The fundamental issue here is: who's responsibility is it to keep people safe? The author, without really acknowledging it, makes the assumption that it is up to someone in authority to keep us safe. If you accept that premise, then yes, American gun control policy doesn't make sense.
Governments across the world have been steadily extending their remit into our personal lives and behaviour with the introduction of the welfare state, socialised healthcare and nationalised industries, always in the name of keeping us safe/well/employed. The assumption that "someone should do something about this" is so pervasive these days that it's hard to mentally snap out of it and say, why?
I'm no fan of guns[1] but in recent months I've come to understand the thinking behind the 2nd amendment, that government has to be kept in its place and that society must not give complete power to a small group at the centre. When you look at it that way, the hot coffee and the driving regulations are the things that don't make sense.
Whichever side of the gun control debate you're on, denouncing the other for not getting gets you nowhere. This is a debate about the proper role of government, not about guns or hot coffee per say.
[1] I'm British and so have no involvement in the whole US gun control debate, but am virtually genetically predisposed to thinking guns are strange and scary!
Whislt I do agree with your position, what bugs me most about the whole argument put forward by this Guardian article is the assumption that America's elevated murder rate is due to it's firearms laws. The evidence simply doesn't bare this out.
If you assume that its the governments job to keep you safe and in detroit it takes over an hour for the police to show up then you are in trouble. If you are in one of the many isolated areas and rely on the local sheriff for protection who is miles away you are in trouble. If you are in the woods hunting or hiking and run into trouble, the sheriff cant get to you. America presents a variety of diverse situations which come into play with gun laws and general law enforcement issues that other countries in Europe dont have to face.
The article is slightly tongue-in-cheek (I'm pretty sure Henry Porter does not want the UN to intervene militarily in the US!).
But it does express, quite forcefully, the simple point that if the US is concerned about the safety of its citizens it might do better to focus on gun safety and ownership than on the so-called war on terrorism.
No, it's just a laughably bad argument all around. Including suicides in gun deaths is always done like this because otherwise the numbers are not impressive enough, I guess. No mention is made of things that might add perspective, like the number of people who die from smoking, alcohol, drug overdoses, drunk driving, or swimming pools. That would soften the point too much.
And the terrorism angle is just ridiculous. The reason it makes sense to worry about terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars is that a WMD attack on American soil would cost potentially trillions of dollars. Certainly 9/11's impact was massively expensive both financially and psychologically.
For some reason these issues always bring out the most intellectually dishonest and transparent arguments. Really smart people disagree about this topic and have much better arguments than this author's.
>The reason it makes sense to worry about terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars is that a WMD attack on American soil would cost potentially trillions of dollars.
Nope. The truth is that it simply doesn't make sense to worry about terrorism to anywhere near the degree we do. We'd have done far better to chalk the whole thing up to "act of God" and move on.
Regarding the risk of a "WMD attack", you're making the same mistake you just accused the other guy of doing. He conflated suicide with homicide; the term "WMD" is intentionally vague so as to conflate actual nuclear weapons, "dirty bombs", and every variety of chemical weapon. The bad guys don't HAVE nukes or chemical weapons and 9/11 did nothing to suggest that sort of attack had become more likely than before. The risk of damage from a "dirty bomb" would be largely self-inflicted - we'd harm ourselves due to our own paranoia. The risk of damage from chemical weapons is pretty small even if our enemies had them, which they don't. If you correctly separate the threats you'll see each individual one is really really small.
> Certainly 9/11's impact was massively expensive both financially and psychologically.
9/ll's impact as massively expensive because we chose to LET it be massively expensive. If we had shrugged it off, it wouldn't have been.
Though not American myself, I'm an admirer of the US in many ways. One thing I don't get is Americans' attitude to guns. Surely the freedom to walk down the street without getting shot is more important than the freedom to carry a gun?
Surely, the freedom to walk down the street knowing you can protect yourself from a fatal stabbing is more important than the freedom to feel a false sense of safety?
Ban guns, people will use knives. Ban knives, people will use sticks. Ban sticks, people will use fists. The weapons involved are not the issue. The root cause of the violence is.
Most murderers are people who have been convicted of multiple violent crimes. An interesting related statistic is that most murder victims also have been convicted of multiple violent crimes. So if you aren't a violent criminal and don't know any violent criminals, your chance of being killed goes way down.
If you aren't involved in the drug trade the chances of being killed by a gun (omitting suicide) in the US are quite low. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but incidents like the horrific killing of the Australian baseball player a few months back are exceedingly rare but get a ton of media attention.
You trust the NSA with your private communications, though. Or is there another explanation for the apathetic response by the American public to widespread government surveillance?
On the scale of things to worry about, most Americans are more worried about the flesh and blood swat team down the street serving search warrants than internet surveillance. When the police are armed with military grade weapons and sees the community it's policing as the enemy, people are getting more hesitant to get the police involved in even seemingly minor things. This is where the 2nd amendment comes in to play. If the police can't protect you, you have to protect yourself.
