[cemerick]

The only thing I'm "championing" (just pointing out, really) is that certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities, despite all available data contradicting that worldview.

I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.

[screye]

On the other hand, I feel like it takes an incredibly public tragedy for a platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.

People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.

> quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities

I don't see why speaking out about lack of police enforcement is seen as 'quasi-apocalyptic'.

> despite all available data contradicting that worldview

All available data is in favor of those speaking out about crime & drugs in west coast cities. Additionally, the eye test seems to portray a situation that's more dire than even the data might suggest. (underreporting, catch & release).

[shadowgovt]

> People want to talk about crime, drugs & homelessness all the time. It is only in high profile cases where the issues seem topical, that HN can't discourage discussion around them.

Indeed, because that's not what this forum is for. There's ten thousand fora online for general, local, or city-policy political discussion; those topics are only germane in this forum when they relate to tech or the processes of tech.

[rchaud]

Because HN is a technology discussion board with a worldwide audience, not a local politics one. YCombinator isn't even based in SF.

When the CEO of YCombinator blocks people on Twitter for disagreeing with him online on SF politics[0], it tells me I don't want HN to be a haven for that.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125

[JeremyHerrman]

FWIW, he mass blocks people who have _never_ interacted with him on twitter. If you happen to like a tweet from an account that he doesn't like, you're blocked!

I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.

[madeofpalk]

I wouldn't really take who YCombinator execs have blocked with much of an indication of anything. It's a badge of honor to be blocked by Paul Graham over something silly and petty.

[p_j_w]

It's indicative of the exec's desire to actually engage on a topic with people who might disagree with them. That's a big issue with how much control they can potentially exert on this site.

[rchaud]

I'm referring to blocking people specifically over SF politics, as per his own comment, linked to above.

[RC_ITR]

> platform for HN to tolerate any discussions around SF crime.

I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.

I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"

EDIT: Just to cite my sources: [0] shows 397k registered cars in SF [1] shows 810k residents.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-research-reports/research-...

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...

[Guid_NewGuid]

Just to reinforce what you say here

> I think we all live in our own bubbles, because I see so much discussion of SF crime.

As a European on this platform it's ceaseless whinging about the state of SF and how the "woke mob" are ruining San Francisco and the state of the Tenderloin versus Mission or Market or whatever and I don't particularly care to know.

Like I've started to learn the parts of a city I have no particular interest in visiting from repeated stories about how someone shouted and pooped in the street because of boogeyman de jour.

Definitely feels like maybe YC could make a "local HN" to save the rest of us from these circular discussions.

[wpietri]

I appreciate you saying so. As a 20-year SF resident I wondered if it was just confirmation bias making me think those topics/views were incredibly common. But it's at the point where I'd almost rather deal with Bitcoin boosters.

[dang]

Yes, it's common for one and the same topic to be perceived as both hideously overrepresented and hideously underrepresented on HN.

Even the very most popular stories get perceived as being suppressed—for a striking example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35296170.

[ribosometronome]

>I also think it's important to note that there is a huge difference between "should we prevent random street killings?" and "how much effort should SFPD exert to protect cars when the majority of actual SF residents don't even own one?"

Hmm, the vast majority of tourists in Orlando aren't Orlando residents, but if I got murdered back in my hotel on a Disneyworld trip, I would hope they'd be willing to at least poke into it.

[RC_ITR]

Again, I agree murders are important to discuss, but it is not a good idea to talk about smash and grabs like they are murders.

[TylerE]

18% of that 810k is under 18.

397k for 664k adults means a 59.8% car ownership rate.

[RC_ITR]

I think it is important to note that police do not only protect adult residents.

[hindsightbias]

You must have some filter on. There are literally thousands of HN posts in the last few years about housing and crime and hundreds of which devolved into the dystopian hellhole memes endemic in the HN ideosphere.

The quickest path to karma at HN is to post anything about BA housing.

[kevingadd]

Crime - and SF crime specifically - frequently gets discussed on HN when crime-related stories make it to the front page. You're not paying attention if you think the site has a zero-tolerance policy for it.

[Rekksu]

What does "SF crime" have to do with the content that is expected on hackernews?

[idopmstuff]

Someone saying that the have a gun and are going to shoot you is very clearly assault, which is a criminal act. It would generally quality as a violent crime in statistics (if SFPD took reports of threats of violence, which they will not).

While we should use data, we should also understand where there may be issues with the data that we're using.

[ambulancechaser]

The gist of your point is 100% correct. I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.

> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.

Calmly ignoring the threat is evidence that the person was not "in immediate apprehension of such a contact".

I only bring this up because i think it's interesting, and the underlying point you are making is 100% correct. This kind of thing is not normal nor innocent and not to be tolerated.

[stickfigure]

Oh, I was definitely apprehensive of imminent harm.

More details: Fairly normal-looking dude walked up next to me and kept pace for a couple minutes, threatening me and calling me "faggot" (which seemed odd, since I was walking with my girlfriend at the time). I didn't see an actual gun so I figured that the safest course of action was to simply ignore him until he presented more of a threat or walked away. I guess I bored him so he walked away.

The calm took some willpower.

[ambulancechaser]

For sure. I didn't mean to derail the thread or tell you how you feel, just share what I think is an interesting aspect of assault as defined in common law. But your subjective experience here is exactly what the law means to recognize with assault and sounds like it was assault. But who knows. Glad the situation fizzled out (usually best case scenario)

[idopmstuff]

> I just want to point out that under the common law definition of assault (and i have no idea what definitions are in effect in SF), the fact that the person calmly ignored them points that this might not be assault.

This is actually an interesting point of semantics to me. I guess it'd really hinge on how you define "calmly" here - if you saw me walking my dog while a homeless person screamed that he was going to kill me, I would certainly appear calm. Even internally, I suspect my heart rate would increase but not enormously. Still, I would be very alert and mentally prepared for the possibility that this person is going to attack me, because I very much believe that to be possible. Given that, I would say that I have a reasonable apprehension of imminent harm (and I expect a lot of San Franciscans are similar in that regard).

[Lochleg]

It's a reasonable belief and fear that person will carry out the act. You are probably misinterpreting the reasonable part, especially when people mask their reaction to try to get away or out of shock / instinct. The person making the threats probably gets enjoyment from getting a rise out of random strangers. Also, returning to the original context, there are too many people on the street that have severe mental health crises going on and are freely roaming some cities. They don't necessarily need to go to be convicted of a crime as a solution.

[runjake]

We should also take practical steps to increase your chances of survival, which, if someone says this to you:

- Keep an eye on their hands.

- Attempt to de-escalate the person.

- If they brandish a weapon in extreme close proximity to yourself, use both your hands to firmly grab onto the hand/wrist that's holding the weapon and extend your arms fully (using your skeleton to maintain that distance and provide added strength). Your focus should be on controlling that hand so they don't stab or shoot you. Yes, you may incur injury regardless, this is what's colloquially known as a "shit sandwich".

- Increase distance and vacate the area as soon as possible. If they have a gun, run in a zig zag pattern and seek cover (blocks bullets) or concealment (hides you, but doesn't stop bullets).

- Once you are safe, then report the incident to law enforcement (if they'll do anything).

[jstarfish]

You mean well, but this is Hollywood-grade advice for close quarters encounters.

Arms extended gives you the least possible leverage. Like when cops in movies run around with gun drawn at arms' length (the Weaver stance is for target shooting). To disarm a gun-wielding opponent, you want to get in close, grab the weapon from both sides securely (hug it) and do a dead drop. Unless you're fighting The Rock, they can't hold both you and the weapon. Unless you are The Rock, you'll probably get killed grappling with them any other way.

Don't do this for knives. Just stay the length of two arms + 1 beer bottle away from them.

I don't have any advice for swords but anyone who comes at you with one isn't playing by conventional rules, so run like hell.

The zig zag thing is a myth. It works in Counter-Strike, but you'll just end up dying an embarrassing death in reality. The only zig zagging you should be doing is from cover to cover. Get to cover as directly as possible. This isn't The OA...interpretive dance won't save you.

PROTIP: As cover goes, cars are made of the same stuff as beer cans and glass. The IC engine block is the only part that will actually stop a bullet. EVs are explosive.

[idopmstuff]

I can't imagine you live in SF, because this is just bad advice.

You don't attempt to de-escalate. You completely ignore. You do not try to grab their wrist. If they brandish a weapon, you run.

You don't report the incident to law enforcement, because they do not care and will do nothing.

[treeman79]

And depending on the DA you’ll be thrown in jail if you defend yourself.

[sanedigital]

By "certain populations" do you mean a small selection of the worst members of almost all populations?

Jumping to conclusions and pushing narratives isn't the exclusive purview of any particular group, especially not in 2023.

[wpietri]

> certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities

For those interested in the topic, I recommend Loewen's "Sundown Towns". My copy's on loan, but I think it's in Ch 11, "The Effects of Sundown Towns on Whites" that he talks about the culture among descendants of white-flight suburbanites, their low-to-no-experience views on the horrors of the city, where Those People run rampant. Many are terrified of even going to cities. To people who actually live in the cities, their view is almost unrecognizable.

As an example from something in my feed reader today [1], take Theo Wold, a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy (under Trump) and current Idaho Solicitor General. He quote-tweeted a photo of a white woman hugging two Black men. They were the Tennessee Three, the state legislators who were under threat of expulsion for protest.

