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I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's hig

I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement and invasion of personal privacy has failed to appreciably reduce crime or violence or murder. At best you merely create divisions in society between the privileged and the desperate that hides the problems from the privileged and wealthy so they can ignore it until eventually it boils over because the privileged and wealthy members of society are shielded from actually seeing the systemic problems that everyone else is dealing with.

razakel 2y ago
Canadians have guns. Mexicans have guns. Australians have guns. They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis. The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.
- yesco 2y ago
  I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-shootings-school-shootings-2024/77044156007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-s... > GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed. Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
    - benmanns 2y ago
      Also keep in mind there’s something like 180 days per year of K-12 education in the US each year, so that’s something like 0.62 to 5.4 per school day.
    - mattw2121 2y ago
      USA Today's reporting is wrong. There are not 971 cases of school shootings. There are about that many "school incidents". Some of those incidents, like the one listed below, are where police responded to a report of someone with a gun and never found the person or gun. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3096236 https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3096236 Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3091356 https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3091356
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        > Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. Did you look at your link? > Student shot in leg during dispute in parking lot as school was dismissing That's a school shooting. The parking lot is absolutely part of the campus.
        simoncion 2y ago
        > That's a school shooting. Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late. Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too. For lots of folks, the term "school shooting" is strongly associated with the notion that a massacre happened... and not at all with the notion that some folks got into a heated argument, and one of them decided to attack the other with a weapon.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
  - razakel 2y ago
    There were 112 school shootings where someone was injured or killed this year.
  - dmoy 2y ago
    It really depends on the definition of "school shooting". If you mean the type that makes national headlines where someone shoots a bunch of random people, then no it's not daily In 2023 it was three events: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-report-062124.pdf/view https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-repo... If by "school shooting" you include all the people shot in or right next to schools, then yea it's almost daily (or at least every couple days or so). That includes fights escalating to guns, targeted shootings of single people due to whatever revenge.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Swiss also… everywhere. And the laws are not so different in the USA as the rest of the world as often portrayed. Also the violence all around the world is more uniform than many think or want to admit (if counted relative to people count) But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere while a shooting, say in Germany, will not be covered as much. Just in south germany (BW) there are a couple of people killed per week, but that is covered only occasionally, when at all, by very local newspapers.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere... No, it won't. Unless it's a very large or very notable one (school w/multiple deaths, lots of deaths, politician, etc.), it'll be a line item on the day's evening news for the local TV station. We have 10k+ a year, not "a couple per week". I don't even hear of most of the ~50/year that happen in my fairly small city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... > In 2017, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate was 25 times higher. Although the US has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children.
  - razakel 2y ago
    A school shooting in Germany would be headline news around the world. Nobody really cares when it's criminals shooting other criminals. The latest American one only made the news because a girl did it.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Mexicans have guns. Mexico has some of the most stringent gun laws in the world. They also have more than four times the murder rate of the US. So while it's technically true that Mexicans have guns, this is more along the lines of "people inclined to violate the law against murder have no qualms about violating the law against unlawful possession of a firearm" rather than that it's easy to lawfully acquire a firearm in Mexico.
  - razakel 2y ago
    Practically anyone can own a shotgun in the UK, which also has restrictive gun laws. There has only ever been one school shooting (and the guy responsible owned his weapons completely legally). What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help. I still don't get how this is supposed to work. It seems like there are two main categories of shootings. The first is the ones that most often make the news, i.e. school shootings. But the people who do this are typically people who snap rather than career criminals, and then they would pass the background check etc. Also, these are in practice a small minority of shooting deaths. The second is gang violence. This is where you really get the high body counts. But it's also where gun laws aren't going to be followed, and then you get the same result as you do in Mexico, i.e. stringent laws that do nothing because drug cartels are already operating a criminal smuggling operation and don't give a crap about following gun laws. The best argument I've heard in favor of "gun control" reducing fatalities is something like, if you make it inconvenient for normal people to have guns then fewer of them will do it and you get fewer accidents. But then there are any number of alternative ways to get a similar result, like subsidizing gun safes or training etc., which don't require you to fight the people you're otherwise intending to purposely inconvenience.
potato3732842 2y ago
Don't forget the massive illegal drug industry that has to DIY the kind of business-dispute settling violence that normal industries use court ordered state violence for. That alone accounts of a huge amount of our violence.
- soared 2y ago
  Source, does gang/drug violence really account for a lot of our violence? This says only 16% of homicides are drug related. https://www.niagararecovery.com/blog/drug-related-crime-statistics https://www.niagararecovery.com/blog/drug-related-crime-stat...
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    I think HN User potato3732842's comment was probably true back in the 90's. But now, yes, the nature of threats to US citizens have changed. There has obviously been a decrease in the whole drug and gang violence side because of interdiction and enforcement. Meanwhile a massive expansion of the whole "school or workplace shooter" thing. Law enforcement has not changed to effectively meet this threat yet, so it seems like it's happening with impunity. Just as in the 90's law enforcement had not changed to meet the drug violence threat yet, so drug violence seemed like it happened with impunity back then. We just need for law enforcement to increase the pace at which they adapt to meet new threats.
gruez 2y ago
>US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Source? This doesn't pass the sniff test. First, US's poverty rate isn't the lowest, but is below many lower income countries that also have lower homicide rates. The figures for poverty rates take into account PPP, so it's not a matter of "Americans are richer in absolute dollars but poorer in relative dollars". Second, looking at the data, the correlation between income inequality is all over the place. For instance Malaysia is only marginally lower than the US in terms of income inequality, but is almost an order of magnitude lower in homicide rate. Trinidad and Tobago has even lower income inequality, but has almost an order of magnitude more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in...
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  [flagged]
- giantg2 2y ago
  Plenty of sources on the correlation of various socioeconomic factors with violence and gun violence. Pubmed is a good starting point. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35546249/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35546249/
  - gruez 2y ago
    That study doesn't have any mention of controls in the abstract. Therefore it can't prove a casual link. For instance, it could be the case that rich people with the means flee more violent areas, and/or that less violent people are more successful in life, which allows them resources to escape violent areas, and that's responsible for the correlation, rather than "socioeconomic factors" making people more violent.
chefandy 2y ago
Blanket black-and-white statements about what will or won’t ‘solve’ gun violence can only exist in oversimplified worlds that conflate causes, catalysts, prerequisites, cultural influences, economics, etc. If anybody is expecting one sphere of concern— e.g socioeconomic equality, bans, mental health treatment, draconian sentences for violent crimes, etc.— to essentially resolve the issue to the exclusion of all others, then nothing will ever look like it’s going to work because it’s not one problem. It’s not even one symptom. Street gang violence, criminal cartel violence, and mass killings by extremists are serious problems with very different root causes that express themselves in very different ways. It’s also totally disingenuous to say their having a common tool is inconsequential, or that the same approach to addressing that makes sense everywhere, or that taking away the rights of people with different values is an inconsequential concern. You can’t solve all problems at once, and dismissing one approach out-of-hand because you can cite problems it won’t solve and assert all sorts of assumed negative effects without any evidence is nothing more than avoidance.