The guardian article was right about one thing: America is in the middle of a civil war of sorts.
The NSA does what they do in secret, without consultation or permission from the governed (if you believe the foot dragging and outright lying to Congress, which I do). We don't trust the NSA, because they never asked us for our trust except by the very thinnest stretch of implication.
The 2nd Amendment however is part of a public document. The public document in the US. And many people believe in the 2nd, either because it allows them guns, or because more generally it's part of our governing document. Of course many people don't support the 2nd. But it is the law, and because it's explicitly part of the Constitution there are huge (but not impossible) barriers to changing it.
As for apathy, yes we in the US are apathetic, but it doesn't imply that we trust the NSA, it just means that we're generally apathetic. The list of issues and wrongs that we in the US ignore is long (just for starters, compare our war deaths and gun violence deaths to the deaths of innocents around the world by "collateral damage"), and the NSA is just one of many. We mostly don't give a shit about anything except hating the opposite political party, hating people who have different religious views than our own, and watching TV. And football, we like that a lot.
"That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact"
The world should stay out of this problem. It's a US-only ideology issue, primarily driven by the second amendment, and the twisted interpretation of "freedom".
If I were in Government in another country (Canada, U.K., Germany, Australia, etc) I would use this in the country's favour. This U.S. gun issue is extremely scary for many, and would use it (among other points) to attract talent from the U.S. or divert quality immigrants from the U.S. to my country. It sounds harsh, but quality of life and life expectancy are top priorities for almost anyone. If you can market this the right way, these countries with less gun-death risk can really benefit.
Country Guns per 100 Total Firearm-related deaths per 100,000
US 88.8 10.2
Canada 30.8 2.44
Germany 30.3 1.1
Australia 15.0 1.04
UK 6.2 0.25
I would like to see that chart with 'homicides' instead of just firearm-centric ones. I crunched these numbers several years ago for my own amusement and found that in countries with strict gun control, violence in general and violent deaths especially went WAY up, surpassing the US's by a fair margin. No I don't have a source at the moment, it was a weekend's worth of Googling trying to find data that didn't come from biased sources (either the NRA on one side, or groups like the Violence Policy Center on the other), and done purely for my own amusement.
>On the numbers you crunched, which western countries "with strict gun control" did have a higher murder rate than the U.S.?
Mexico, most of Central America, most of South America, most of the Caribbean, some of Oceania.
What is interesting is that Washington State, Montana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine all have very similar homicide rates to their Canadian neighbors.
Ok, I see, but most of those are not considered "western countries" as per Huntington, as they are not comparable in economic development, HDI, etc. Apple and oranges.
I was referring to comparable nations, primarily to the anglo-saxon countries on the above list really comparable to the US. The U.S. has 4x more murders than the average of the western countries above. That is 4x, food for thought.
If you control for Ango-Saxon admix, it seems that the US will have a very similar homicide rate to other Ango-Saxon nations. Higher, perhaps, but probably only by a bit:
The first link gives an upper bound of 1.32x higher... and it'd probably be a solid bit less given that youth murder rates are higher than adult murder rates...
I understand that you might be unhappy with the US murder rates, and you are trying to paint a different picture. I get that. But lets not make up cases, exclude/include different scenarios, races, demographics, etc., a la politicians, I thought this was Hacker News, facts over bullshit. Macro numbers are what they are: "Total Murders divided by Country's Population".
I'm not talking about the cause behind the murders, but just the rate. But hey, bottom line, believe whatever you want, I'm not here to make you hear what you want.
He's not implying causation. The idea that stricter gun control laws cause shootings is ridiculous. He's disproving the causation that stricter gun control laws stop violent shootings.
Off topic: This is strange. This story was posted an hour ago, it has, at the moment, 24 points, yet I can only see it on /newest. It was briefly on the front page, but now I can't find it there. There's also no sign of it on the second, third, fourth or fifth page. I didn't look further. Weird. Does anybody have an explanation?
True, but I couldn't find it on the next five pages either. If it had received so many flags, it would have been autokilled. But it wasn't (and still isn't) [dead]. The first thing I thought of was that there may be a bug in HN code... perhaps there are other posts that aren't visible even though they aren't dead. Maybe PG should look into this.
Governments across the world have been steadily extending their remit into our personal lives and behaviour with the introduction of the welfare state, socialised healthcare and nationalised industries, always in the name of keeping us safe/well/employed. The assumption that "someone should do something about this" is so pervasive these days that it's hard to mentally snap out of it and say, why?
I'm no fan of guns[1] but in recent months I've come to understand the thinking behind the 2nd amendment, that government has to be kept in its place and that society must not give complete power to a small group at the centre. When you look at it that way, the hot coffee and the driving regulations are the things that don't make sense.
Whichever side of the gun control debate you're on, denouncing the other for not getting gets you nowhere. This is a debate about the proper role of government, not about guns or hot coffee per say.
[1] I'm British and so have no involvement in the whole US gun control debate, but am virtually genetically predisposed to thinking guns are strange and scary!