A Statistician Look at Gun Control Ideas

For John, BLUF:  The real reason for the Second Amendment is not target practice.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

I used to think gun control was the answer.  My research told me otherwise.

From The Washington Post and Ms Leah Libresco,♠ on 3 October 2017.

Here is the lede plus one:

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.

If passing gun control laws work, that is, passing laws, why do we find so many shivs and so much drugs in prisons?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”