In the wake of the mass murder in Las Vegas on Sunday (10/01), the calls for gun control have become deafening – from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) denouncing Congress’s failure to pass gun-control legislation as an “unintentional endorsement” of mass shootings, to pundit Keith Olbermann calling for the NRA to be labeled a “terrorist organization.”
I am a professional statistician. And I admit, 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 research 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.
In the wake of the mass murder in Las Vegas on Sunday (10/01), the calls for gun control have become deafening – from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) denouncing Congress’s failure to pass gun-control legislation as an “unintentional endorsement” of mass shootings, to pundit Keith Olbermann calling for the NRA to be labeled a “terrorist organization.”
I am a professional statistician. And I admit, 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 research 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.