Common sense gun legislation,.
Common sense policy about guns.
Common sense gun reforms.
We have to act.
We can't wait to take the firearms
first and then go to court.
I don't need to wait another minute
to take commonsense steps
After reaching historic lows in the
mid 2010s, gun violence rates
in America have gone up in recent
years, and they remain higher than
in some other parts of the developed
world.
There are hundreds of laws and
regulations that restrict Americans
access to firearms.
Yet, according to some advocates,
social science research shows that a
few more simple, common sense laws
could make a significant difference.
The notion that gun laws don't work,
it's not born out by the evidence.
And evidence and data is in.
Gun safety saves lives.
It's not something we assert,
something we can prove over and over
and over again.
It's not even
in dispute.
Of the thousands of studies that
have been done on the effect of gun
control laws, nearly
all are so flawed as to be total
nonsense.
A hundred or so good studies
are usually ignored or
misrepresented by politicians, and
the media
Statistician Aaron Brown has taught
at NYU and the University of
California at San Diego.
He's a columnist for Bloomberg and a
leading expert on risk management.
If you think most published journal
articles on public policy issues
have clear causal conclusions, such
as at a specific gun control
regulation does or does not work,
you would be mistaken.
Federal gun crime prosecutions are
up 16 percent since I took
office, but we must do more,.
And I think there needs to be
vigorous prosecution of gun laws on
the books.
Last year, we prosecuted
a record number of firearms
offenses.
Gun control policies based on flawed
research can have tremendous costs,
may turn otherwise law abiding
citizens into criminals, and
they increase prosecutorial power
and mass incarceration.
They exacerbate the racial and
socioeconomic inequities in the
criminal justice system.
Brown points to a 2020 meta analysis
from the nonpartisan research
organization the Rand Corporation
that analyzed twenty seven thousand
nine hundred studies on the
effectiveness of gun control
regulations.
The authors concluded that point
four percent, or only 123,
were rigorous enough to provide
meaningful results.
And even among those, many didn't
answer the most pressing question
for policymakers whether
gun control laws can reduce
violence.
One hundred twenty three studies
that met the Rand criteria were the
best of the bunch, but they still
had serious defects.
In fact, given the uncertainties in
the data, it's next to impossible
for any study to prove that a
particular gun control measure had
any effect whatsoever.
The only thing we can say
confidently is many of the most
widely trumpeted results are
likely based on random chance alone.
Peer reviewed journals generally
accept a result a statistically
significant if as a one in 20
chance or less of being due to
random chance.
This means that if researchers run
100 studies on the relationship
between two things that obviously
have no connection to each other at
all. Say milk consumption
and car crashes.
By pure chance, they can be expected
to get five statistically
significant results that are
entirely coincidental, such
as that milk drinkers get into more
accidents.
So what was wrong with one hundred
and twenty three studies that met
the approval of the RAND
researchers?
These papers tested 722
separate hypotheses about the impact
of gun control laws at the five
percent level of significance,
even if there were no relationship
between gun laws and violence, much
like the relationship between
drinking milk and getting into car
accidents.
We'd expect about five percent of
those 722 tests,
or 36 results to
show that gun regulations had a
significant impact.
Collectively, these papers found
significant results for only 18
combinations of gun control, measure
and outcome.
Half would we would expect by random
chance if gun control measures had
no effect at all.
But let's assume that these 18
statistically significant results
were not the result of random chance
and do demonstrate a relationship
between gun laws and violence.
Are there any meaningful takeaways?
Brown argues that these findings
actually have very little relevance
for policymakers because of the poor
quality of the data.
Researchers often conceal this by
using the shoddy data to build
conceptual models and then claiming
high confidence in the results of
the models spit out.
In reality, gun violence is rare
enough that it's nearly impossible
for researchers to figure out what
difference a law makes, if any.
For example, one of the significant
results cited by Rand found that
more restrictive child access laws
could stop a total of two kids
across 11 states from
injuring themselves each year with a
gun, either by accident or by
attempting suicide.
These events are simply too rare to
get meaningful statistical
estimates.
There's simply too much variation
from other factors and random noise
to give any precise estimate of this
number.
Brown says similar data issues
plague most social science research
that tries to tease out the effects
of a policy change on rare events
like accidents, suicides or
homicides,
These studies are doomed from the
start. Regulations could take years
to implement and enforce
and will likely affect only a small
fraction of new gun sales.
New gun sales are a small fraction
of all total firearms owned.
Therefore, the most optimistic
projection of first year effect of a
gun control rule would be a small
fraction of one percent of gun
homicides.
But gun homicide rates in states
change by an average of six percent
in years, with no legislative
changes.
Fatal data problems like this
frustrate all gun control research
that attempts to tease out the
effect of marginal policy changes
on suicides, homicides or
anything else.
It frustrates opponents of gun
control who sometimes argue that
guns are more often used for
self-defense than to victimize
others. Anyone basing a gun
control position on scientific
evidence is building on sand.
