12 ms·

I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise

86 points by reitanqild 9y ago

post_break 9y ago
Good information. I wish more people understood that suppressors are still on the fine line of hearing damage for most cases.
- internalfx 9y ago
  I really wish suppressors were easier to buy. They help protect hearing, and reduce noise pollution for people at or near the gun range.
  - post_break 9y ago
    I think anyone who owns a gun wishes they were easier to buy. I mean they are easy to buy, it's just the delay after purchase makes them frustrating.
    - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
      Easy to buy, if you live in a state that allows them, pay the $200 tax, and have a chief of police that likes you. Even the UK, totalitarian shithole that it is, doesn't regulate them.
      - post_break 9y ago
        Obama got rid of that chief of police thing. Thanks Obama.
camillomiller 9y ago
America, your denial is deep.
astanway 9y ago
The author calls herself a statistician but has no advanced OR undergraduate degree in statistics. I would not put much faith into this "research". Making conclusions and recommendations at the global and national population level is something I would only trust a proper scientist to do.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- terravion 9y ago
  Academic credentials do not create truth. If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem. If you actually have a problem with her research, point out the error. Employing an ad hominem like credentialism only makes her findings more credible at first glance.
  - JCzynski 9y ago
    Worked at 538, past tense. Moved on a few months ago, though well after the gun investigation she took the data from. I think she's at [Wave](https://www.wave.com/ https://www.wave.com/), now.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem. I wouldn't assume that. It's clear that Nate Silver is excellent at what he does, but that doesn't mean everyobe who has ever been affiliated with 538 in any capacity is an expert at the use of statistics; the employment-based credentialing you propose is at least as invalid as the academic credentialism you criticize.
- incongruity 9y ago
  She does have a degree in political science – there definitely are political scientists who get seriously into statistical methods. Moreover, I'd humbly suggest that this topic is dead-on for someone with a political science background. Moreover, given her connection to fivethirtyeight and the fact this work is on fivethirtyeight.com ( https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ ) which itself has a solid reputation for talking about statistics, I think this work has some credibility, at first blush.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
tl;dr past and present firearms legislation mostly focuses on banning firearms/features which is both too broad and not properly targeted nor does it reflect the nature of the problem.
kharms 9y ago
I don't think the title represents the content very well. "Gun control" is a rather broad topic and her research is clearly narrowly focused on item-specific sales restrictions. Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability. This would align incentives to reduce gun violence: safe storage, less lethal rounds & weapons, mental health checks, trainings, age-tied pricing, etc. It won't stop all gun violence, but nothing short of a constitutional amendment can even get us close to stopping all gun violence.
- etchalon 9y ago
  I've become a greater and greater fan of mandatory liability insurance for firearms, and a requirement no sale can be completed until the vendor verifies that the purchases possess that insurance.
  - stmfreak 9y ago
    The insurance industry loves this idea. But who benefits? How do you calculate the payouts? And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance?
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > How do you calculate the payouts? Calculating damages for injuries is something tort law covers already, not a new area. Determining what liabilities must be covered, and to what minimum level, would be new. > And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance? If gun owners are liable for securing there guns, and that is part of the liability that must be insured, that's covered. Illegally manufactured or imported guns aren't, though.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability. That would just be a way to make people who are young, not white, live in higher crime areas, etc, etc pay more. Shooting something/someone you shouldn't be shooting is incredibly rare so either premiums would be negligible or they would have be be artificially high (vice tax). Furthermore it would also be fought every step of the way by anyone who doesn't want a registration scheme since it effectively would create one. The idea itself should have a positive impact (at least on paper) since it would presumably make high risk groups less likely to own firearms (at a statistical level) but it's pretty incompatible with something that's right. You don't need to pay for free speech insurance in case you offend someone.
roury 9y ago
I'm not from America so this might come off as naive (do pardon my ignorance)– but why don't people analyze what % of these horrible deaths come from guns sold legally? i.e. what % of these killers are getting their guns legitimately vs. off a black market?
- CabSauce 9y ago
  http://www.newsweek.com/government-wont-fund-gun-research-stop-violence-because-nra-lobbying-675794 http://www.newsweek.com/government-wont-fund-gun-research-st...
