
I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise - reitanqild
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html?utm_term=.9d1a02fc9ef4
======
moomin
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.

~~~
electrograv
_> 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.

~~~
arnaud12
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...)

~~~
cosmiccartel
> 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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate))

~~~
cadlin
Lithuania has also halved their homicide rate over the past ten years.

[https://knoema.com/atlas/Lithuania/Homicide-
rate](https://knoema.com/atlas/Lithuania/Homicide-rate)

~~~
jdpedrie
> Lithuania has also halved their homicide rate over the past ten years.

The homicide rate in the US has also fallen considerably over the last 15
years.

[https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-
America/Homicide-r...](https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-
America/Homicide-rate)

------
lisper
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.

~~~
apendleton
> 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.

~~~
lisper
> I don't think this is the claim.

That is exactly the claim, almost word-for-word.

"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?

------
kharms
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>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.

~~~
etchalon
We currently have a government mandate which demands we have health insurance,
which was upheld by SCOTUS.

This doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.

~~~
angersock
How well has everybody been served by that mandate?

How much of the current fuckery of healthcare and costs is directly due to the
insurance complex?

Hint: it's nontrivial, and in fact is a direct cause of rising costs in
healthcare.

~~~
kharms
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.

~~~
angersock
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.

------
post_break
Good information. I wish more people understood that suppressors are still on
the fine line of hearing damage for most cases.

~~~
internalfx
I really wish suppressors were easier to buy. They help protect hearing, and
reduce noise pollution for people at or near the gun range.

~~~
post_break
I think anyone who owns a gun wishes they were easier to buy. I mean they are
easy to buy, it's just the delay after purchase makes them frustrating.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Easy to buy, if you live in a state that allows them, pay the $200 tax, and
have a chief of police that likes you.

Even the UK, totalitarian shithole that it is, doesn't regulate them.

~~~
post_break
Obama got rid of that chief of police thing. Thanks Obama.

------
roury
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?

~~~
nostrademons
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.)

~~~
nbanks
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.

~~~
DanBC
And Breivik only legally got guns after trying, and failing, to illegally get
guns in Prague.

------
Diederich
I'm pretty sure this comment is against the rules, but I'm willing to go for
it.

I'd like to hear from the people who flagged this article: why?

~~~
akvadrako
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.

------
purplezooey
Just another right-wing/libertarian shill. How about one of his opening
sentences:

"Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback
program to be clear evidence of progress."

I see. Hmm...

~~~
angersock
1\. That's a few paragraphs down, not in the opening sentences.

2\. She, not he.

Check your reading.

~~~
purplezooey
Touché, #1 seems a little nitpicky though.

------
camillomiller
America, your denial is deep.

------
dsfyu404ed
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.

------
x3n0ph3n3
Looks like this has been stricken from the front page.

~~~
nulagrithom
I've noticed that with a few of these kind of submissions. Seems there's an
attempt to keep the gun control debate out of HN.

To be fair, there wasn't much constructive conversation going on in this
thread... as has been par for similar submissions.

------
devnonymous
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"

~~~
jbob2000
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.

------
ouid
This article seems unthoughtful to me. Perhaps the actual research was more
enlightening, but this barely even qualified as a teaser.

------
alex_escalante
C'mon. Stop making excuses!!

------
thebestia29
Thus the researcher will always have something as evidence

------
astanway
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.

~~~
terravion
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
jbob2000
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.

~~~
revelation
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.

~~~
post_break
"And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns."

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.

~~~
revelation
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.

~~~
post_break
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.

