Why Most Gun Laws Aren’t Backed Up by Evidence
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
On one side, we have people that are livid that literal children are being murdered - and in schools. And on the other side we have people furious that a right bound up in the fabric of the founding of the country is under threat.
And you know what? Both these sides are right. Children are literally dying in schools. And a foundational right is under threat.
I (of course) don’t have the answer to this or even how to hash it out. In some sense, I don’t think the argument is over facts themselves, I think the disagreement is about the axioms underneath everything.
There are some that have the position that it’s not acceptable that one child die to guns. And if someone has personally lost a child to gun violence, can you blame them? Their axiom is no child can die from guns - the right to life, liberty, etc.
And on the other side, if the primary reasoning behind 2A is discouraging or actively fighting tyranny, why shouldn’t they have a fully automatic machine gun? Why not even more capable weapons than that? Their axiom is that tyranny must not take root here.
Rights are often in tension — definitely in this case. But I don’t really see productive conversations happening along these lines: both sides are too entrenched.
The gun banners don't want it because most criminals don't have legal guns in the first place. Nothing you can do short of disarming society will have much effect on the criminals and most of them don't want to admit that's their actual objective.
The gun nuts don't want it, either, because it will show some benefits of gun regulations (for example, locking up guns around kids helps.)
The same areas that disarm the populace also tend to hamstring police and have crime friendly DAs, a recipe for a class of sheep to be preyed upon.
> 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides, while 43% were murders
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...
Actual article point: “ doesn’t mean other gun laws don’t work — just that the research proving it doesn’t yet exist. Scientists I spoke to saw it as an “absence of evidence” problem, stemming from long-standing, intentional roadblocks in the path of gun violence research.”
Here people are, hundreds of years later, still trying to ban gun. Go figure.
Never question the narrative. Keep buying guns and keep loving freedom.
The thing is that almost every other country in the world handles private firearms ownership through a combination of:
1. Categorizing firearms on objective criteria, and grouping weapons on what is essentially a risk basis. So manual-action rifles and shotguns might be category A, semi-auto long guns with fixed magazines and revolvers might be category B, semi-auto weapons with detachable magazines might be category C, and so on.
2. Having a tiered licensing system that gates private access to firearms based on which category they fall into. In a fair number of European countries, the basic firearms license is obtainable basically as long as you're an adult citizen without a criminal history who can pass a basic psychological evaluation. The categories and licenses actually vary a ton between countries. Some are quite permissive (e.g. Czechia, Switzerland) and some are very restrictive (e.g Romania).
In the US it's totally different. There is no license for owning a firearm, there is simply legal eligibility (are you an adult, not a drug addict, not a felon, not convicted of domestic violence, etc). As a US citizen, owning firearms operates on a sort of "benefit of the doubt" system where you have the right to own them by default. That's basically the opposite of every other country.
Also, under federal law there is no legal difference between a single-shot .22 and an AR15. The only category based restriction is that handguns can't be sold to under-21s. The only weapons which are meaninfully treated differently are machine guns, "destructive devices" (explosives, launchers, and certain shotguns for some reason), silencers/suppressors, and "short-barreled" rifles & shotguns (defined as having a barrel length under 16 or 18 inches respectively). The thing is, that even these special categories of firearms do not have any advanced legal requirements for ownership beyond those of normal firearms, but they have to be registered and require additional paperwork and processing time to transfer ownership.
On the state level, there are some laws that introduce a license system, some laws that try to restrict certain categories of firearms or magazines, and other things of that nature. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that state-level gun laws are very effective in reducing gun crime. But across the US you have states with every combination of high/low crime and lax/permissive gun laws. It seems like any meaningful change will have to take place on the federal level.
I think the best thing the US could do for everyone is move to a tiered-license system for all firearms. As a part of this, we could get rid of the arbitrary NFA classifications which might help bring support from the pro-gun side. I think this is ultimately wishful thinking however, because I don't think this kind of system would be allowed under the current interpretation of the 2nd amendment.
It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns. The phenomena exists because the object exists and is sold in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister.
> It’s the shooters. It’s the shooters. It’s the shooters. The phenomenon exists because the criminals exist and are not imprisoned in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister.
Did I do it right?
Rocket Launchers are highly illegal. We have a massive amount of illegal weapons coming from south of the border. That's Obama had a big scandal called the fast and furious (https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/obama-relents-in-figh...). The illegal guns they sold the cartel were coming back over the border and being used in crimes.