His comment: "Every Red State will have to wrestle with the fetid, urban Leftist vote sinks. That begins with asking the question: why does the GOP continue to push the annexation/development of rural land that only grows the size and power of Leftist strongholds?"

Fetid stronghold sinks! Sounds pretty bad. In our favor, at least we have taco trucks on every corner.

It reminds me of nothing so much as this bit from Chairman Mao: "It is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants. Cadres and other people in the cities should be persuaded to send their sons and daughters who have completed junior or senior middle school, college or university, to the countryside. Let us mobilize."

[1] https://balloon-juice.com/2023/04/13/late-night-open-thread-...

[kolinko]

Considering that a large population of sf tech is migrants, many people, myself included, compare it not to other American cities but to European and Asian ones.

I would say that the comparison is apt - since we compare the tech/science successes of SF with the rest of the world, we should also compare the crime rates with it.

[RC_ITR]

I didn't like the direction of this comment. All cities are good and bad in their own way for the people that live there.

[politician]

It might be helpful for you to take a class on gun safety to reduce the anxiety you have about seeing guns. Remember, the police also open carry because peaceful open carry is primarily about deterrence.

Brandishing a weapon is legally different from open carry, and is already a crime. Brandishing means to draw or exhibit the weapon in a threatening manner, or to use it in a fight, other than in lawful self-defense.

[bigtex88]

What an absolutely asinine thing to champion. How does that do any good to actually help with "policy" as your initial comment seems to intend? All you seem to be doing is acting like "I'm smarter than all of you!"

SF is a dangerous city. That seems to be the main point of concern here.

[emodendroket]

Well if we’re inventing types of danger out of whole cloth and proposing solutions to them they probably won’t help with anything. We also should probably quantify what “dangerous” means if, as both that post and the article say, violent crime in San Francisco is actually exceptionally low.

[quest88]

No one is denying crime is a problem. The point is that people were quick attribute this tragedy to yet another unprovoked attack, which turned out to be false. But it fit the narrative, so it was believed to be true.

[hermitdev]

It's not just this tragedy, it's any tragedy. Every time there's a mass shooting, people use it as a rallying cry for more gun control, rather than focusing on fixing the issues that actually led to the violence (usually severe mental health issues), as if people haven't used knives or vehicles to commit mass murder/violence. Never let a good tragedy go to waste, so the saying goes.

[krferriter]

A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife. Seems like it's always a gun. Probably because a gun makes it really easy to kill people quickly.

[WillPostForFood]

I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife

Guns are clearly more deadly than knives, so I am not intending to equate them, but mass casualty knife attacks also happen.

10 dead, 15 hospitalized in Canada mass stabbing attacks, police say:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-stabbing-saskatchewan-de...

Six people were killed and 14 injured after a knife-wielding man stabbed passersby on a pedestrian shopping street in the eastern Chinese city of Anqing:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks-mic...

At least 15 killed, dozens injured in knifing near Tokyo

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/nation-world/2016/07...

[atchoo]

I don't consider two of those to be good comparisons to mass shootings of the "kill dozens of people in a couple minutes" variety.

The Saskatchewan stabbings were attacks at 13 separate locations across a sparsely populated reservation rather than a single mass casualty event.

The Sagamihara stabbings were attacks on sleeping disabled patients inside a care home. It reminds me more of Angel of Death type mass killings (by nurses / doctors). He considered it to be euthanasia and the weapon could have been a pillow - the mass killing was not down to the deadliness of the weapon but the passivity of the victims.

The Anqing attack is a better example - a single event against conscious victims. Nevertheless, mass stabbings across the whole globe are rarer than the daily mass shootings in the US.

[cmh89]

The person you replied to said

"A person with a few full magazines and a semiauto rifle in a crowded place, and not much concern about surviving, can kill dozens of people in a couple minutes before there's any chance of someone else with a gun being able to stop them. I'm not aware of someone doing this with a knife.

The Canadian incident took place over days and 13 different locations. The other two incidents don't say how long they took but it just takes way longer to kill people with a knife than a gun.

[comte7092]

> usually severe mental health issues

Do you have a citation on that?

I am not fully researched on this topic, but as a lay observer it appear that the gun rights side basically categorizes anyone who is willing to commit a mass shooting as mentally ill, and hence every mass shooting is a result of mental illness by definition. But it does not follow that mass shooters are mentally ill by any professional standards.

[ruph123]

> Every time there's a mass shooting [...]

If this is a valid premise, then you know you are doing something wrong as a society. Mass shootings are common place in the US (with currently 177 mass shootings this year so far). This is not normal.

[dmoy]

It depends entirely on the definition of mass shooting.

If you use the FBI's active shooting definition, there's closer to 15-20 per year on a 20 year average.

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents...

If you use the GVA definition, which includes a whole lot of other things, then yes. But the GVA's dataset is somewhat suspect.

