjective.
This is really a thinly veiled attack on the "then we should outlaw cars!" argument.
This lays out the case for "reasonable" safeguards and limitations that should be put in place for guns because "reasonable" rules have made cars so much safer.
While that may be the claim, the NYT blew their cover with the front page editorial last week where they openly admitted to wanting all guns out of everyone's hands, regardless of the legality. What we understand now is that the "reasonable" laws are the wedge to start going for more and eventual outlawing.
The problem is that "gun control advocates" claim that people shouldn't own guns really mean that civilians shouldn't own them. They're still okay with government having guns.
Because "tyranny will never come to America..."
If I'm not mistaken, the implication here is that tyranny might come to America, and I 100% agree with that. Of course it might, and in fact I think the increasing surveillance state atmosphere makes it seem increasingly likely.
But any implication that civilian gun ownership could make a difference if it happens seems overly hopeful. The US military is the largest in the world by a large margin. If tyranny comes to America then a few civilian shotguns aren't going to help much.
You're making the common assumption that such a situation would be "the standing US military roughly as it exists now" vs "rebel citizens with only small arms". This scenario is unlikely to ever happen.
What would be more likely to happen is something like the Civil War where the army itself was also divided. Even more importantly, it is a lot harder to control an army when the targets are the people the army supposedly exists to protect. In a survey[1] of "300 U.S. Marine Corps soldiers" about unit cohesion when working with the UN, the final question asked:
The results of that question suggests a "citizens vs army" scenario is very unlikely.
Small groups of people often have some kind of consistency across the group, because the definition of the group self-selects for something. (e.g. the people who choose to attend a chess club tend to like to play chess) As a group grows in size, the makeup of the group tends to become more heterogeneous. Eventually, as the group becomes very large, the makeup of the group tends to resemble the makeup of the general population.
The military is a very large group of people, so the individual attitudes and politics of a soldier tends to resemble the attitudes and politics seen in the country in general. When considering a topic that is obviously politically controversial, you should expect that the people serving in the armed forces will be approximately as divided as the rest of the citizens.
[1] http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a293790.pdf
Your scenario would still present a situation where civilian arms ownership, while the cause of the conflict, is relatively inconsequential in the ensuing conflict itself. The military against itself is still a conflict with military grade arms.
That is possible. My point is mainly that it isn't going to be the lopsided "civilians vs army" scenario. The military isn't a single monolithic entity.
As for the utility of civilian being armed, I think you are underestimating the deterrence factor. Yes, they would lose in some situations and are less important in others.
Consider the situation from the perspective of the attacking army. Fighting an army is hard enough, but that attack is a lot harder if you also have to defend against the population in general. The counter to that problem is a scorched earth policy that doesn't leave a population that could be a threat, but such a policy is risky and can easily turn more people against you.
We see this when our army fights in the middle east: when you want to maintain good PR instead of razing cities, small arms and IEDs can be surprisingly effective.
Thanks, I hadn't seen that survey before.
I wonder how many of these guns belong to the police (and hence the murders can't be prevented by reducing civil gun ownership)...
http://killedbypolice.net/
You can just subtract the numbers.
10% demographic, when you break down the numbers last I checked. But ya.
This is crazy. I recently stumbled upon the numbers for gun-killings by German police, I can't believe how much these numbers diverge:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_... (Second column is "number of fatal shots", third is "total number of shots fired at people")
Of course, the USA have 4 times as many inhabitants and the German numbers are only related to gun-killings, not other methods. But still, they are in a completely different dimension.
I'd reckon that most incidents of police shooting civilians is due to civilians armed with guns.
You'd reckon, eh? I'd beg to differ.
Seriously? There have been plenty of incidents in the news of police taking out a gunman who was either firing on people or threatening to. They just don't register as police violence because everyone knows they are justified.
Well, arguably, the article states two-thirds of these gun deaths are suicides, so not many, to be fair.
guns don't kill people; people with guns kill people. They mostly just kill themselves:
"...[S]uicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths."
I know its like being CPT Obvious, but that is so true. Fix the problem, not the symptom.
Fixing the issues that lead a person to consider suicide is really hard. Decreasing the number of available guns is much easier and is effective.
When Australia decreased the number of guns, the suicide rate (not just gun related suicides, but all suicides) decreased by 65%.