razakel 2y ago

Canadians have guns. Mexicans have guns. Australians have guns. They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis. The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.

yesco 2y ago
I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-shootings-school-shootings-2024/77044156007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-s... > GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed. Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
  - benmanns 2y ago
    Also keep in mind there’s something like 180 days per year of K-12 education in the US each year, so that’s something like 0.62 to 5.4 per school day.
  - mattw2121 2y ago
    USA Today's reporting is wrong. There are not 971 cases of school shootings. There are about that many "school incidents". Some of those incidents, like the one listed below, are where police responded to a report of someone with a gun and never found the person or gun. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3096236 https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3096236 Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3091356 https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3091356
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      > Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. Did you look at your link? > Student shot in leg during dispute in parking lot as school was dismissing That's a school shooting. The parking lot is absolutely part of the campus.
      - simoncion 2y ago
        > That's a school shooting. Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late. Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too. For lots of folks, the term "school shooting" is strongly associated with the notion that a massacre happened... and not at all with the notion that some folks got into a heated argument, and one of them decided to attack the other with a weapon.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
- razakel 2y ago
  There were 112 school shootings where someone was injured or killed this year.
- dmoy 2y ago
  It really depends on the definition of "school shooting". If you mean the type that makes national headlines where someone shoots a bunch of random people, then no it's not daily In 2023 it was three events: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-report-062124.pdf/view https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-repo... If by "school shooting" you include all the people shot in or right next to schools, then yea it's almost daily (or at least every couple days or so). That includes fights escalating to guns, targeted shootings of single people due to whatever revenge.
f1shy 2y ago
Swiss also… everywhere. And the laws are not so different in the USA as the rest of the world as often portrayed. Also the violence all around the world is more uniform than many think or want to admit (if counted relative to people count) But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere while a shooting, say in Germany, will not be covered as much. Just in south germany (BW) there are a couple of people killed per week, but that is covered only occasionally, when at all, by very local newspapers.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere... No, it won't. Unless it's a very large or very notable one (school w/multiple deaths, lots of deaths, politician, etc.), it'll be a line item on the day's evening news for the local TV station. We have 10k+ a year, not "a couple per week". I don't even hear of most of the ~50/year that happen in my fairly small city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... > In 2017, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate was 25 times higher. Although the US has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children.
- razakel 2y ago
  A school shooting in Germany would be headline news around the world. Nobody really cares when it's criminals shooting other criminals. The latest American one only made the news because a girl did it.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Mexicans have guns. Mexico has some of the most stringent gun laws in the world. They also have more than four times the murder rate of the US. So while it's technically true that Mexicans have guns, this is more along the lines of "people inclined to violate the law against murder have no qualms about violating the law against unlawful possession of a firearm" rather than that it's easy to lawfully acquire a firearm in Mexico.
- razakel 2y ago
  Practically anyone can own a shotgun in the UK, which also has restrictive gun laws. There has only ever been one school shooting (and the guy responsible owned his weapons completely legally). What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help. I still don't get how this is supposed to work. It seems like there are two main categories of shootings. The first is the ones that most often make the news, i.e. school shootings. But the people who do this are typically people who snap rather than career criminals, and then they would pass the background check etc. Also, these are in practice a small minority of shooting deaths. The second is gang violence. This is where you really get the high body counts. But it's also where gun laws aren't going to be followed, and then you get the same result as you do in Mexico, i.e. stringent laws that do nothing because drug cartels are already operating a criminal smuggling operation and don't give a crap about following gun laws. The best argument I've heard in favor of "gun control" reducing fatalities is something like, if you make it inconvenient for normal people to have guns then fewer of them will do it and you get fewer accidents. But then there are any number of alternative ways to get a similar result, like subsidizing gun safes or training etc., which don't require you to fight the people you're otherwise intending to purposely inconvenience.

