Statistics vs. Gun Control

Leah Libresco is a statistician, former newswriter for the data journalism site Five Thirty Eight, and Yale alumna. Despite holding anti-gun opinions, she decided to let data drive her study results rather than emotions. Here is what she learned. "Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. Then, my colleagues and I at Five Thirty Eight 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 guns. "I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be.

Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths. "As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference.

Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. "The next-largest set of gun deaths—1 in 5—were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence.

And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them. "By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout.

I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them; policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news. "I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners, and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves."