Moving the Needle on Gun Violence

I like the framing of the opening paragraph: "like other complex problems, the success metric shouldn’t be reducing gun violence to zero, but rather how much we can move the needle down from the 33,000 lives lost to gun violence each year." But I'm not sure that any the suggested actions would really "move the needle" on the number of deaths.

Let's start by considering the first proposal "Federal Grants for School Resource Officers". How people are killed in schools each year in the US, and how many would be saved if we had additional resource officers? 2018 is considered the worst year ever for school shootings, and 35 people were killed (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514).

It can easily argued that this is 35 people too many, but if the stated goal is to reduce the 33,000 deaths per year, this seems like an poor solution to lead with. Even if adding federally funded resource officers got this number to zero (which I think we agree that it wouldn't?) this only leads to a .1% reduction in shooting deaths --- which doesn't qualify as "moving the needle"!

The other proposals seem to follow the same theme --- they might be reasonable ideas on their own, but they seem unlikely to actually reduce the number of shooting deaths in the US by any significant amount. I guess the change to HIPAA might --- 2/3 of the shooting deaths in the US are suicides. Is there a good estimate of how many suicides might be prevented by making it more difficult for the mentally ill to purchase firearms? I'm sure it could be a real reduction, but I'm doubtful that it would be anything close to a majority.

Since this is Hacker News, let's tie things back to computer programming. The key to optimizing a program is to measure first, to find out where the program spends the majority of its time. A program doesn't get much faster if you reduce the time spent on a rarely called subroutine from .1% to 0%, even if you make that subroutine much faster. Instead, if your goal is making the program faster (reducing the number of gun deaths) you need to figure out where the program is spending all its time (which guns are used to kill people in the US). I'll focus on homicides, since even though they are only 1/3 of the gun deaths in the US per year, they strike me as more preventable.

It turns out that the vast majority of gun homicides in the US are done with pistols. The FBI's data says that in about 90% of the cases were the weapon is known, the perpetrator was using a handgun: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-.... The remainder are split about evenly between rifles and shotguns. It's possible that these numbers might be off by a bit, since in about 30% of cases the type of weapon is not stated, but it seems likely that pistols are the majority of the unknowns as well. I can't find up to date numbers for suicides, but the numbers I did find (https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.78.7....) suggested that handguns are used in the majority of suicides as well.

So if I were trying to "move the needle" on gun homicides in the US, I would probably put all my emphasis on reducing the number of pistols in the hands of people who are likely to kill themselves or murder others. If your goal is reducing the number of gun deaths per year in the US, wouldn't this be a better place to start than increasing the number of school support officers? And if your goal isn't to reduce the number of deaths by guns in the US (and I agree that there are lots of other worthy goals), why start with such a solid lead paragraph asking this question?