potato3732842 2y ago

Don't forget the massive illegal drug industry that has to DIY the kind of business-dispute settling violence that normal industries use court ordered state violence for. That alone accounts of a huge amount of our violence.

soared 2y ago
Source, does gang/drug violence really account for a lot of our violence? This says only 16% of homicides are drug related. https://www.niagararecovery.com/blog/drug-related-crime-statistics https://www.niagararecovery.com/blog/drug-related-crime-stat...
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  I think HN User potato3732842's comment was probably true back in the 90's. But now, yes, the nature of threats to US citizens have changed. There has obviously been a decrease in the whole drug and gang violence side because of interdiction and enforcement. Meanwhile a massive expansion of the whole "school or workplace shooter" thing. Law enforcement has not changed to effectively meet this threat yet, so it seems like it's happening with impunity. Just as in the 90's law enforcement had not changed to meet the drug violence threat yet, so drug violence seemed like it happened with impunity back then. We just need for law enforcement to increase the pace at which they adapt to meet new threats.

gruez 2y ago

>US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Source? This doesn't pass the sniff test. First, US's poverty rate isn't the lowest, but is below many lower income countries that also have lower homicide rates. The figures for poverty rates take into account PPP, so it's not a matter of "Americans are richer in absolute dollars but poorer in relative dollars". Second, looking at the data, the correlation between income inequality is all over the place. For instance Malaysia is only marginally lower than the US in terms of income inequality, but is almost an order of magnitude lower in homicide rate. Trinidad and Tobago has even lower income inequality, but has almost an order of magnitude more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in...

Der_Einzige 2y ago
[flagged]
giantg2 2y ago
Plenty of sources on the correlation of various socioeconomic factors with violence and gun violence. Pubmed is a good starting point. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35546249/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35546249/
- gruez 2y ago
  That study doesn't have any mention of controls in the abstract. Therefore it can't prove a casual link. For instance, it could be the case that rich people with the means flee more violent areas, and/or that less violent people are more successful in life, which allows them resources to escape violent areas, and that's responsible for the correlation, rather than "socioeconomic factors" making people more violent.

chefandy 2y ago

Blanket black-and-white statements about what will or won’t ‘solve’ gun violence can only exist in oversimplified worlds that conflate causes, catalysts, prerequisites, cultural influences, economics, etc. If anybody is expecting one sphere of concern— e.g socioeconomic equality, bans, mental health treatment, draconian sentences for violent crimes, etc.— to essentially resolve the issue to the exclusion of all others, then nothing will ever look like it’s going to work because it’s not one problem. It’s not even one symptom. Street gang violence, criminal cartel violence, and mass killings by extremists are serious problems with very different root causes that express themselves in very different ways. It’s also totally disingenuous to say their having a common tool is inconsequential, or that the same approach to addressing that makes sense everywhere, or that taking away the rights of people with different values is an inconsequential concern. You can’t solve all problems at once, and dismissing one approach out-of-hand because you can cite problems it won’t solve and assert all sorts of assumed negative effects without any evidence is nothing more than avoidance.