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Usually whenever a mass shooting occurs the media eventually reports on whether the firearms used were acquired legally or not. In the vast majority of cases I can recall, they were. It's uncertain whether this tells us anything useful, though, because the important question is would the killer still have acquired the weapons even if guns were illegal, i.e. given this particular killer, would he have been willing & able to break the law and acquire black market guns even if they were not legal. This is a counterfactual that's different to answer, because the fact is that guns are legal in the U.S. There's evidence on both sides - on one hand, murder is illegal everywhere and so there's ample evidence that the killer is willing to break laws, on the other, countries that have outlawed guns have reported significantly fewer incidents of mass shootings. (Not necessarily fewer instances of terrorism, though; domestic terrorists there end up using Semtex, nerve gas, or homemade claymore mines instead.)
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    When things get real, like with proliferation of nuclear weapons, no one argues in favor of proliferation. It's only when poor people's lives are at stake, there is a lot of PR to essentially let them get killed with guns and make money in the process, rich can afford to protect themselves.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
alex_escalante 9y ago
C'mon. Stop making excuses!!
lisper 9y ago
Something about this piece smells wrong. It's supposedly written by someone who used to advocate gun control, but then "discovered" after doing research that every single policy that has been proposed to limit gun violence is useless and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. This conclusion seems just a little too convenient. Let's look at some of the specific claims: > Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. Oh? Just how common do they have to be? Before the buyback the number of mass-shooting was >0 (that's what prompted the change of policy to begin with) and since then the number has been exactly zero. It might be the case that the number before was too small for zero to be statistically significant, the author goes much further than that and concludes that because Australia does not provide enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the null hypothesis (gun control doesn't work) is therefore true. And this person claims to be statistician? > 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... This is true, but all classifications are invented. Just because a classification is invented doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. The idea that because "assault weapon" is an "invented classification" that it is meaningless is an NRA trope. Why would a statistician fall for it? Also, no mention whatsoever of background checks despite the claim that "By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout." Background checks are probably the single most prominent proposed intervention, and totally ignoring in a piece whose thesis is that all proposed interventions are useless is either journalistic malpractice or evidence of bias. It would not surprise me a bit to learn that this piece was quietly commissioned by the NRA in the same way that oil companies fund climate-change-denialism reports. It just seems too sloppy and convenient to be genuine.
- etchalon 9y ago
  You can verify the authors credentials. The idea it was paid for by the NRA has no basis in facts. You're free to disagree with it.
  - lisper 9y ago
    All of the people who published anti-climate-change studies on behalf of the oil industry also had credentials. Even people with credentials can succumb to temptation. And I didn't say that this piece was commission by the NRA. I said that it would not surprise me to learn that it was. I'm advancing that as one hypothesis to explain the very strange too-good-to-be-true correspondence between the author's rhetoric and the classic tropes and talking points of the NRA. That might all be a coincidence, and it might be that all of the oversights and faulty reasoning are really Leah Libresco's work alone. But that would imply that Leah Libresco is incredibly stupid and a really bad statistician, and that seems unlikely to me.
jbob2000 9y ago
This is an intellectual cop-out. The gun control laws aren't there to curb gun crimes directly, they're there to end the stupid hobby and fascination that people have with guns which places them in everyone's hands. Get rid of silencers and that's one less thing for hobbyists to play with. Get rid of long magazines, sniper rifles, machine guns - one less thing to play with. On and on until you end up with "gun culture" just being a couple of handguns that all look and shoot the same. It becomes boring and people stop collecting them. Stephen Paddock had 47 guns. He was a gun nut, a collector, a hobbyist. This is what gun control laws are about - stopping runaway gun culture.
- revelation 9y ago
  My favorite piece of cognitive dissonance was that on the guns subreddit, the first reaction of people was thoughts and prayers, then they immediately started discussing which of the 10 methods he might have used to convert his guns to full auto. I think there wasn't a single person on there who didn't know at least of one. And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns. They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense.
  - post_break 9y ago
    "And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns." They were never banned, just grandfathered. You have been able to buy a full auto gun for a long long time. No one that commits these acts buys a full auto gun legally through NFA. "They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense." They are collector items that increase in price every year. You can take them to a gun range and waste ammo. You can use them for self defense like any other gun, Harry Beckwith did just that. The reason the guns subreddit all flock to see how this person was shooting at such a rapid fire is to see if this was a machine gun (historic event similar to the LA bank robbers) or if he used some other method which would cause such a thing to become banned.
    - revelation 9y ago
      Maybe I can't read between the lines in a gun subreddit but they weren't talking about grandfathered collectors items but buttstocks and rotary crank "hacks". Didn't saw anyone mention machine guns or LA bank robbers either.
moomin 9y ago
Bear in mind that what the researcher is saying is that they don't have evidence of an effect, not that they have evidence of no effect. The distinction is important in this case: there's a famous one where researchers could find no link between money and happiness. Another 30 years of solid data provided the missing evidence that the obvious was true. Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values. Also worth bearing in mind: what statisticians do agree on is that owning a gun is more likely to hurt you than help you. If you live alone that's your own call, but if you have a family I'd say it's something you ought to think about carefully.
- ericmcer 9y ago
  The statistic makes sense, owning a gun is more likely to harm than help you. That is across all of society though. The thing is, you own it and are personally in charge of storage, maintenance, operation, etc. So it is harder to blanket apply the harm vs help rule to an individual owner without knowing their personal practices.
  - moomin 9y ago
    It is, but it's also worth bearing in mind that, on average, you're going to be average. And, as is natural, you probably overestimate your own behavior. (This last point is basically true of everything, but gun safety's pretty unforgiving on that last point.)
    - yellowapple 9y ago
      Right, but unless you're an expert on gun safety (which in turn implies being an expert on guns), you're probably not going to be qualified to determine if someone is above or below average in terms of gun safety.
- electrograv 9y ago
  > Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values. I really hate to bring this up, but "no mass shootings" does not equal "no mass deaths". There have been plenty of attacks in Europe to great effect without guns being used -- for example, the truck attack in Nice, Paris is still unrivaled by any gun massacre in America. We shouldn't play semantic games / statistical filtering games with phrases like "reducing gun violence" and "reducing mass shootings"; I think we all can agree that our collective goal as decent human beings is work towards reducing violence/harm/death, period. Why qualify it on only gun attacks -- other than for political reasons? If banning guns indeed reduces mass killings overall (again, it's rather a red herring to say your only goal is to reduce mass shootings rather than mass killings in general), then by all means let's work towards that. But the data so obviously shows this to be a false correlation: Right now Europe is if anything the poster-child of why gun control doesn't work, with all the truck and bomb attacks. Again, I hate to bring this up, but so often Europeans use this as a common insult to Americans but I see this as a rather strong case of cognitive dissonance.
Shidizity 9y ago
Flagged because it doesn’t fit the HN echo chamber?
devnonymous 9y ago
I honestly didn't follow the argument - "Gun control policies in other countries don't provide sufficient data to conclusively state that applying them would bring down gun related violence... But hey, here are some completely random measures I think that might work despite having not data to back up my claim"
- jbob2000 9y ago
  It's probably proof that they do work, if you can't get enough data to make a reliable assertion. The author is basically saying, "there's so few gun crimes in countries with strong gun control, that we can't determine if the gun control laws work". Hilarious.
x3n0ph3n3 9y ago
Looks like this has been stricken from the front page.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  I've noticed that with a few of these kind of submissions. Seems there's an attempt to keep the gun control debate out of HN. To be fair, there wasn't much constructive conversation going on in this thread... as has been par for similar submissions.
- Diederich 9y ago
  Yes...I'd love to hear from people who are flagging it: why?
Upvoter33 9y ago
best response was a reply posted soon after: "I, too, analyze data for a living. Two important differencse between the author and myself. The first is that I understand the difference between a Type I and a Type II error. There were 13 mass shootings in Australia in the 18 years prior to their imposition of moderately strict gun laws in 1996. There have been 0 since then. 0. The author finds this to be insufficient evidence in light of the fact that some other things changed in Australia as well. True enough, but it's not like we can randomly assign Australia to the gun-law treatment and keep New Zealand as a control. The second difference? I've been doing this for almost 45 years now and have a PhD in the subject. The author graduated from Yale with a degree in 2011 in journalism. A note: She recently converted from atheism to catholicism. You should read some of her writings on the topic. What is a disgrace is that WaPo chose today to publish this nonsense. Truly disgraceful. "
thebestia29 9y ago
Thus the researcher will always have something as evidence
ouid 9y ago
This article seems unthoughtful to me. Perhaps the actual research was more enlightening, but this barely even qualified as a teaser.
Diederich 9y ago
I'm pretty sure this comment is against the rules, but I'm willing to go for it. I'd like to hear from the people who flagged this article: why?
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Obviously some people don't like the conclusion. If you are solidly in the gun-control-is-good camp, the weak evidence in this opinion piece isn't going to sway you. The natural effect is to cause such humans to dig into their entrenched positions even further. That requires considering this article and author to be stupid or hostile and hence flag-worthy.
purplezooey 9y ago
Just another right-wing/libertarian shill. How about one of his opening sentences: "Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress." I see. Hmm...
- angersock 9y ago
  1. That's a few paragraphs down, not in the opening sentences. 2. She, not he. Check your reading.
  - purplezooey 9y ago
    Touché, #1 seems a little nitpicky though.

86 points by reitanqild 9y ago

Good information. I wish more people understood that suppressors are still on the fine line of hearing damage for most cases.

internalfx 9y ago
I really wish suppressors were easier to buy. They help protect hearing, and reduce noise pollution for people at or near the gun range.
- post_break 9y ago
  I think anyone who owns a gun wishes they were easier to buy. I mean they are easy to buy, it's just the delay after purchase makes them frustrating.
  - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
    Easy to buy, if you live in a state that allows them, pay the $200 tax, and have a chief of police that likes you. Even the UK, totalitarian shithole that it is, doesn't regulate them.
    - post_break 9y ago
      Obama got rid of that chief of police thing. Thanks Obama.

camillomiller 9y ago

America, your denial is deep.

astanway 9y ago

The author calls herself a statistician but has no advanced OR undergraduate degree in statistics. I would not put much faith into this "research". Making conclusions and recommendations at the global and national population level is something I would only trust a proper scientist to do.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
terravion 9y ago
Academic credentials do not create truth. If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem. If you actually have a problem with her research, point out the error. Employing an ad hominem like credentialism only makes her findings more credible at first glance.
- JCzynski 9y ago
  Worked at 538, past tense. Moved on a few months ago, though well after the gun investigation she took the data from. I think she's at [Wave](https://www.wave.com/ https://www.wave.com/), now.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > If she works at 538 and knowing nothing else about here, I'd wager she is probably better at statistics than most academics, especially those in social sciences who are likely to study this problem. I wouldn't assume that. It's clear that Nate Silver is excellent at what he does, but that doesn't mean everyobe who has ever been affiliated with 538 in any capacity is an expert at the use of statistics; the employment-based credentialing you propose is at least as invalid as the academic credentialism you criticize.
incongruity 9y ago
She does have a degree in political science – there definitely are political scientists who get seriously into statistical methods. Moreover, I'd humbly suggest that this topic is dead-on for someone with a political science background. Moreover, given her connection to fivethirtyeight and the fact this work is on fivethirtyeight.com ( https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ ) which itself has a solid reputation for talking about statistics, I think this work has some credibility, at first blush.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

tl;dr past and present firearms legislation mostly focuses on banning firearms/features which is both too broad and not properly targeted nor does it reflect the nature of the problem.

