[auggierose]

The problem is that when you don't know if a citizen is armed or not, you just default to thinking they are. Because that is the safer assumption for you to make as a police officer. If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes. It is a whole different dynamic.

[jlkuester7]

> If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes.

I am not sure this is entirely correct. Generally speaking, law-abiding citizens are not the ones that police have to worry about anyway (regardless of if they are carrying guns). Citizens that are not law-abiding (criminals), on the other hand, are the people that police generally need to be concerned about. It does not seem like a great idea to assume these people are not armed simply because they "are not allowed to carry guns."

Admittedly, the absolute saturation of American culture with guns is not making the cop's jobs any easier, but the answer to these problems is way more complicated than disarming law-abiding citizens.

[fitblipper]

I find your distinction between law abiding citizens and criminals hilarious.

There is no difference between the two and to pretend like there is a difference is how we get the same people chanting both "we need to punish criminals more severely!" and "It's shameful the US has so much of it's population in prison"

edit: But also, how do you expect a COP to be able to differentiate between the 2 in the field? They are essentially the ones that gets to decide who is a criminal or not which brings us back to how the police are given the ability to abuse their power.

[jlkuester7]

> There is no difference between the two

Certainly there is no difference between them in terms of their human dignity and (unless otherwise specified by law) their rights as citizens. But it seems illogical to assert that there is no difference at all between a person who has broken a law and a person who has not...

[auggierose]

It's not way more complicated. Get rid of the guns, and you will get rid of a lot of problems. It is really that simple.

But I would not know how to get rid of guns in the US now, because there are just too many guns around, and "non-law-abiding" citizens will still carry them.

A citizen should not carry a gun. Doesn't matter if they are "law-abiding" or not.

[johnisgood]

If it was likely the other person has a gun, I would think twice before doing something. It makes more sense to me to be more wary when I assume that the person I may be thinking of robbing has a gun on them, vs. knowing it is extremely unlikely that the person is not going to have a gun on them.

Are you sure the problem is guns? What makes you so sure? I am genuinely interested, because Serbia is known for having lots of guns, too, but firearm-related death rate is low, vs. Honduras, which has much less guns per 100 inhabitants and extremely high firearm-related death rate that is homicide.

In any case, here is the table:

  | Country  | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
  | US       |     4.46 |                    120.5 |
  | Serbia   |     0.72 |                    37.82 |
  | Honduras |    28.65 |                9.9-11.24 |

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r....

What do you think explains this? Curious to explore.

[aurelius12]

From the Harvard Injury Control Research Center:

"Where there are more guns there is more homicide."

"Across high-income nations more guns = more homicide."

"Across states, more guns = more homicide."

"More guns = more homicides of police."

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

[filoleg]

I would be careful with this information, because correlation != causation, as well as the fact that cause and effect might be reversed. And to be fair to the HICRC, they don't claim the causation.

Could it be that states with high homicide rates lead to people in those states buying more guns to feel more protected at home (and not the other way around)?

For a real life example, I live in Seattle, and we had a giant spike in the first-time firearm ownership numbers last year. It was driven by a lot of people who previously had zero interest in owning guns who suddenly became more concerned about their safety due to all the violence happening adjacent to protests, as well as due to the local District Attorney refusing to prosecute a lot of violent criminals with many repeated offenses and letting them out (to clarify: when I say "violent", I am not talking about protests, I am talking about people with multiple battery and assault charges, robbery, gang violence, rape, etc.). So in the Seattle scenario, it was indeed an increased rate of crime and homicides that caused a spike in firearm ownership, not the other way around.

And what about Switzerland, with their extremely high rate of gun ownership but low rate of homicides?

I don't have an answer to these questions, but it makes me feel like it is a bit less simplistic than just "higher rates of gun ownership in high-income nations create higher homicide rates".

[pas]

The problem is, even if people buy guns to feel safer, it doesn't help. (It simply makes crime more violent. Guns don't deter crime.)

Politics is broken if the DA is not effectively enforcing laws. Guns can't fix it. (Just as every surveillance thread on HN has comments about "technology can't really fix this, it's a politics problem", guns are very much just technology when it comes to socioeconomics/politics of crime.)

Switzerland has very high regulation. Not just for guns, for everything. And a very effective (almost direct) democracy. And an almost universal very-very-very high standard of living. (Yet their suicide rate is pretty high! Used to be higher than the US' - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates?tab=c... ) Gun ownership there is more of a cultural heritage, and very much not a safety device.

[johnisgood]

The thought that someone may have a gun may deter though. How effective is it? I do not know. If it is known that in my area most people carry a gun, then people may think twice to rob. Emphasis on may, because I do not know how effective it is at all.

[pas]

Crime is motivated by opportunity (eg. if there's virtually no enforcement) and necessity. By the time someone gets to the point of committing violent crimes, armed or not doesn't really matter. (At least this is how I understand it.)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-...

There are many, many words written on how great guns are or how grave problem they are. I completely accept that if the plurality want this so be it, it's not as deadly as many other problems.

[23iofj]

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as they say. Serbia and Honduras are anomalies. Within the entire data set there's a significant positive correlation between "Guns per 100 inhabitants" and Homicide rate.

[johnisgood]

Are they really anomalies?

  | Country  | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
  | US       |     4.46 |                    120.5 |
  | Serbia   |     0.72 |                    37.82 |
  | Honduras |    28.65 |                9.9-11.24 |
  |          |          |                          |
  | Cyprus   |     0.50 |                     36.4 |
  | Canada   |     0.72 |                    34.70 |
  | Finland  |     0.20 |                     32.4 |
  | ...      |          |                          |
  |          |          |                          |
  | Jamaica  |    38.20 |                      5.8 |
  | Eswatini |    37.16 |                      8.1 |
  | Brazil   |    23.93 |                      8.6 |
  | ...      |          |                          |

Are they anomalies, too, or what do you mean by anomaly? I do not want to edit the table anymore, but someone also mentioned Switzerland, indeed, extremely low rate of firearm-related homicide (0.13) with high rate of gun ownership (27.6-41.2). There are many more.

[23iofj]

Why cherry-pick? Just running the regression analysis on the entire dataset.