We have no useful empirical data on
the subject, and we have no body of
work that rises above the level of
expected false positives, either for
or against gun control,
According to Brown. There's another
major takeaway from the RAND
analysis.
The numbers indicate that
researchers are suppressing results
that show gun control policies do
nothing or have the opposite of
their intended effect.
Of the seven hundred and twenty two
hypotheses contained in the 123
studies that met the approval of the
RAND researchers, only one
significant result found that a gun
control measure had made gun
violence worse, even
by random chance.
Those studies should have yielded
about 36 false positive results,
and roughly half of them should have
shown the opposite of what
researchers expected.
So why is it that only one published
finding showed that a gun control
measure didn't work,
Given the vast number of studies
done, the vast number of hypotheses
tested, we would expect more
of these negative results by random
chance alone.
The fact that only one was found
suggests strongly researchers are
suppressing negative results.
The rarity of pro-gun control
results in the near total
absence of anti-gun control results
are strong evidence that we know
nothing about the effect of gun
control regulations.
Three laws are particularly
important. Universal background
checks. Ammunition checks.
Identification of firearms through
ballistic imprinting.
Each of these laws by themselves
could reduce firearm mortality by
about 60 to 80 percent.
If all three were implemented
nationally in the same way as
they're implemented in some states,
we could reduce firearm mortality by
about 90 percent.
Gun control researchers aren't the
only ones guilty of misusing
statistics.
The studies that get the most
attention from reporters and
politicians are the ones that claim
the most shocking and powerful
effects, which, according to Brown,
are usually also based on the
flimsiest evidence.
None of the 123 studies blessed
by Rand got significant media or
legislative attention.
It was the worst studies with the
most outrageous claims from
among the 27,000
that Rand excluded
that made the headlines.
It's common sense you should need a
license to buy and own a firearm.
And states like Connecticut that did that, they saw 40 percent drops in gun violence and 15 percent drops in suicides.
Hundreds of studies have been done
comparing gun homicide rates
before and after states changed
their gun control laws.
One prominent study made the
astounding claim that
a permit requirement for handgun
purchases in Connecticut reduced
their gun murder rate by 40 percent.
It is true that Connecticut's gun
murder rate fell rapidly after that
law was passed in 1995,
but so did gun murder rate
throughout the country in order
to form a conclusion about the
effect of the Connecticut law.
You would want to compare
Connecticut to something as similar
as possible that did not make
the change.
But the authors do not compare
Connecticut to itself in prior
years, nor to all other states.
Their 40 percent claim as the actual
murder rate in Connecticut compared
to something they call a synthetic
Connecticut that they constructed
for the purpose of their study.
The combination of mostly Rhode
Island, but also Maryland,
California, Nevada and New
Hampshire.
The paper claims to show a 40
percent decline in gun murders in
Connecticut as compared to synthetic
Connecticut. But Brown says this
entire effect is due to the fact
that Rhode Island experienced of
about 20 extra murders between 1999
and 2003 and synthetic
Connecticut was more than 72
percent Rhode Island.
Even comparing to synthetic
Connecticut, the decline, the
authors found, didn't last.
Although the law remained on the
books by 2006,
the gun murder rate in Connecticut
had surpassed synthetic Connecticut
and continued to increase to the
point where it was 46 percent
higher.
The authors, despite publishing in
2015, elected
to ignore data from 2006
and afterwards they're making
strong claims based on complex
models and uncertain data.
Were they cherry pick their time,
periods and locations to get their
preferred outcome.
This is unfortunately common in
social science research on gun
control.
We know that states with the most
gun laws tend to have
the fewest gun deaths.
What people in Vermont, and I
suspect New Hampshire understand
is that guns in our part of
the world are very different than
guns in Chicago, Los Angeles,
in New York.
The real story on gun control is
that states with strong gun control
regulations are different from
states with weaker gun control
regulations.
They're richer, more liberal, more
urban, and they have lower murder
and suicide rates.
The effect is almost certainly the
reverse. Places with low crime
rates are more willing to give up
personal guns, and richer people
put more trust in the police to
protect them from crime.
But the cultural differences are
too big, and there's just too much
uncertainty about this to say
anything about what would happen if
we enforce Greenwich Connecticut
laws in Festus, Missouri.
We can ban assault weapons and
high capacity magazines
in this country.
Once again,
I got that done when I was a
senator, and it brought down these
mass killings.
Then there's the question of whether
bans on assault, style weapons and
large capacity magazines, which
are often passed together, have
reduced the frequency or deadliness
of mass shootings.
Researchers define basic terms like
assault weapons and mass shootings
differently.
They limit their data, buy, time,
place or other factors, such
as classifying an event as an act of
terror, and therefore we're not
considering it a mass shooting.
There's no reason someone needs a
weapon, a war with one hundred
rounds, 100 bullets.
These varying definitions make
studies apples to oranges
comparison, and they
invite researchers to cherry pick
finding limited data sets based
on number of casualties, type of
weapons, time period and other
factors to support whatever
conclusions the researcher wants.