kharms 9y ago

I don't think the title represents the content very well. "Gun control" is a rather broad topic and her research is clearly narrowly focused on item-specific sales restrictions. Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability. This would align incentives to reduce gun violence: safe storage, less lethal rounds & weapons, mental health checks, trainings, age-tied pricing, etc. It won't stop all gun violence, but nothing short of a constitutional amendment can even get us close to stopping all gun violence.

etchalon 9y ago
I've become a greater and greater fan of mandatory liability insurance for firearms, and a requirement no sale can be completed until the vendor verifies that the purchases possess that insurance.
- stmfreak 9y ago
  The insurance industry loves this idea. But who benefits? How do you calculate the payouts? And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > How do you calculate the payouts? Calculating damages for injuries is something tort law covers already, not a new area. Determining what liabilities must be covered, and to what minimum level, would be new. > And what about criminals using stolen guns? How do you get them to pay for insurance? If gun owners are liable for securing there guns, and that is part of the liability that must be insured, that's covered. Illegally manufactured or imported guns aren't, though.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Personally I'm a proponent of mandatory gun insurance and owner liability. That would just be a way to make people who are young, not white, live in higher crime areas, etc, etc pay more. Shooting something/someone you shouldn't be shooting is incredibly rare so either premiums would be negligible or they would have be be artificially high (vice tax). Furthermore it would also be fought every step of the way by anyone who doesn't want a registration scheme since it effectively would create one. The idea itself should have a positive impact (at least on paper) since it would presumably make high risk groups less likely to own firearms (at a statistical level) but it's pretty incompatible with something that's right. You don't need to pay for free speech insurance in case you offend someone.

roury 9y ago

I'm not from America so this might come off as naive (do pardon my ignorance)– but why don't people analyze what % of these horrible deaths come from guns sold legally? i.e. what % of these killers are getting their guns legitimately vs. off a black market?

CabSauce 9y ago
http://www.newsweek.com/government-wont-fund-gun-research-stop-violence-because-nra-lobbying-675794 http://www.newsweek.com/government-wont-fund-gun-research-st...
nostrademons 9y ago
Usually whenever a mass shooting occurs the media eventually reports on whether the firearms used were acquired legally or not. In the vast majority of cases I can recall, they were. It's uncertain whether this tells us anything useful, though, because the important question is would the killer still have acquired the weapons even if guns were illegal, i.e. given this particular killer, would he have been willing & able to break the law and acquire black market guns even if they were not legal. This is a counterfactual that's different to answer, because the fact is that guns are legal in the U.S. There's evidence on both sides - on one hand, murder is illegal everywhere and so there's ample evidence that the killer is willing to break laws, on the other, countries that have outlawed guns have reported significantly fewer incidents of mass shootings. (Not necessarily fewer instances of terrorism, though; domestic terrorists there end up using Semtex, nerve gas, or homemade claymore mines instead.)
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  When things get real, like with proliferation of nuclear weapons, no one argues in favor of proliferation. It's only when poor people's lives are at stake, there is a lot of PR to essentially let them get killed with guns and make money in the process, rich can afford to protect themselves.
  - nostrademons 9y ago

alex_escalante 9y ago

C'mon. Stop making excuses!!

lisper 9y ago

Something about this piece smells wrong. It's supposedly written by someone who used to advocate gun control, but then "discovered" after doing research that every single policy that has been proposed to limit gun violence is useless and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. This conclusion seems just a little too convenient. Let's look at some of the specific claims: > Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. Oh? Just how common do they have to be? Before the buyback the number of mass-shooting was >0 (that's what prompted the change of policy to begin with) and since then the number has been exactly zero. It might be the case that the number before was too small for zero to be statistically significant, the author goes much further than that and concludes that because Australia does not provide enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the null hypothesis (gun control doesn't work) is therefore true. And this person claims to be statistician? > 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... This is true, but all classifications are invented. Just because a classification is invented doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. The idea that because "assault weapon" is an "invented classification" that it is meaningless is an NRA trope. Why would a statistician fall for it? Also, no mention whatsoever of background checks despite the claim that "By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout." Background checks are probably the single most prominent proposed intervention, and totally ignoring in a piece whose thesis is that all proposed interventions are useless is either journalistic malpractice or evidence of bias. It would not surprise me a bit to learn that this piece was quietly commissioned by the NRA in the same way that oil companies fund climate-change-denialism reports. It just seems too sloppy and convenient to be genuine.

