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

Somehow an opinion piece from Leah Libresco made it into the pages of the Washington Post. It was entitled; I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. Libresco used to write for the Huffington Post but apparently, she’s had a conversion;

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.

She talks about her revelation that 66% of gun deaths in the country were suicides and 20% were gang-related or the result of street violence – young men killed by other young men.

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.

After looking at the actual crime statistics, she found that proposed gun control laws weren’t targeted at the actual gun violence. I could have told her that without the math, but at least she looked at the causes of gun violence without the typical hysterical emotion of the Brady crowd and the Giffords bunch.

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 that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-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.

So, Ms Libresco’s solution to gun violence is a more focused look at the causes, rather then the more popular emotional knee-jerk reactions to feelings;

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.

As always with articles in the Post that actually make sense, you should stay out of the comments, most Post readers can’t summon the intestinal fortitude to read past the headline and their comments reflect it.

Category: Guns