Comment by runako

Comment by runako 13 hours ago

4 replies

View on Hacker News

1. Comparing a city-state to a city in a large country is kind of a silly exercise. There is no hard border at ("everything's legal in") New Jersey, for example.

2. Singapore has a very different firearm regulation regime than the US (or even New York State or NYC). Your argument could make sense as an argument in favor of more tightly restricting firearm ownership in the US.

3. Your argument doesn't even attempt to generalize to other authoritarian regimes. One could equally compare NYC's murder rate with that of Japan or Switzerland, which did not have to use authoritarianism to achieve low homicide rates.

godelski 12 hours ago

It's not silly to compare, but it is silly to draw causal relationships. Especially when cherry-picking

  - Singapore is authoritarian and has a low homicide rate
  - Venezuela is authoritarian and has a high homicide rate
Huh... maybe authoritarianism isn't sufficient to conclude the homicide rate... I mean Saint Kitts and Nevis is a constitutional monarchy and has the highest homicide rate in the world.

But let's also compare Homicide and GDP[0]. There's multiple interesting things to say from graphs like this. Though I still wouldn't conclude a causation here.

People love data when it confirms what they already believe but people don't like putting in the work needed to interpret data. Granted, the latter is not easy. But maybe if we're not math lovers we probably shouldn't claim to also be data lovers.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?x...

Reply View 2 replies
  • aeonfox 12 hours ago

    Maybe the dichotomy here is between governments that invest in their people intelligently vs those that don't.

    Reply View 1 reply
janalsncm 12 hours ago

1. The city vs country distinction cannot account for a 60x difference in safety. There are many other countries which are also orders of magnitude safer than both NYC and the US.

2. One person’s “firearm regulation” is another’s authoritarianism. A regulation simply means one’s ability to have a firearm will be taken away in some cases i.e. fewer rights.

3. There is no point where freedom ends and authoritarianism begins. It’s a matter of the types and number of rights which are protected by the government. Anyone who believes removing the right to bear arms in some circumstances agrees that there can be a tradeoff between freedom and safety which was the core of my argument, that the US is becoming less free while becoming no more safe.

Reply View 0 replies