The depressing truth about gun control

NY Post ^ | October 5, 2017 | Leah Libresco

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense 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. I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia. Neither nation 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. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

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 semiautomatic 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.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

If anybody is interested in FReeper comments, this article, from different sources, has been posted several times:

How are you supposed to do a search when the same article is posted with different titles? I don't even bother trying the complete title because that causes too many misses. Instead I take words from inside the title, in this case depressing truth because they are more likely to botch up either end than the middle. And I still missed it.

[upchuck]

I heard Rush talking about this yesterday and he said the article was from the WaPo. I did a search of WaPo’s site, found the article and was going to post it here. But I did a search first:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?s=gun+control&ok=Search&q=quick&m=exact&o=time

In the search I found the article from the WaPo had already been posted:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3591761/posts

Later, when I saw your thread, I did the search again and saw there were several other threads using the WaPo article. That’s when I posted to your thread. Not to point out duplicate posts but to let FReepers know there were other threads with good comments.

Your frustration with the FR search is understandable. It’s not the best.