I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer. My Research Told Me Otherwise.

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Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gunowner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers – they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United Statesevery year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?

However, the next-largest set of gun deaths – 1 in 5 – were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.

By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.

Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally – not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.

Special To The Washington Post · Leah Libresco

{Matzav.com}


8 COMMENTS

  1. Gun control is not the answer. According to the Paddock family, there is no way this retired 64 year old man who has no military background and no experience in handling guns and weapons could have killed 59 people and shot another 500 in under 5 minutes. This clearly has the fingerprints of the Deep State who continue their witch-hunt on Trump, trying to undermine his presidency who is a threat to the globalists. The deep state and shadow government operators most likely first killed their guinea pig Paddock and then went on a shooting spree. Wait another few days/weeks and this theory will be proven to be correct.

  2. look at Chicago they have stiff gun controls and guess what they have the highest gun related deaths per any state: therefore does gun control work???

    • No, you don’t understand. Gun control laws are only for WHITE Christian taxpaying moral bible carrying heterosexual males. ONLY those evil racists have to abide by the rules. If you are a minority or just a regular dreg of society, you can do what you want. There are no rules or laws to be followed. Sure, just ask Rahm Emanuel. If you disagree with me, you are a racist and should have the Thought Police come and arrest you for a hate crime!

  3. England has a much higher assault rate than America. Whether criminals use knives, sticks, or their fists, the chance of being assaulted in England is much higher than in America. Every Brit is unarmed for sure, making even groups of people an easy target. And it’s true that suicidal men prefer guns, but without a gun around, they would simply find another way, tragically enough.

    The Las Vegas murderer could’ve chucked homemade bombs from the window in lieu of his guns. (And I still don’t know how he got so many guns past security and despite housekeeping.)

    Also, regarding domestic violence and guns: In Muslims countries where honor killings are all the rage, wives and daughters are almost never shot to death, but murdered in other ways. Ditto with the honor killings committed in supposedly civilized countries by Muslim immigrants.

    Kudos to Matzav for posting this article.

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