etchalon 9y ago
You can verify the authors credentials. The idea it was paid for by the NRA has no basis in facts. You're free to disagree with it.
- lisper 9y ago
  All of the people who published anti-climate-change studies on behalf of the oil industry also had credentials. Even people with credentials can succumb to temptation. And I didn't say that this piece was commission by the NRA. I said that it would not surprise me to learn that it was. I'm advancing that as one hypothesis to explain the very strange too-good-to-be-true correspondence between the author's rhetoric and the classic tropes and talking points of the NRA. That might all be a coincidence, and it might be that all of the oversights and faulty reasoning are really Leah Libresco's work alone. But that would imply that Leah Libresco is incredibly stupid and a really bad statistician, and that seems unlikely to me.

jbob2000 9y ago

This is an intellectual cop-out. The gun control laws aren't there to curb gun crimes directly, they're there to end the stupid hobby and fascination that people have with guns which places them in everyone's hands. Get rid of silencers and that's one less thing for hobbyists to play with. Get rid of long magazines, sniper rifles, machine guns - one less thing to play with. On and on until you end up with "gun culture" just being a couple of handguns that all look and shoot the same. It becomes boring and people stop collecting them. Stephen Paddock had 47 guns. He was a gun nut, a collector, a hobbyist. This is what gun control laws are about - stopping runaway gun culture.

revelation 9y ago
My favorite piece of cognitive dissonance was that on the guns subreddit, the first reaction of people was thoughts and prayers, then they immediately started discussing which of the 10 methods he might have used to convert his guns to full auto. I think there wasn't a single person on there who didn't know at least of one. And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns. They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense.
- post_break 9y ago
  "And here I'm thinking we banned full auto guns." They were never banned, just grandfathered. You have been able to buy a full auto gun for a long long time. No one that commits these acts buys a full auto gun legally through NFA. "They serve no purpose whatsoever for sports use, hunting or self defense." They are collector items that increase in price every year. You can take them to a gun range and waste ammo. You can use them for self defense like any other gun, Harry Beckwith did just that. The reason the guns subreddit all flock to see how this person was shooting at such a rapid fire is to see if this was a machine gun (historic event similar to the LA bank robbers) or if he used some other method which would cause such a thing to become banned.
  - revelation 9y ago
    Maybe I can't read between the lines in a gun subreddit but they weren't talking about grandfathered collectors items but buttstocks and rotary crank "hacks". Didn't saw anyone mention machine guns or LA bank robbers either.

moomin 9y ago

Bear in mind that what the researcher is saying is that they don't have evidence of an effect, not that they have evidence of no effect. The distinction is important in this case: there's a famous one where researchers could find no link between money and happiness. Another 30 years of solid data provided the missing evidence that the obvious was true. Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values. Also worth bearing in mind: what statisticians do agree on is that owning a gun is more likely to hurt you than help you. If you live alone that's your own call, but if you have a family I'd say it's something you ought to think about carefully.

