Bear in mind that what the researcher is saying is that they don't have evidence of an effect, not that they have evidence of no effect. The distinction is important in this case: there's a famous one where researchers could find no link between money and happiness. Another 30 years of solid data provided the missing evidence that the obvious was true.
Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values.
Also worth bearing in mind: what statisticians do agree on is that owning a gun is more likely to hurt you than help you. If you live alone that's your own call, but if you have a family I'd say it's something you ought to think about carefully.
> Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values.
I really hate to bring this up, but "no mass shootings" does not equal "no mass deaths". There have been plenty of attacks in Europe to great effect without guns being used -- for example, the truck attack in Nice, Paris is still unrivaled by any gun massacre in America.
We shouldn't play semantic games / statistical filtering games with phrases like "reducing gun violence" and "reducing mass shootings"; I think we all can agree that our collective goal as decent human beings is work towards reducing violence/harm/death, period. Why qualify it on only gun attacks -- other than for political reasons?
If banning guns indeed reduces mass killings overall (again, it's rather a red herring to say your only goal is to reduce mass shootings rather than mass killings in general), then by all means let's work towards that.
But the data so obviously shows this to be a false correlation: Right now Europe is if anything the poster-child of why gun control doesn't work, with all the truck and bomb attacks. Again, I hate to bring this up, but so often Europeans use this as a common insult to Americans but I see this as a rather strong case of cognitive dissonance.
The attacks in Nice and Paris are the French equivalent of 9/11. They’re acts of war and are really outliers in statistics. You can’t really use these attacks as an argument against gun control. In day to day life there are 0.21 homicides by gunfire for 100k inhabitants per year in France and 3.6 in the US (source: wikipedia). I think the real argument is there... But then again, as a Frenchman most of American politics are more and more foreign and impossible to understand to me (gun law, healthcare...)
> In day to day life there are 0.21 homicides by gunfire for 100k inhabitants per year in France and 3.6 in the US (source: wikipedia).
This is missing the point of the comment you're replying to. You're comparing homicide by gunfire, not homicide.
It is true that Europe has a lower homicide rate in general, but there are exceptions. Lithuania is a European country with restrictive gun laws and a substantially higher rate of intentional homicide than the U.S. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...)
How do guns stop a lorry mounting the pavement? They don't.
Even if they did, why would we trade these very infrequent attacks for daily misery? How many school massacres is it going to take before you realise that safety and freedom are two ends of the same balance.
It's much harder to be an accidental fatality in a gang knife fight. Things are safer when there aren't 8g chunks of supersonic lead flying around.
There's still as much gun crime in the US as there is —even where there are regulations— because there are still guns. In direct circulation or coming in from other states. Criminals tend to not care too much about restrictions. If they want a gun and can steal a gun, they can have a gun.
Gun control works elsewhere because we do it nationally and then get rid of all* the guns. It takes decades and insanely strong punishments. We still have criminals, we still have knives and acid and lorries and explosive precursors. All nasty stuff, but a power of magnitude when it comes to general safety of the rest of us.
* Most guns anyway. I have a shotgun but you can have rifles and there are a very, very few handgun exceptions for the right people. With all of these, there are restrictions on things like barrel length and magazine size on all guns and even more restrictions on types of ammo, and how much you can own. Not to mention the interview and home office check you get before you're allowed anything.
>Most guns anyway. I have a shotgun but you can have rifles
I would argue that rifles are more a tool for hunting than a shotgun. Germany wanted to ban shotguns (trench guns) the allies used in WWI because of their devastating effects.
Shotguns are also a good tool for hunting birds and whatnot. There are many places in the US where people hunt for cheap food.
Pistols aren't ideal for any kind of hunting though. They're almost exclusively for self defense (and the majority of guns used in homicides).
Worth considering: if you own a truck you have to register it and get insurance in case you cause any damage. Even ignoring the effect on killings, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask the same of gun owners.
No, you don't, at least in many ag-based US states. You can own and operate a truck without a license or insurance on private property. Which means nothing would stop someone doing that, and then driving it on the roads and running people over other than a cop being lucky enough to pull them over first.
Car safety's definitely an issue too. For many years governments have basically blocked research into making cars safer for pedestrians. I'm hoping that's going to change, since it appears that terrorists are finally waking up to the possibilities. On the other hand, we recently had a really ugly terrorist incident at London Bridge, which is somewhere I go most days. The good news is the terrorists only had knives. People died, including police officers, but the death toll would have been much worse if they'd even had small caliber handguns.
The statistic makes sense, owning a gun is more likely to harm than help you. That is across all of society though. The thing is, you own it and are personally in charge of storage, maintenance, operation, etc. So it is harder to blanket apply the harm vs help rule to an individual owner without knowing their personal practices.
It is, but it's also worth bearing in mind that, on average, you're going to be average. And, as is natural, you probably overestimate your own behavior. (This last point is basically true of everything, but gun safety's pretty unforgiving on that last point.)
Right, but unless you're an expert on gun safety (which in turn implies being an expert on guns), you're probably not going to be qualified to determine if someone is above or below average in terms of gun safety.
Something about this piece smells wrong. It's supposedly written by someone who used to advocate gun control, but then "discovered" after doing research that every single policy that has been proposed to limit gun violence is useless and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. This conclusion seems just a little too convenient.
Let's look at some of the specific claims:
> Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.
Oh? Just how common do they have to be? Before the buyback the number of mass-shooting was >0 (that's what prompted the change of policy to begin with) and since then the number has been exactly zero. It might be the case that the number before was too small for zero to be statistically significant, the author goes much further than that and concludes that because Australia does not provide enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the null hypothesis (gun control doesn't work) is therefore true. And this person claims to be statistician?
> When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification...
This is true, but all classifications are invented. Just because a classification is invented doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. The idea that because "assault weapon" is an "invented classification" that it is meaningless is an NRA trope. Why would a statistician fall for it?
Also, no mention whatsoever of background checks despite the claim that "By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout." Background checks are probably the single most prominent proposed intervention, and totally ignoring in a piece whose thesis is that all proposed interventions are useless is either journalistic malpractice or evidence of bias.
It would not surprise me a bit to learn that this piece was quietly commissioned by the NRA in the same way that oil companies fund climate-change-denialism reports. It just seems too sloppy and convenient to be genuine.
> the author goes much further than that and concludes that because Australia does not provide enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the null hypothesis (gun control doesn't work) is therefore true
I don't think this is the claim. I think the claim is that the evidence is insufficient to merit supporting a particular policy intervention. Banning things is not without cost: there will be some economic consequences for people making the thing, and there will need to be an enforcement regime which will either increase law enforcement costs or reduce LEO time spent elsewhere, and the practical impact of that enforcement regime will, if past gun interventions are predictive, involve incarcerating a bunch more people, many or most of whom will be urban men of color, which will result in both monetary and societal costs. And if there's a buyback program, that will also be enormously expensive, and require either incurring new debt or not spending that money on some other means of life-saving.
I think it's reasonable to want to be pretty confident a particular policy intervention will work before agreeing to incur that cost, and I think the author is saying the Australia example does not constitute sufficient evidence to merit that confidence. That's not the same as saying it didn't or won't work.
"Neither nation [Australia or Britain] 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."
But if you actually look at the data, this is simply absurd. Australia averaged one mass shooting every 18 months before the ban without about a dozen separate events. Since the ban 21 years have gone by without a mass shooting. To say that "mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress" is manifestly absurd. At the very least it requires an explanation: just how many mass shooting does she require before their total absence for over two decades can be attributed to an intervention?
All of the people who published anti-climate-change studies on behalf of the oil industry also had credentials. Even people with credentials can succumb to temptation.
And I didn't say that this piece was commission by the NRA. I said that it would not surprise me to learn that it was. I'm advancing that as one hypothesis to explain the very strange too-good-to-be-true correspondence between the author's rhetoric and the classic tropes and talking points of the NRA. That might all be a coincidence, and it might be that all of the oversights and faulty reasoning are really Leah Libresco's work alone. But that would imply that Leah Libresco is incredibly stupid and a really bad statistician, and that seems unlikely to me.
I don't have a horse in the race, but if we are doing argument by authority, I would trust the CS PhD and JPL researcher more than the blogger with a PoliSci degree undergrad who dabbled in data visualisation and SPSS and thinks she is an authority.
FiveThirtyEight has a good piece that reached the same conclusion. It's likely that it's by the same research team, but is published under a different author:
That piece is completely different. It's mostly just a factual report. It comes to a much vaguer and more general conclusion:
"Gun violence isn’t one problem, it’s many. And it probably won’t have a single solution, either."
Libresco's piece has a long list of specific policies that she rejects (banning silencers, assault weapons), endorses (personal interventions), or ignores (background checks).
Is your issue with the conclusions or with the data? Your initial comment seemed to challenge the veracity of the data and the motivations of the author, but the same data is presented on FiveThirtyEight and same research team compiled both.
"Did Australia and Great Britain’s reforms prevent mass shootings? It’s hard to say, simply because mass shootings are relatively rare. In the post-buyback period, Great Britain has had one massacre with guns while Australia has had none. It’s hard to calculate how many would have been expected without a ban. Australia looks more successful in this regard, because it had more frequent mass shootings before the ban (averaging about two mass shootings every three years from 1979 to 1996) Mass shootings in Great Britain, prior to the ban, were rarer. Prior to 1996, there hadn’t been a widely covered mass shooting in Britain since 1987."
So... between 1979-1996, a 17 year period, they averaged 2 mass shootings every three years, or one every 18 months, with about a dozen data points. Since the ban, 21 years -- 250 months -- have gone by without a mass shooting. I cannot even begin to imagine how someone could conclude from that data that it's "hard to say" whether the ban worked. At the very least this extraordinary conclusion requires an explanation, not merely a glib assertion.
I think the claim that the UK only had one massacre with guns is questionable - we had Hungerford and Dunblane, both of which led to bans, and neither type of mass killing has been repeated since
> Is your issue with the conclusions or with the data? Your initial comment seemed to challenge the veracity of the data
I don't see anything in lispers posts challenging data, only the authors selective portrayal of facts and reasoning from the data.
Further, your upthread comment didn't reference the data either, it referred (falsely) to the 538 piece coming to the same conclusion; you backed off to claim it was about shared data and not a shared conclusion when it was pointed out that your claim about the conclusion was false.
"Just because a classification is invented doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless."
In the case of "assault weapons", though, the classification does indeed happen to be meaningless and useless. With the possible exceptions of silencers/suppressors and maybe bayonet/equipment mounts, the vast majority of what constitutes an "assault weapon" has effectively zero real effect on that weapon's lethality (either to an individual or to a large group).
I don't think the title represents the content very well. "Gun control" is a rather broad topic and her research is clearly narrowly focused on item-specific sales restrictions.
Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability. This would align incentives to reduce gun violence: safe storage, less lethal rounds & weapons, mental health checks, trainings, age-tied pricing, etc.
It won't stop all gun violence, but nothing short of a constitutional amendment can even get us close to stopping all gun violence.
>Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability.
That would just be a way to make people who are young, not white, live in higher crime areas, etc, etc pay more.
Shooting something/someone you shouldn't be shooting is incredibly rare so either premiums would be negligible or they would have be be artificially high (vice tax).
Furthermore it would also be fought every step of the way by anyone who doesn't want a registration scheme since it effectively would create one.
The idea itself should have a positive impact (at least on paper) since it would presumably make high risk groups less likely to own firearms (at a statistical level) but it's pretty incompatible with something that's right. You don't need to pay for free speech insurance in case you offend someone.
That may be the intended result, if the desired effect is to limit gun violence without impinging on legitimate owners' rights to own guns. And then higher cost of guns = less gun violence = less need to own a gun = less gun violence = lower cost of insurance = the price reaches an equilibrium where the true cost of owning a gun is equal to the negative externalities it causes.
At least that's the theory. It's unclear whether it'll actually play out that way, with the existence of black markets and the general inability to afford a lawyer and sue for damages within these communities.
Car insurance is also a mandate. It works well. The healthcare situation isn't because it's a mandate, it's because of inelastic demand. A situation that's not comparable to gun ownership.
Arguably, in cities without good public transportation, car insurance has inelastic demand too. Further, it's being used to do things like backdoor in ubiquitous surveillance using GPS.
One also wonders what the effect car insurance has had on repair costs, for similar reasons as healthcare.
My point is that adding an insurance burden onto guns isn't a clear win, unless you assume that further government intervention (by the queerly circuitous route of private-sector insurance involvement the US seems to like) is unquestionably good. It also doesn't make sense to require insure for guns that are used for target shooting a few times a year.
Frankly, given the huge number of firearms and owners in this country and the rather small amount of violence they produce, it would probably be a bigger win to ask for mandatory insurance on pools, ladders, fast-food, sugary drinks, and so forth.
>That would just be a way to make people who are young, not white, live in higher crime areas, etc, etc pay more.
Except for the racial discrimination that all sounds reasonable, and racial discrimination is avoidable[0]. Car insurance costs more depending on where you live, what kind of car you have, your age, your education, your driving history, etc. I recently looked into getting a car and decided against it because cost of parking + insurance + depreciation was greater than renting every other weekend. I don't believe driving is less essential a right than gun ownership.
> Shooting something/someone you shouldn't be shooting is incredibly rare
A large portion of violent crime is committed with stolen weapons.[1] I believe the original owner should be liable if the weapon wasn't properly secured.
From the OP: "Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them." Key phrase - guns on hand. Guns are a highly effective and impulse-friendly suicide method.
"Various studies of survivors of suicide have calculated that as many as two-thirds of those who reported suicidal behavior did not plan their attempt...About half of those did so within 20 minutes, and three-quarters of suicide attempts occurred within an hour."[2]
Also from OP: "And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence." A world where a woman is beaten instead of shot because there isn't a gun in the house, or the gun isn't easily accessible is a world where that woman survives and can seek help. It's not a good world, but it's better.
Imagine a gun safe that opens one hour after you put in the code. Still accessible for deliberate action, while drastically reducing the cost of impulsive violence.
P.S. The racial discrimination link is a good read, check it out.
Mandatory insurance sounds promising, but what happens when the insurance lapses and the person still owns the guns? Does the government go in and repossess their guns? Does it force them to pay somehow? Doesn't seem practical.
I've become a greater and greater fan of mandatory liability insurance for firearms, and a requirement no sale can be completed until the vendor verifies that the purchases possess that insurance.
The insurance industry loves this idea. But who benefits? How do you calculate the payouts? And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance?
Calculating damages for injuries is something tort law covers already, not a new area. Determining what liabilities must be covered, and to what minimum level, would be new.
> And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance?
If gun owners are liable for securing there guns, and that is part of the liability that must be insured, that's covered.
Illegally manufactured or imported guns aren't, though.
The frustration lately is that there are a number of relatively easy-to-implement policies that don't "take your guns away", like many of the ones you mentioned. Yet, since Sandy Hook nothing has been done and the mass shootings continue.
In the grand scheme of these things, large spree killings like Sandy Hook, Orlando, and even this most recent tragedy are pretty infrequent.
There is a great deal of pathos and "something must be done!" but, especially given the history of gun control in America and given the current political situation, extreme caution and conservatism is the order of the day.
I appreciate how terrible all this must seem--especially for the increasingly gun-ignorant elite and urban population that is susceptible to a lot of the outrage porn--but we really need to be careful about the road increased gun control or confiscation would set us down.
> Why is extreme caution and conservatism the order of the day?
Simply put: this was instruction #2 in the BIOS of our country. The people who went to such lengths to gain independence said that allowing an armed populace without government infringement was second only to free speech and religion. This was deliberate.
We've also already had forced confiscations of US citizens during Katrina [5]. We all saw how well that worked out, caused as it was by miscommunication of overlapping agencies despite standing directions not to do so [6].
The reason that caution and conservation are called for is simple: once you allow the government to confiscate firearms, you don't get them back. It's a one-way street, and a street that historically ends with massive oppression of the populace and corruption of law enforcement.
> What history of gun control and political situation are you referring to?
Wikipedia[1] has a quick overview, but the overall theme is continual erosion of the ability of gun owners to possess and maintain relevant firearms. One of the only things preventing this is the continued efforts of the Supreme Court, as seen in cases like District of Colombia v. Heller[2] and the incorporation of same under McDonald v. City of Chicago[3].