If the solution was putting people in jail then we'd have the lowest rate, so it's gotta be something else
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
This is also compared to every other country, so to explain the discrepancy then it would have to be something every country does more than the US
We could do this all day.
"It’s the trucks. It’s the trucks. It’s the trucks. The phenomena exists because the object exists and is sold in every town in America for reasons that range from the deranged to the sinister."
In foreign countries without second amendment rights criminals just ram trucks into people instead. Since no guns are involved, these don't get reported as "mass shootings", not that it would bring any comfort to the victims and their families [0] [1] [2].
In all seriousness, this isn't Harry Potter where the wand "speaks" to the wizard. An inanimate object won't "convince" someone to commit a crime. Focusing on the human shooting the gun would yield much better results. But say "mental health" and watch everyone suddenly go very silent and ignore the issue. Much easier to blame the evil inanimate object!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
Let’s say you are a fifty year old woman. Just try defending yourself without a gun.
An infant isn't capable of handling any weapon. At around the age of twelve, children, if accustomed to guns, are capable of defending themselves, and have done so, both in the pioneer days and currently.
But, we don't allow children to be armed in school, because not all children are emotionally mature. That's why we set age limits on legal firearm ownership.
We depend on the school staff and facilities to keep them safe and we expect that children will be civilized by their families and their schooling to respect authority. Sadly, that is not always the case, especially in the last few decades.
Using a gun in self defense is a last resort. Lawful gun owners are very reluctant to do so, because they understand the responsibility and ramifications of doing that.
Found the person who not only didn't read the article, but is essentially summed up by it.
VT and NH, with triple the gun ownership of CA, have one half of the CA gun murder rate.
NH and VT are constitutional carry states, with gun laws consistent with the US Constitution. CA is heavily regulated.
How do you account for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
The point of the entire article is that people are just using simple graphs like the one you linked to without actually doing any studying and then making laws based upon some perceived correlation. California is strict with its rules but it doesn't say that it's a good thing.
The plot I posted shows that there isn't any correlation between gun ownership rates and the gun murder rates state by state. I haven't looked at the states behind the few outliers, but I suspect that people who do won't like what they find.
It gets even murkier when you include gun suicides, which are half the deaths, in the polemics. People will always find a way, and some states can be more depressing, e.g. winter in New Hampshire.
Edit: That 18 / 100,000 outlier seems to be bogus, I don't see it in the data table.
Oh wait...
Who said I'm white?
tell us what those demographics are.
Sure it doesn’t get rid of all guns. No one is claiming that it would but that’s an unreasonable bar that’s only set by critics. Even countries with strict gun control still have guns. However gun deaths are more rare because the penalty associated with even holding a gun illicitly are quite high, so in practice the number of guns floating around is lower and their use is really constrained (mainly because the cost of acquiring a gun is higher). Sure, the US has way more private gun ownership than other countries when they took steps towards effective legislation. It’ll take longer for any meaningful legislation to take effect, and only if it’s a national thing to mitigate cross-border transport. And SCOTUSes current ideological bent and strange 2nd amendment interpretation further complicates things at all levels. For what it’s worth the 2nd amendment seems to only ever have been interpreted about national regulations of formal state militias (eg the state’s National guard, police, etc). The reinterpretation in Heller to mean protection of private ownership is both recent (2008) and quite strange. A significantly worse decision than whatever Roe got wrong in legal theory and one that had strict social harm vs Roe which actually at least had positive social outcomes.
Uh, what? The National Guard most definitely IS the militia. Did you miss the Militia Act of 1792? A whole four years after the 2nd became the law of the land, they formalized the militia into what became the National Guard. You can argue about the militia clause in the 2nd being prefatory, but you really have nothing to stand on when you say the National Guard is not the militia.
You don't have to make them go away, just reduce the numbers so they don't get used in everyday murders. Most murders are crimes of passion and the difference between pulling out gun and having to find weapon will stop most of them. Britain still has a few illegal handguns, they get used in crimes, but their murder rate is much lower. A good indication that ease-of-killing matters is that murders with shotguns and long guns are pretty rare.
The single most-common weapon used is a handgun, around 4x as common as knives. But the Supreme Court has unambiguously ruled on the constitutionality of handgun bans and refusal to grant handgun licenses. And even under the most expansive gun control position that the Second Amendment only protects guns that existed in 1789... well... pistols were invented in the late 1500s.
You can't study it.
By banning any observation no one can prove whether the majority of shootings come from the gun owner or someone who stole the gun.
As such the negative "making them illegal does not make them go away" also cannot be proved by you.