For example this qualifies as a mass shooting in the GVA:

https://www.atlantapd.org/Home/Components/News/News/4031/631

[txsoftwaredev]

US isn't even close to the top of the list for mass shootings in the world and it is not "common place". Most "mass" shootings, which could be just three individuals, are gang related and added to the data for mass shootings.

[dmoy]

Not even three. GVA includes a lot of incidents with just two individuals being shot, so long as at least two other people are present for the incident.

[mhoad]

It’s actually nothing like that at all. People keep bringing it up because the US has the second highest number of gun related deaths of any country in the entire world.

[bryanlarsen]

hermitdev claimed that if guns weren't available, people would use knives or cars instead. So the fact that gun related deaths are higher in the US is irrelevant. And they do have a point: knife murders are more common in Europe than they are in the US.

But not by much. The fact that the murder rate in the US is 7X the murder rate in Europe is a much more relevant statistic.

[mhoad]

The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

There is not any evidence what so ever that a person who might commit a murder with a gun would just use the next available option to them such as a knife. That was something that was just introduced to the discussion as a fact when in reality it’s something you have made up.

In fact it’s immediately clear that to most people they are two very different things precisely because one of them is literally just pushing a button.

There is a reason why the murder rate is 7x higher because the access to guns requires a much lower buy in to commit the act in the first place.

Hence why people argue for stricter gun control laws. Mass access is precisely the problem.

[MrOwnPut]

so you think these gangs are just going to not kill people anymore because all guns magically disappeared?

you do know when they don't have access to guns in prison they then shank people with whatever they can sharpen, right?

[Jochim]

There's much less opportunity to attack someone with a knife and it involves a lot more personal risk. You're likely to get stabbed back unless they're totally unprepared. It's much more difficult to do a "drive by knifing".

[mhoad]

You are responding to a claim that nobody made and then introducing another “fact” that isn’t actually relevant to the conversation.

The argument isn’t that all murder stops. It’s that it goes down, dramatically when you remove guns from the equation.

[bryanlarsen]

> The point you seem to be making doesn’t really hold up to even a light level of scrutiny.

What point do you think I'm making? Because I think you're trying to reiterate the same point.

[ToValueFunfetti]

~25% of the murders in the US are already committed without guns, so even if you removed gun crime outright and no one decided to commit the same crime with a different weapon, the US would still have ~2x the murder rate of Europe. Not that this is a case against gun control, as we're still (very theoretically) saving ~15,000 lives a year. But it does suggest that there is a cause for the differing rates that is not related to guns.

[rubyn00bie]

Sources please. This reads like a NRA ad full of lies.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Here's the murder weapon statistics for 2019 from the FBI[1]. This only includes homicides for which the weapon is known. We'll assume that the rest match the distribution, though I suspect if you can't identify the weapon, there probably aren't bullet holes.

Summing total homicides gives 13,927. Summing total firearm homicides gives 10,258. 10,258/13,927 = 77.15%. I admit I did not do initially do that work and instead summed percentages from this infographic[2], arriving at 26.3% non-firearm homicide. I can't explain the discrepancy, as they point to the same data. The total homicide count is 5 higher on the FBI site, so possibly the page was updated later on. I point this out to clarify that I rounded the percentage down, which is why I felt comfortable with .25 * 7 ~= 2, though the answer with the new percentage is 1.59. I'd round to 1.5 if I did it again.

If you want a source for Europe's homicide rate being 1/7 that of the US, you'll have to ask the person I was replying to. Wikipedia[3] says Europe's murder rate is 3.0 and the US is 6.5, but I expect the person here was restricting it to the EU or something else along those lines (also various sources differ, and it's something that changes over time). I don't think the restriction changes either of our points, as long as the 7x number does really exist.

I can't recall ever having seen an NRA ad but I don't imagine my comment sounds anything like one. If the NRA really does say in their ads that they're not making a case against gun control and that it could save 15,000 lives a year, I don't have a problem sounding like them.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://infographicjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/we...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[dmoy]

FBI:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

It's about 28-35% of homicides without guns

[dmoy]

(note you may also be interested to learn from that table that knives are used ~5x more frequently than all rifles in homicide)

[bigtex88]

It's a lot harder to murder a large number of people with a knife than a gun.

[MrOwnPut]

what about a van? and there's been plenty of mass stabbings.

focus on getting rid of gangs, your gun murder rate will plummet.

noone seems to care about the 20-60 shootings per day in gun-free Chicago.

all of those criminals don't seem to respect the gun laws...

the only thing that happens when you restrict guns in the US is you take away the ability for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves.

[mhoad]

And yet… there’s no vehicular homicide crime wave but 8/10 murders in the country involve a gun https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

[suzzer99]

And yet the US is the only place where mass shootings resulting in 5+ deaths regularly happen.