As for the political situation, I'll sketch it thusly: do you think that the well-documented issues of police violence would be better or worse (given existing officers) if they knew that the average citizen was unarmed? Do you feel safer under a Trump presidency or somebody worse if the average citizen was unarmed? During the LA Riots, was Koreatown [4] kept safer by having armed citizens?
Using a relevant historical example, in the United States the civil rights movement only really made progress once the Overton window was pulled over by armed extremists and peaceful positions like Dr. King's were seen to be a much more manageable compromise and were made to happen.
> Why do you think this isn't as terrible as it seems to the gun-ignorant?
To be frank: the gun-ignorant typically don't even have the language to understand the danger of firearms in context. Terms like "assault weapon"[9] were created to avoid more accurate (and thus less able to be abused) terms like "assault rifle". Emphasizing "semi-automatic" whenever reporting weapons use, because it sounds kinda like "automatic" and that's scary (even though legally-obtained automatic weapons are basically never used in crimes or shootings--typically instead we see illegal weapons or weapons modified to be automatic). Pointing out "armor-piercing" rounds when that's more a function of caliber and design of round and type of armor, and that being used to limit import and sale of perfectly reasonable (and environmentally friendly!) steel-core rounds.
Then you have stuff like people freaking out about Ghost Guns[10], which are perfectly legal to create and own and frankly which are the same thing people were doing a hundred years ago with lengths of pipe and rubber bands[11]. The thing is, though, that numbers for how many of those improvised and home-manufactured weapons have actually been used are a little hard to come by. But you wouldn't know that from looking at media coverage or from political stump speeches!
The language of gun control has been distorted beyond-belief by both sides[7], and news coverage tends to misidentify weapons badly or to (for example, in Rolling Stone[8]) use such vague phrasing as to paint all firearms as problems.
And yes, these shootings are terrible, but gun violence has been decreasing for quite some time now[12], and as one of this author's colleagues has pointed out[13] there is a lot more at work around gun deaths than a massacre like this would have you imagine.
> What road would increased gun control set us down?
Frankly, I think it'd further our slide into a despotic nation, ruled over by jack-booted thugs and plagued with petty and organized crime. At best, this results in an eventual rebellion and widespread disturbance of the peace and at worst this results in a genuine police state where ubiquitous surveillance and armed police punish and torture citizens for the indefinite future when it suits them.
I don't agree with you that our current gun situation is worth it as insurance against tyranny, but I can at least understand where you're coming from.
I think your "gun-ignorant" argument amounts to gate-keeping. People's opinions on gun control still matter even if they don't use the same lingo as gun-lovers.
> People's opinions on gun control still matter even if they don't use the same lingo as gun-lovers.
I respectfully disagree. I don't think people can have opinions on public policy worth listening to unless they at least possess a novice knowledge and experience of the matter they would see legislation on.
I wouldn't trust a virgin nun to vote on women's rights, I wouldn't trust anybody in congress to make laws on cybersecurity, I wouldn't trust somebody who has never cooked anything to make regulations for kitchens.
I don't trust teetotalers to make regulations on alcohol or drugs.
Similarly, I don't believe that people who've never fired, cleaned, trained others, and owned firearms to have useful opinions on those tools.
EDIT:
(And it's more than just "lingo"...there are systematic disinformation and FUD as mentioned above against firearms. It's not a harmless "you called it a foo when it's a foobar".)
To be clear, I'm not against people having opinions privately--it's just when those opinions are going to be used to make public policy that affects others and may infringe upon their rights that I become testy.
> Similarly, I don't believe that people who've never fired, cleaned, trained others, and owned firearms to have useful opinions on those tools.
I don't think that private citizens should be allowed to own nuclear weapons. Is my opinion worthless because I've never seen, touched, owned, or detonated one?
Why? The point is the same. One need not be an expert on something to come to a justified believe that it does more harm than good.
One of the consequences of your argument is that the only opinions that matter in the gun debate are those of gun enthusiasts. Doesn't pass the smell test.
>* One of the consequences of your argument is that the only opinions that matter in the gun debate are those of gun enthusiasts.*
So, I see where you'd be getting that impression, but that's not what I mean to convey.
I don't think that you have to be a "gun enthusiast" to have a worthwhile opinion on public policy--you just have to have some actual first-hand experience and knowledge of the thing.
My concern is that it seems like the majority of people who push for gun control are not educated in firearms safety or operation, and so are vocal but easily mislead.
Well, making good policy is an extremely different skill than sharpshooting. I think the crux of your point could be sharpened to a question, "In addition to policy-making experience and skills, how much gun firing experience does one need to make relevant and effective gun policy?"
An answer to this question probably depends on the specific concerns we wish policy to address. If it has to do with detailed classification of firearms, then significant experience is probably required. Whereas if we only care about reducing overall gun sales, specific firearm experience is probably less relevant or useful. These are just dummy examples, but I hope my point is a bit clearer than mud.
> I don't think people can have opinions on public policy worth listening to unless they at least possess a novice knowledge and experience of the matter they would see legislation on.
Right, which is why if you are a layman with no study of or practice of law, you aren't entitled to any opinion on any area of public policy that involves law.
Thank you for the well thought out reply! I think this is a good representation of how some Americans think about guns, at least in my experiences from Northern California up through the North Oregon Coast. As a working class yokel, I don't trust the Federal Government to act with my best interests in mind.
Just throwing this out there, but do you trust yourself to be capable of protecting your best interests? The prisoner's dilemma is a pretty clear example where people "looking out for their own" ends up causing everyone to shoot themselves in the foot.
There just a lot of situations where we are all individually better off by acting counter to our personal interests. Traffic congestion is a great, uncontroversial example I was just discussing in another thread. Lots of traffic problems come about because everyone is just trying to get home quickly without thinking of entire city's optimal traffic flow. If we all worked to maximize city traffic throughput instead of just getting where we want to go, we would actually end up getting home faster most of the time.
However, it's not really reasonable to expect this of each other, so naively, we want a way to "hack the prisoner's dilemma". We want to make the selfish decision somehow correspond to the globally optimal decision. We want cleverly designed roads and traffic flow control. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to identify where such hacks are needed, even more so figuring out how to implement them well.
My view of government's (ideal) role is to take on this "policy hacking" role. We want something to magically make Pareto Optima to also be a win situation for everybody. However, making policy is also part of the game, so there are hacks (e.g. the Constitution, etc.) in place to try and make people's personal interests align with making good policy.
It's hacks all the way down.
Sure, the system is buggy and runs on an old, crufty, legacy BIOS from the 1700s with a giant mess of spaghetti code hacks on top, but we're probably better off trying to fix this system's bugs than having to revert to Eniac and anarchy. Maybe we could do a rewrite??
I'm not from America so this might come off as naive (do pardon my ignorance)– but why don't people analyze what % of these horrible deaths come from guns sold legally? i.e. what % of these killers are getting their guns legitimately vs. off a black market?
Usually whenever a mass shooting occurs the media eventually reports on whether the firearms used were acquired legally or not. In the vast majority of cases I can recall, they were.
It's uncertain whether this tells us anything useful, though, because the important question is would the killer still have acquired the weapons even if guns were illegal, i.e. given this particular killer, would he have been willing & able to break the law and acquire black market guns even if they were not legal. This is a counterfactual that's different to answer, because the fact is that guns are legal in the U.S. There's evidence on both sides - on one hand, murder is illegal everywhere and so there's ample evidence that the killer is willing to break laws, on the other, countries that have outlawed guns have reported significantly fewer incidents of mass shootings. (Not necessarily fewer instances of terrorism, though; domestic terrorists there end up using Semtex, nerve gas, or homemade claymore mines instead.)
If all guns are banned, even obtaining a gun illegally becomes much harder. So dumb criminals can't get guns. Smart criminals know that using a gun will make them the target of nationwide attention, so they stay away from guns. (Anybody who tries using a gun against another person are quickly listed among the nation's top wanted, and their criminal careers are usually cut short pretty quickly.)
As a bonus, police officers will never shoot you even if you're jogging at 2 am in a back alley holding a baseball bat, because what justification would they have? They thought you might shoot them? Yeah as if that kind thing happens here.
