Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

This is an appealing idea, with a great soundbite, that has literally no large-scale evidence in its favor. The epidemiological evidence is pretty clear on this; the prevalence of self-defense use of guns is minuscule.

Even where guns are used in self-defense, it's often in the context of an escalation of an argument rather than in the scenarios people imagine. People who do use guns to protect themselves in the course of crimes are no less likely to be injured than those who do not.




I would encourage you to revisit the research around firearms used in self defense. 500,000 to 3,000,000 encounters where a firearm was used in self defense in the US is what I was able to find. Doesn't sound minuscule.


You need to look beyond the headline numbers.

Here's a good place to start reading: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr...


Some popular firearm magazine a coworker used to keep on their desk always had references to news stories with summaries of encounters of legal self defense using firearms. Some months they had as few as 5, some as many as 20. If you assume they found as many as they could, that would be not much more than one hundred per year. They only used cases where the assailant was actually shot, and only cases that made the news. But it is still indicative that millions is probably a vast inflation just as your link indicates. Is the fact that excercising the right is rarely warranted or effective, and outweighed by the danger of doing so a valid reason to abolish it? My intuition is that it is not, but I'm not at all sure. I tend to gravitate towards fairness of a policy over its actual outcome. The notion that doing an injustice to accomplish a good is immoral is probably naive, but it is my instinct.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: