Gun Policy, Gun Culture & Guns across the U.S.: What Makes Us Safer? | Hacker News Reader

Gun Policy, Gun Culture & Guns across the U.S.: What Makes Us Safer?

microryza.com

14 pointsirollboozers14 comments

It should be clear that in 1996, a funding freeze was put in place for all federal research funds to stay away from gun control research that went even touched policy. From the top down, it was just a no touch area and so the science just stopped.

Because this project is crowdfunded, there will be no restrictions. For the first time in a long time, a researcher will be able to dive into a previously released CDC data set looking at gun control policies and related gun violence.

This is huge, because this project is picking up the slack where others are unable to go.

The chart of mass shooting casualties leads me to believe this study has underlying bias already.

1) The use of bullets seems like something a media outlet would do to invoke irrational emotional response. I'd hope that if this is a serious scientific study you wouldn't have to resort to such antics.

2) The only chart on this page centers on mass shootings which account for less than 1% of all gun violence. I'd much rather see a comprehensive breakdown of gun violence by incident type (gang, mass, accidental, etc.) and also by weapon (semi-auto handgun, revolver, shotgun, semi-auto rifle, etc.).

EDIT: It would also be nice to see a citation for the underlying chart data.

This is the research leader. Good points on the visuals. I am discussing with Microryza what the appropriate visuals are to convey the urgency of this research in a way that is also appealing to non-academics, while making it clear that we are proposing hypotheses, NOT guaranteeing answers that please one group or another!

I'm disappointed to see the study focus only on gun violence. I think if someone is determined to inflict harm on themselves or another person they will tend to use the most effective and expedient means of doing so at their disposal. I'd prefer to see the study examine violence in general.

Hi This is Pia Sen, the study leader. Your point is excellent. Actually, in our earlier study published in Preventive Medicine, we looked at that question -- whether people just 'substituted' other means of violence for guns. We did not find evidence indicating that is the case. That's why its no longer a primary research question in this round, but it is something we will revisit as part of specification checks.

I'd support an unbiased and scientific study, but I don't think this is likely to be one, nor would anything the CDC/NIH funds be likely to be.

The only funding source I could imagine being impartial would be either a large organization with balanced pro and anti gun agenda (say, the US Military -- it has a pro-gun agenda due to interests of members and mission, but is very safety conscious and runs the world's largest school system as well.) Or maybe taking equal amounts of money from a pro gun group and an anti gun group and giving it to a fairly independent researcher with no ongoing ties to the organizations.

I love the idea of taking equal amounts of money from pro and anti gun groups :) The 'look' on the page is a work-in-progress, as a scientist I have no experience with crowdfunding and am trying to find the right 'balance' between making my page as dry as an academic research proposal, and something catchy enough that would interest the non-academic. Howver, even if you suspect I am biased, it would be extremely bad for my career to do biased or bad research (all the data we will use is secondary, and we will be sharing a great deal of it it on this site too -- so anyone with good statistical skills can double-check my findings). At the end of the day, my research will have to stand up to scrutiny both in peer-reviewed journals and other scientists who want to 'double check' my results.

You should probably contact Jim Pitkow (part of Ron Conway's gun violence thing); they would probably contribute funding, since "lack of good studies" was one of their major findings.

The questions I'd really like to see answered are exploring specific current regulations for effectiveness as well as proposed regulations. i.e. I'd like to see if suppressors have ever been meaningfully used in crime, or if striking them from NFA would have limited crime-increase effects. And if some of the other fairly irrational regulations (parts of US origin requirements under 922(r) for imported non-sporting firearms) make any difference to crime. Or California's .50bmg ban.

Convinced me; I just contributed $10.

Although arguably a crowdfunded study has a lot better odds of being impartial than most other ongoing funding sources, so maybe this has a chance.

Given recent events, we definitely need more real data and research to understand what can make each of us safer, and if there is a need for more comprehensive policy overhauls. We should all support this research effort!

Isn't it more effective to simply look at other countries who haven't put such restrictions on their their gun control research?

There are huge variations across countries, or even across states or within a state within the US, so it's not particularly predictive to say banning guns in Japan means they should be banned in the US.

Agreed. The approach we used in our earlier gun study and will also use in this study is to try and control for cultural differences across states using various standard econometric techniques (fixed effects, lagged dependent variables etc). Otherwise it would be foolish to just eyeball Massachusetts and Mississippi and assume what works in one will work in the other!

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