ericmcer 9y ago
The statistic makes sense, owning a gun is more likely to harm than help you. That is across all of society though. The thing is, you own it and are personally in charge of storage, maintenance, operation, etc. So it is harder to blanket apply the harm vs help rule to an individual owner without knowing their personal practices.
- moomin 9y ago
  It is, but it's also worth bearing in mind that, on average, you're going to be average. And, as is natural, you probably overestimate your own behavior. (This last point is basically true of everything, but gun safety's pretty unforgiving on that last point.)
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    Right, but unless you're an expert on gun safety (which in turn implies being an expert on guns), you're probably not going to be qualified to determine if someone is above or below average in terms of gun safety.
electrograv 9y ago
> Meanwhile, I live in the U.K. and we haven't had a mass shooting since the laws passed. I'll happily wait for the statistics to go past the required p-values. I really hate to bring this up, but "no mass shootings" does not equal "no mass deaths". There have been plenty of attacks in Europe to great effect without guns being used -- for example, the truck attack in Nice, Paris is still unrivaled by any gun massacre in America. We shouldn't play semantic games / statistical filtering games with phrases like "reducing gun violence" and "reducing mass shootings"; I think we all can agree that our collective goal as decent human beings is work towards reducing violence/harm/death, period. Why qualify it on only gun attacks -- other than for political reasons? If banning guns indeed reduces mass killings overall (again, it's rather a red herring to say your only goal is to reduce mass shootings rather than mass killings in general), then by all means let's work towards that. But the data so obviously shows this to be a false correlation: Right now Europe is if anything the poster-child of why gun control doesn't work, with all the truck and bomb attacks. Again, I hate to bring this up, but so often Europeans use this as a common insult to Americans but I see this as a rather strong case of cognitive dissonance.

Shidizity 9y ago

Flagged because it doesn’t fit the HN echo chamber?

devnonymous 9y ago

I honestly didn't follow the argument - "Gun control policies in other countries don't provide sufficient data to conclusively state that applying them would bring down gun related violence... But hey, here are some completely random measures I think that might work despite having not data to back up my claim"

jbob2000 9y ago
It's probably proof that they do work, if you can't get enough data to make a reliable assertion. The author is basically saying, "there's so few gun crimes in countries with strong gun control, that we can't determine if the gun control laws work". Hilarious.

x3n0ph3n3 9y ago

Looks like this has been stricken from the front page.

nulagrithom 9y ago
I've noticed that with a few of these kind of submissions. Seems there's an attempt to keep the gun control debate out of HN. To be fair, there wasn't much constructive conversation going on in this thread... as has been par for similar submissions.
Diederich 9y ago
Yes...I'd love to hear from people who are flagging it: why?

Upvoter33 9y ago

best response was a reply posted soon after: "I, too, analyze data for a living. Two important differencse between the author and myself. The first is that I understand the difference between a Type I and a Type II error. There were 13 mass shootings in Australia in the 18 years prior to their imposition of moderately strict gun laws in 1996. There have been 0 since then. 0. The author finds this to be insufficient evidence in light of the fact that some other things changed in Australia as well. True enough, but it's not like we can randomly assign Australia to the gun-law treatment and keep New Zealand as a control. The second difference? I've been doing this for almost 45 years now and have a PhD in the subject. The author graduated from Yale with a degree in 2011 in journalism. A note: She recently converted from atheism to catholicism. You should read some of her writings on the topic. What is a disgrace is that WaPo chose today to publish this nonsense. Truly disgraceful. "

thebestia29 9y ago

Thus the researcher will always have something as evidence

ouid 9y ago

This article seems unthoughtful to me. Perhaps the actual research was more enlightening, but this barely even qualified as a teaser.

Diederich 9y ago

I'm pretty sure this comment is against the rules, but I'm willing to go for it. I'd like to hear from the people who flagged this article: why?

akvadrako 9y ago
Obviously some people don't like the conclusion. If you are solidly in the gun-control-is-good camp, the weak evidence in this opinion piece isn't going to sway you. The natural effect is to cause such humans to dig into their entrenched positions even further. That requires considering this article and author to be stupid or hostile and hence flag-worthy.

purplezooey 9y ago

Just another right-wing/libertarian shill. How about one of his opening sentences: "Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress." I see. Hmm...

angersock 9y ago
1. That's a few paragraphs down, not in the opening sentences. 2. She, not he. Check your reading.
- purplezooey 9y ago
  Touché, #1 seems a little nitpicky though.