Breivik managed to obtain his guns legally in Norway despite fairly tough gun control. It took him a while to do it. He said his semi-automatic .223 would be used for deer hunting. It would make sense to ban semi-automatic rifles since bolt action rifles should be good enough for hunting.
Paddock had ten times as many guns, many of which were modified with bump stocks to make them practically fully automatic. It would be much more difficult to achieve this starting with a bolt action rifle.
When things get real, like with proliferation of nuclear weapons, no one argues in favor of proliferation. It's only when poor people's lives are at stake, there is a lot of PR to essentially let them get killed with guns and make money in the process, rich can afford to protect themselves.
No, when things get real, only the people who already have nuclear weapons or have no chance of acquiring them argue in favor of non-proliferation. Many states on the cusp of achieving them - Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea - argued very vociferously that they should be allowed to have them, and then went ahead and developed them over the strenuous objections of the existing nuclear powers. And once a state has them, it's very rare that they will argue to ban them. We've been talking about a comprehensive ban on nuke possession since the end of the Cold War, but it's 25 years later and there are still thousands of nukes in active service. Who's the biggest objector to banning them entirely? The U.S.
So it is with guns. People who already own guns argue very strongly that they should be allowed to keep them, but are fine with new restrictions on who can buy them. People who might want to own a gun (or own more guns) in the future argue against any form of gun control. People who would never consider owning a gun argue that they should be banned entirely.
It's pretty predictable self-interest, and where you stand on the issue depends a lot on where you stand on possession.
In a number of states, it's almost impossible to determine the chain of custody of any particular firearm. It's no more difficult or encumbered by regulation to buy, sell, or swap them than it is lawn mowers or picture frames, between private individuals. The state I grew up in, Uncle Henry's was always full of people with ads selling rifles and shotguns, or offering to trade them for a boat.
Obviously some people don't like the conclusion. If you are solidly in the gun-control-is-good camp, the weak evidence in this opinion piece isn't going to sway you.
The natural effect is to cause such humans to dig into their entrenched positions even further. That requires considering this article and author to be stupid or hostile and hence flag-worthy.
tl;dr past and present firearms legislation mostly focuses on banning firearms/features which is both too broad and not properly targeted nor does it reflect the nature of the problem.
I honestly didn't follow the argument - "Gun control policies in other countries don't provide sufficient data to conclusively state that applying them would bring down gun related violence... But hey, here are some completely random measures I think that might work despite having not data to back up my claim"
It's probably proof that they do work, if you can't get enough data to make a reliable assertion.
The author is basically saying, "there's so few gun crimes in countries with strong gun control, that we can't determine if the gun control laws work". Hilarious.
The author calls herself a statistician but has no advanced OR undergraduate degree in statistics. I would not put much faith into this "research". Making conclusions and recommendations at the global and national population level is something I would only trust a proper scientist to do.
Academic credentials do not create truth. If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem. If you actually have a problem with her research, point out the error. Employing an ad hominem like credentialism only makes her findings more credible at first glance.
> If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem.
I wouldn't assume that. It's clear that Nate Silver is excellent at what he does, but that doesn't mean everyobe who has ever been affiliated with 538 in any capacity is an expert at the use of statistics; the employment-based credentialing you propose is at least as invalid as the academic credentialism you criticize.
Worked at 538, past tense. Moved on a few months ago, though well after the gun investigation she took the data from. I think she's at [Wave](https://www.wave.com/), now.
She does have a degree in political science – there definitely are political scientists who get seriously into statistical methods. Moreover, I'd humbly suggest that this topic is dead-on for someone with a political science background. Moreover, given her connection to fivethirtyeight and the fact this work is on fivethirtyeight.com ( https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ ) which itself has a solid reputation for talking about statistics, I think this work has some credibility, at first blush.
This is an intellectual cop-out. The gun control laws aren't there to curb gun crimes directly, they're there to end the stupid hobby and fascination that people have with guns which places them in everyone's hands.
Get rid of silencers and that's one less thing for hobbyists to play with. Get rid of long magazines, sniper rifles, machine guns - one less thing to play with. On and on until you end up with "gun culture" just being a couple of handguns that all look and shoot the same. It becomes boring and people stop collecting them.
