Posted on 10/03/2017 11:24:20 PM PDT by Reno89519
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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.
This is a great article to share with gun control people!
If you pull out the statistics files...actual murders, assaults, wounded, etc...generally military-style weapons figure only into one-percent or less of all acts in a normal year. Shotgun activity will generally be less than one-percent. When you can establish silencers being involved in a situation...it’s awful rare.
So the chief weapon in roughly 98-to-99 percent of episodes are pistols. I think if we asked the Chicago cops to review their yearly database....virtually all of the shootings are pistol-related.
If you outlaw military assault rifles (the likely outcome now from this episode)...there’s still a million-odd weapons existing in the country which owners won’t turn in, and the black-market will become a place where people buy and trade such weapons in the future.
“specific measures to protect women menaced by their abusive partners “
Now this is archi-dumb. Americans women already have the best thing to protect them from abusive partners, it’s called... a gun.
“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...”
The author is just beginning to think for herself which I commend and encourage, but is still trapped mentally by the fences of pure liberalism.
* You can’t be a suicide victim. It doesn’t jump out and kill you without your own action. You perpetrate it on yourself. Statements like this show that the person can not parse life through any lens but that of a victim. It’s not heartless to say that someone COMMITS suicide. It’s just fact.
* Women menaced by abusive partners need guns. If the partner is truly that cruel and dangerous then they may acquire a weapon of any kind either through legal or illegal means. The only remedy is equalization of risk during an attack. That means the potential victim needs deadly force as an option.
* “...kids swept up in street vendettas...” This one is another twisted up lie wrapped with a grain of truth using the wrong words to make you feel rather than think. It should read “Kids growing up as members of street gangs.” There are always drug money wars involved. Saying the problem is a “vendetta” is trying to treat a symptom without naming the problem. They are members of killer gangs fighting for turf to sell drugs and make money. This is not a mere vendetta. Without more personal intellectual honesty than this further debate over what to do about the gangs, the young and not-so-young members and their level of armament is pointless.
But yes, Leah here is absolutely beginning to think for herself. Which is wonderful. Another year or two and she will be shunned and pushed out by her liberal peers for asking too many questions and sounding too conservative. She hasn’t yet fully discovered that her destination will be conservatism precisely because she wants to think for herself.
Good analysis.
Bookmark
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.Perhaps a bit more research would disabuse her of this particular gun-grabbers' myth.
BINGO! If we could have silencers to make guns as convenient for women as handling a light and quiet easy fun to use Nerf Gun, we would win the gun culture just like Apple won the Computer culture by making it psychologically accessible to women with the iphone waht was once a predominently “obscure” male endeavor.
The so called Assault Military features is a LIE. It was designed so feminine Vietnamese men with little access to tech know how could learn it quickly.
The AR is a device of accessibility with automatic features for the disabled and those not in gun culture as we know it.
This is why the NFA rules are so grievious.
I am willing to bet that if silencers were allowed and cheap, most gun ranges would require it for women and children and their safety!
Yes! Thanks for posting. Author will, I hope, continue and expand on the intellectual honesty she refreshingly displays this article, as above commenters have pointed out.
“Another year or two and she will be shunned and pushed out by her liberal peers for asking too many questions and sounding too conservative. She hasn’t yet fully discovered that her destination will be conservatism precisely because she wants to think for herself.”
Good summation and I’d only add the old saw about a conservative being a liberal who has been mugged. I do not wish any violence on the author, merely pointing out that certain triggering events in our lives can bring a focus that would be hard to achieve otherwise. Such an event sweeps away the fog of human foibles and rationalizations to leave the clear light of day to see things as they are.
Marked for later
I saw this in another publication. I’m surprised to see it in the compost.
well, I would have read, copy/pasted it if it didn’t want me to shut down my adblocker.
Bump for later.
“This is a great article to share with gun control people!”
The gun control people I know are not interested in facts or reason. They KNOW guns are the problem and people who own guns, people not superior like them, are the problem. You can’t argue and trying will get you a spit shower. It’s not about guns, it’s about control. If there were no guns it would be Global Warming or gay marriage or your unreasonable stance on pedophilia.
“A Giant luxury mega-mansion for Gore, a Government Green EcoShack made of poo for you”
I drive past a development of tiny houses. Individually, they are cute. There are about twenty of them on a lot that formerly had a small house on it. I buy sheds for my rental properties that are bigger by about one foot in width and two in length. I take it these things are about 80 square feet. I have two thousand square feet just for my tools and one of my four vehicles. My family has rooms set aside for activities like sewing or entertaining. I have friends with a room set aside for just a pool table. It’s fine that some people can live in a garden shed but they expect all of us to do it. I make money off my tools. Every time I drive by I think thoughts like yours about Al Bore.
Amazing!
bfl
Shocked this was at the Washington compost. They usually stay on talking points.
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