The bottom line is the effect of
bans on large capacity magazines
or assault. Weapons on mass
shootings is inconclusive for the
same data problems that affect all
gun control policy research.
But there's a further problem.
Mass shootings are extremely rare
relative to other forms of gun
violence, and most of them don't
involve assault weapons.
Depending on what definitions you
use, mass shootings involving
assault weapons are a small fraction
of one percent of all gun homicides.
But that 10 years we had it done.
The number of mass shootings
actually went down, and since
then the number of
massacres has increased one hundred
eighty three percent.
Mass shootings went up 200
percent in the decade after the
assault weapons ban expired.
For example, the U.S.
federal ban on assault weapons and
large capacity magazines was in
place for 10 years from 1994
to 2004,
before, during and after which many
societal factors cause crime rates
to vary widely, making
it impossible to draw useful
conclusions about the effect of
the ban on anything and
in particular on something as rare
as mass shootings.
This type of mass violence does not
happen in other advanced countries.
States and countries with bans
define assault weapons and other key
elements of laws differently.
So combined with the data problems
inherent in comparing different
populations of people over different
periods of time.
Comparisons between states and
countries are almost meaningless.
Another Rand Corporation meta
analysis updated in 2020
found inconclusive evidence that
these bands have any effect on mass
shootings or violent crime.
But how about the more
straightforward question of whether
owning a gun makes you more or less
safe? One widely influential
study that has constantly resurfaced
in headlines since it was published
in the New England Journal of
Medicine in 1993, concluded
that quote "Rather than confer
protection, guns kept in the home
are associated with an increase in
the risk of homicide by a family
member or intimate acquaintance."
Brown says there are major problems
with this study.
First of all, the researchers
concluded that keeping a gun at home
increases a person's risk of being
killed. But nearly half the murders
they included in their analysis were
not committed with firearm and
among gun owners who were killed
with a gun.
The authors didn't establish whether
the weapon used was the victim's own
gun or if it belonged to another
person.
But Brown says the main reason
research on this topic is
inconclusive is because the answer
almost entirely depends on
individual differences.
They can easily be controlled for in
social science research.
A gun expert with a gun safe and
a high crime neighborhood may well
be safer with the gun, whereas
a careless alcoholic living in a low
crime area who keeps loaded guns
in his kids closet is certainly
going to be less safe.
People want a simple overall answer
to whether guns make you less safe
or more safe in order to
inform legislation, but social
science cannot deliver that.
When the researchers behind the 1993
study tried to control for all the
variation between people to tease
out just the effect of owning a gun.
Their analysis found that other
factors can increase your risk of
being killed even more than having a
firearm at home.
What most pressing politicians,
citing the blockbuster 1993
study leave out is that although it
did find that owning a gun increased
your risk, there were other things
that were much more dangerous,
including living alone or being a
renter.
There were no coherent arguments
as to why we wouldn't do this.
I am open and ready to listen
and discuss all ideas that
will actually work.
Advocates who feel strongly
and are pushing every day
to make the rational changes.
Activists may argue that even if the
evidence isn't solid, any new
restriction on guns is worth trying
in the effort to reduce violence,
since there's also no convincing
evidence that gun control doesn't
work.
After all, most laws don't have firm
scientific underpinnings, and
it's certainly plausible that
general government discouragement of
guns can reduce violence over long
periods of time.
We maybe can't save
everybody, but we could save some.
But these policies also have
significant costs restricting
our freedoms and causing more people
to go to prison disproportionately
from poor and minority communities.
Further legal restrictions also grow
black markets and illegal weapons
and incentivize the use of homemade
ghost guns, which are harder to
trace and regulate.
Want to rein in the proliferation of
so-called ghost guns,
anyone from a criminal
to a terrorist can
buy this kit as little
as 30 minutes put together a
weapon.
And it's not just gun control.
Nearly all similar policy analysis
suffers from the same issue.
Too much complexity for the
available data partisans
yearn for scientific backing for
their views, but scientists cannot
deliver it.
Researchers flocked to the field
because there's money and interest
in results, and they peer review
each other's work without applying
the kind of rigor that would
eliminate nearly all publications
We can and will stop this evil
contagion.
Not just the gun crisis,
but what is actually a public health
crisis.
This is an epidemic for God's sake.
In the 1990s, the NRA
convinced Congress to cut all
of CDCs funding for gun research.
But now, in a stunning turn,
the current director of the CDC
is announcing a plan to reduce gun
violence.
The director of the CDC, Rochelle
Walensky, declared in August that
the agency would begin treating gun
violence as a public health crisis,
and Congress approved an initial $25
million in new funds toward
scientific research on the topic.
For those who are worried about
research in this area, I'm
not here about gun control.
I'm here about preventing gun
violence and gun deaths.
These are complex issues that
require rigorous scientific
investigation to come to any kind
of useful conclusion, and
they depend far more on individual
variation, as well as broad social
and cultural factors than
on any regulation.
We should not panic and pass more
laws that sweep up innocent victims
while doing more harm than good.
All with the alleged backing of
science, they can't possibly
tell us what we need to know.