Suicides definitely decrease with less access to guns, however many countries with gun restrictions have higher rates of suicide than the US (e.g Japan, S Korea, France, Belgium) [1]
Also suicides via firearm had been declining in Australia prior to any buyback. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... [2] http://c5.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/australia.jpg
There are also people who decide to commit suicide via automobile.
Here are some stats about alcohol related driver deaths in Pennsylvania
note 44% of the demographic. Ya, crazy .... see how prohibition worked well. Just like the war on drugs. Policy does nothing. Its ineffective, and we need to drive poverty down to target the leading population of gun violence, the poor. It's ironic how the African American population is left out of the conversation in Liberal media. Nobody goes to the ghetto in Chicago and asks THEM about gun violence. The modern liberal is a FB subscribing 18-25 year old that doesn't understand the history that drove the conversation to where its at today.
Firearm suicide data: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm
Firearm murder data: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Unintentional injury death stats: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm
Alternate title: (ex) middle class americans are killing themselves in record numbers, but we want to talk about guns.
How so? According to this article, gun violence hasn't increased much at all. Cars are safer though.
In contrast to automobile deaths, it has increased: "In 2005, gun deaths outnumbered vehicle deaths in just two states, Alaska and Maryland, plus the District of Columbia. By 2014, gun deaths were greater in 21 states plus D.C."
Again, you're not looking at the data. Gun violence hasn't increased, automobile deaths have decreased.
The article also says
Also: Cars are now killing as many people as guns
Redefining the conversation away from the liberal thinking, the real debate is not about guns at all. It's about what causes violence, where does it occur, and how can we stop it. The most dramatic form of this crime, occurs most often from guns - so, we need to reframe it from gun violence to violence where guns are involved. This is a 65 year old problem - the root of it, is based on the highway system in conjunction with relining that left poverty in the inner city. I note here, I am leaving out race, but it disproportionately affects (use right?) the African American population because of the redlining (why I mentioned it), thanks to racism and white privilege - debate all you want, but mobility of the white middle class demographic was huge at this time. Think baby-boomers in particular. The SOLUTION to solving a WHOLE slew of problems, which liberals ALWAYS talk about is giving social programs a go on a major scale to help disadvantaged population. Bipartisan politics always shift away from this, because of the polarizing problem of being perceived as to liberal or to conservative, etc. etc. Poverty to expand on violence is exponential and often (like 80% of the problem) involves desperation which leads to crime, disassociation with society and drives youth / people to gang membership. It's been a long deep understood problem, that gangs of any time typically lean towards drugs, alcohol, and illegal activities to maintain the syndication of crime. This includes prostitution, which affects women and can more often lead to domestic violence. So, with all _that_ said, think of guns in the mix - illegal and not, and ALLLL the gun programs in the past, where do most of the illegal guns come from - that's right, poverty stricken areas. So, I lean back to what is gun control's main problem? It's ineffective. Solve poverty ... put a CONSERVATIVE BUSINESS BASED DEMOGRAPHIC (namely young moderate Republicans) on every other street with strict oversight who are NOT prejudice to start engines of economic growth to stamp out poverty in areas where it exists. Let Liberals cry all they want, but spearhead poverty in the urban centers and you will reduce violence where guns are involved. THAT is the solution.
Please don't use ideological buzz-phrases here. It lowers the quality of discussion, regardless of what flavor of ideology you prefer.
What a crap title...
Cars don't kill people, anymore than guns do. It's the idiot behind the wheel/trigger that's doing the killing.
These pieces of metal are built to be controlled by responsible humans. They do not make decisions for you, anymore than a spoon is making the decision for me to eat another bowl of cereal!
That's kinda a useless distinction. Nobody read that title and pictured sentient guns tracking down and hunting humans. Autonomous cars doing that might almost be plausible, but realistically the same applies there.
"Gun related fatalities are currently as high as automotive related fatalities in the U.S. for the first time" might be a more precise statement, but it's a worse headline.
What's easier? Outlawing idiots or outlawing guns?
If I could downvote this for being a sensationalist article, I would!
Here's the operative phrase: "The convergence of the trend lines above is driven primarily by a sharp drop in the rate of motor vehicle fatalities since 1950."
It's amazing that we've improved vehicle safety in the last 60 years, yet there is zero reason to conflate that with homicides involving a firearm.
I know Americans love their guns and I don't want you to amend your amendments, but you almost made an interesting point, just changing the 2nd part in your sentence:
That's literally the third sentence in the article, which also mentions the rise in suicide and fall in gun homicide rates two sentences below that. The title is dry and accurate.
The article doesn't conflate anything; it makes a very interesting and important comparison: vehicle deaths (which have been extensively studied for decades, with much federal regulation and other pressure to improve safety) are now on par with gun deaths (which had been banned from federal research for nearly two decades).
Wouldn't it be nice if fewer people were dying from guns as well?
It would be nice if fewer people were dying from bullet wounds; that does not change the fact that this article's headline is misinforming.
Further, the data is misleading as well. Suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths are three different things.
On top of that, this data is collected across the US...meaning that it includes both areas where gun laws are loose, and areas where gun laws are strict. This means that the data tells us nothing about whether tougher laws would help or hurt the state of gun-related death, for reasons that should be obvious to anybody who's completed a high school science class.
In terms of someone being killed by a gun, how so exactly?
Suicides are caused primarily by mental illness, and can be committed through many means other than firearms. Trying to stop suicides by removing firearms is a pointless endeavor, similar to trying to cure a cold by keeping the patient from coughing. Homicides are similar in that one can commit homicide by many means other than firearms, though firearms allow doing so from a much greater distance; however, again, the root cause is mental illness, and attacking firearms is a waste of effort compared to trying to fix the root cause. As for accidental deaths, they have nothing to do with suicides and homicides, and the solution there is to teach people how to not point the firearm at something they don't want to kill (among other safety rules, like not keeping the weapon loaded unless absolutely necessary).
You haven't made any arguments in support of this claim.
Yes, what is your point?
Rates of gun ownership is tightly-correlated with rates of gun-related deaths, at whatever scale you cut it. This also holds true for gun suicides:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/spr08gunprevalence...
The article's title is phrased in such a way that it implies gun deaths have increased to meet vehicular deaths. It's clickbait.
Suicides, homicides, and accidents all have different motives and circumstances. Further, suicides and homicides are often driven by mental illness, while accidemts are driven by not following precautions. They require different strategies to fix each problem, because they are three different problems.
Correlation between the existence of firearms and the presence of fireaems deaths is actually kind of obvious people cannot die of something that has not been invented yet. The real question is causality: Why do people get shot and killed? This is why the data in this article is useless--there is no control group. It does not show whether gun deaths are more frequent where firearms are legal, or more common where they have been outlawed. It merely shows that they exist.
Show me data that indicates--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that states with looser gun laws have more firearms homicides than states with stricter gun laws. Then you will have won.
Even though I consider this a sensationalist article ... I think its important for the community like ours to offer conjecture on an intellectual level, because I think Hack News is a GREAT forum for more than just "geeks", but it brings together one of the most diverse crowds I've seen. yes, there are fierce beliefs on both sides of the debate, but if anyone can have something more progressive it's folks in IT.
You can't technically downvote, but you can morally do so by clicking 'flag'. Many of your fellow users did so, and your desired effect would have happened a bit sooner had you joined them.
Making a fine substantive counterpoint, as you did, is excellent too!
Ah, yes, flag it because heavens forbid anyone on HN discusses gun violence!
I didn't say that it ought to be flagged, only what the effect would be.
As far as HN goes, the limits of discussion are primarily about what's on-topic, but also about what the community is capable of discussing without rupturing blood vessels or having fist fights break out in Parliament.
Guns are banned in Brazil and we got the highest homicide numbers in the planet.
Quickref: http://www.itstactical.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/how_ar...
THANK YOU! Honestly, the more data I have the more it validates the gun legislation is a bad idea. The longer view is one of social reform related to what ills the country - crime, poverty, and a replacement of liberalism/progressive thinking with Republican conservatism bridging the isle in Congress by taking on poverty like no progressive ever has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
I always bring up Switzerland. Their gun culture is completely different which is very important. But it shows that guns aren't the problem - the people and their culture are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
I'm Australian, live in Canada, am a hunter who owns a rifle and am currently visiting the US. In the last couple of months, I've seen more guns than I have in my entire life.
Two days ago I walked into a friends unlocked garage to find at least 75 guns, mostly loaded, with ammunition lying all over. Some semi-auto assault rifles, some hunting rifles, tons of handguns. All perfectly legal (and legal to not be locked up too).
I think it's sad to live in a "successful" country where regular citizens feel the need to carry a loaded weapon in public. I think that's a strong indicator something is very wrong with this society.
I'm not an expert, and obviously guns don't kill people, though it's my observation there are a LOT of readily available guns in the US, and the US has a lot of guns deaths.
As an avid hunter I would never advocate "Taking the guns away", though I do think a few things should change - I believe gun laws in the US could be somewhat similar to Canada and Australia (no semi-autos or fully autos, basically no handguns, must be locked up, must apply for a license, need license to even buy ammo, etc) and gun enthusiasts can still have appropriate guns, while the sheer number of guns would drop substantially.
Citizens already can't own surface to air missiles, so we've already established some weapons are not suitable for private citizens, now we're just talking about what falls into what category.
I know it's a very difficult thing to change, as gun ownership is the 2nd amendment and is seen as a right not a privilege.
Grecy, with all the respect I have for Australia, there is a HUGE difference culturally between your population demographics and ours. The primary reason why the Australian ban (noting that 65-80% of guns are still in the general population in your home country, and never reclaimed by the ban - because who's going to enforce that? really?) will never work here. Australia = 97% white/Caucasian, 2% Asian, 1% everything else. The US is a vastly different landscape and our population comes from ALL over the world. If I were to introduce very deeply concentrated communities of 50 other religions, 15 other race demographics, and stir the pot the debate becomes that much more problematic. Back to Australia - having a very, very homogeneous society makes it easy to pass and maintain order in comparison to what makes our country so incomparable with yours on this issue in particular, as a model to follow. Same occurs with the Japanese model - so, leaning on that won't help either. I respect you, and I believe you have a valid point on face value but when you dig into the complexity and what I consider a unique trait of the US citizen (as a positive! for our diversity!) ... we will never ban guns. It's a poverty issue here, not a gun issue.
How do you know it won't work? Seems like speculation to me.
You're saying that because of the demographics, diversity and poverty of the American population, putting restrictions on guns is impossible?
That same population has gay marriage (before Australia and Japan), and (in places) legal marijuana.
The reasons you state don't mean that laws can not be passed an enforced.
You're also giving up before you even try. Nobody said it was going to be easy - but if it brings gun deaths per capita in line with the rest of the developed world, I think everyone agrees it would be worthwhile.
Hi, Such a complicated issue! But if I may correct a few errors,Australia is 60% British descent not 97% which is decreasing year on year. Within the larger cities Melbourne and Sydney there are levels of diversity observationally comparable to most large US cities. Our rural cities have a much higher homogeneous population but I believe that is similar to the USA, observationally anyway.
The 65% guns still in population is an interesting statistic but as a well read Australian I am surprised I have never heard this before and suspect it is a politically motivated / chery picked statistic. Probably a better statistic if we are talking about gun violence would be the decrease in the levels of gum violence that have occurred since the buy back of guns in 1997.
Whether it's legal not to lock them up or not, your friend is a completely irresponsible gun owner and not too bright as well.
It depends heavily on your social circle and what state you're in. Being from upstate NY, I was raised around guns because my father was a hunter, but now living in NYC, almost no one I interact with has ever fired a gun.
It is funny in an article about the difficulties of finding safer ways of handling guns, it is attacked in the comments for trying to talk about gun safety. You can not just say guns are only unsafe in unsafe hands but not allow research and regulation in to gun safety to figure out why. Cars benefited from research and regulation and guns can too.
I haven't read the article and am not interested in attacking the article. Some of us don't believe that others (not all) are arguing in good faith. I don't believe we'll stop talking about firearms till firearms are illegal to own. For example; I believe that if firearm related suicide was reduced to zero we'd still be arguing about firearm safety.
I'm all for increasing the amount of data we gather and research we do in relation to firearms. I'm all for making intelligent decisions based on the data we gather. From where I'm sitting we don't make decisions based on the data we have (on either side).
This largely feels like bizarro abortion argument where both sides of the abortion argument are now arguing the exact opposite when it comes to firearms.
It sounds wrong to say so but that is as it should be!
"Today, suicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths."
It looks like 2nd amendment protects right to suicide.
It is really dishonest to compare accidental vehicle deaths to intentional suicides and homicides via gun. One is a safety issue void of intent. The other is the result of intent to harm with the most efficient tool available.
What are we to make of this? Require anti-death features on a leathal weapon?