Stephen Paddock had 47 guns. He was a gun nut, a collector, a hobbyist. This is what gun control laws are about - stopping runaway gun culture.
But does stopping the "gun culture" actually reduce the deaths? Would those 21,000 suicides have been prevented, or would they have just hanged themselves? Would the victims of gang violence be spared simply because unloading a low-capacity magazine isn't as fun?
To take a terribly pragmatic point of view, 60 deaths at the hands of a maniac is very little compared to the total 33,000 annual gun deaths. If you actually want to reduce the number of deaths due to guns then you're barking up the wrong tree when you ban high-capacity magazines; increasing the accessibility of mental health services for older white men would likely be far more effective. But if all you care about is destroying the gun culture then I guess you're on the right track.
Yes, I think the gun culture is the problem. It's gun culture that is causing youth to walk around with pistols in their pants. Similar youth in UK and Australia use knives instead (arguably safer because you can't accidentally knife someone). Hanging yourself is much harder, it takes a lot more planning and happens slowly (so you have an opportunity to save yourself or be saved) then simply pulling a trigger and it's alllll over.
Without judging you I'll just point out that opinions like yours is why you'll never get NRA along on many otherwise great ideas to reduce gun violence.
I'm out to reduce violence instead of trying to stop gun culture.
I believe we could have a chance - not at banning guns but at reducing violence - if we focused on reducing violence instead.
My favorite piece of cognitive dissonance was that on the guns subreddit, the first reaction of people was thoughts and prayers, then they immediately started discussing which of the 10 methods he might have used to convert his guns to full auto. I think there wasn't a single person on there who didn't know at least of one.
And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns. They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense.
They were never banned, just grandfathered. You have been able to buy a full auto gun for a long long time. No one that commits these acts buys a full auto gun legally through NFA.
"They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense."
They are collector items that increase in price every year. You can take them to a gun range and waste ammo. You can use them for self defense like any other gun, Harry Beckwith did just that.
The reason the guns subreddit all flock to see how this person was shooting at such a rapid fire is to see if this was a machine gun (historic event similar to the LA bank robbers) or if he used some other method which would cause such a thing to become banned.
Maybe I can't read between the lines in a gun subreddit but they weren't talking about grandfathered collectors items but buttstocks and rotary crank "hacks". Didn't saw anyone mention machine guns or LA bank robbers either.
That's because you need to be specific with your language. Your original comment on here mentions how you thought full auto guns were banned, so I tried to clarify that.
When I first heard the shooting the first thought I had was which device did he use to fire so rapidly and what the repercussions might be. This type of thinking always happens because a hobby (or if you feel strongly, a right) you care about will instantly be attacked with false information. Gun enthusiasts try to pick it apart and come up with what it could have been, and the repercussions might be. There were plenty of people who thought he modified the guns to be full auto, I was one. Sliding stocks usually work like crap, and good luck practicing because most gun ranges ban them because you can't aim with them.
My point is just because people who enjoy guns dissect a tragedy to the 100th degree the second it happens, doesn't mean they don't care about anyone but themselves, they just know people who don't know the difference between an AR15 and an M4 or that suppressors are still loud enough to get hearing damage when used will attack your hobby.
When a plane goes down you want to know why and I'm sure pilots do the same exact thing. No you can cry apples and oranges, but before you do please try to put yourself into the mind of the "other" side.
If there is a data breach that financially ruins hundreds or thousands of people, how long does it take us here to go from expressing thoughts and prayers to analyzing and theorizing how the crackers broke in and got the data out?
Nope, that doesn't work. We don't believe breaching companies and financially ruining hundreds of thousands is legal and even have hands on experience in the matter, we believe in responsible disclosure. They were talking about special buttstocks and bizarre rotary crank contraptions with the sole purpose of making a gun full auto out of hands on experience and with full conviction that these things should be legal.
If I find a security issue I report it just as I would expect a gun hobbyist to campaign for full auto hacks to be illegal, because that is the domain of criminals and the irresponsible.
Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values.
Also worth bearing in mind: what statisticians do agree on is that owning a gun is more likely to hurt you than help you. If you live alone that's your own call, but if you have a family I'd say it's something you ought to think about carefully.