Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nadavwr 1485 days ago
A quick google search brought up a statistic from Pittsburgh 2008 where roughly 1/5 of perpetrators were the legal owners of the gun used in a crime.

Gun crimes are so much more prevalent in the US vs practically any other developed country. Usually by leaps and bounds. Australia used to have around 20% of US gun death rate for years. In 1996 they introduced strict gun control laws. Decline in gun deaths was gradual, but over some 15 years they went down by some 70%.

Gun control can work.
3 comments
Glyptodon 1485 days ago
Legal owner is not the same thing as CC permit holder, and CC permit holders to seem to be safer than other gun owning or carrying categories and rarely involved in altercations or crimes.

Australia is a highly ambiguous example of gun control success for numerous reasons.

It's also worth noting that the funding and law enforcement capacity to disarm the US were stringent gun control legal is borderline impossible, if not just impossible, from a purely mathematical perspective when compared to things the like the war on drugs and considering the sheer number of guns owned.

link
yucky 1485 days ago
>In 1996 they introduced strict gun control laws. Decline in gun deaths was gradual, but over some 15 years they went down by some 70%.

Gun deaths worldwide fell precipitously during that same time frame, including in the US. 1994 was the peak of gun violence, and fell almost every years since then until the BLM riots and the ACAB crowd scared cops out of doing their job.

link
stevenicr 1485 days ago
correlation does not equal causation. Economy, pop culture, social safety nets, offline-social networks, and so many other things are factors in all this.

the 90's were not the same at 2009 and not the same as 2021 by many means.

I just searched : https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=Pittsburgh+2008+w... - and even the left wing news is saying that gun rights folks are accurate in that most gun crime is committed by non-legal-firearms owners, like 8 out of 10.

It's a weird stat to consider anyhow. In my experiences, many crimes are not officially reported, and many are not reported completely - so all that is screwed anyhow. There is no way to know how many crimes are committed in each city with illegal gun possessors.

link