Why is gun control the issue of vacant liberal minds???
"I don’t think it’s surprising to anyone
here that sometimes laws are not based on information." Douglas Weil,
research director at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence,
seemed to think that was just fine. "One reason for trigger locks, even
if you don’t think trigger locks are going to be that effective, is
because it is a good way to get people to think about [gun safety]...
Maybe it won’t be that effective, maybe it will. It doesn’t mean there is
no logic behind it."
Shots in the Dark
What do we really know about gun crime? Almost nothing.
By Sam MacDonald
When I arrived at the inaugural meeting of the National Research
Council’s Committee to Improve Research and Data on Firearms this
Thursday, I was the only media representative on hand. No CNN. No
New York Times. Not even the Washington Post. Too bad. The
committee’s report, due in two years, could shape the gun debate for
decades to come. More important, a few stunning admissions at the
meeting reveal an important fact about the body of information on
which America’s existing gun control laws are built --there isn’t any
body of information.
The National Research Council is an arm of the National Academies. In
conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
National Institute of Justice, and three private foundations, the NRC
has called on 16 academics and other notables from around the
country to study gun violence. They are mainly doctors and social
science researchers, and their charge is four-fold: Assess the existing
research and data on firearm violence; evaluate prevention,
intervention and control strategies; describe and develop models of
illegal firearms markets; and examine how firearms become embedded
in the community. If you think someone might have done those things
before passing the thousands of gun control laws already on the
books, you’re wrong.
James Mercy, associate director of research at the CDC’s Division of
Violence Prevention, detailed for the panel the woeful lack of
information that policy makers face, especially on the national level:
"We can’t answer very basic questions with existing data sources
about this problem. We can’t tell you in almost all jurisdictions in the
country what portion of homicides are committed with assault rifles,
however you choose to define that term. We can’t tell you the number
of permanently disabling injuries to the spinal cord and the brain
caused by firearms. That’s unknown. We can’t even tell you the
number of violent deaths that occur in schools. ... There are many
questions like these, very basic questions, that we simply can’t answer
because of the poverty of data that exists in this field. This poverty of
data has particularly bad consequences for the evaluation of public
policy related to violence. Many of our public policies are targeted at
specific types of violence, but we cannot link very specific types of
firearms to suicides and homicides with existing data sources."
Officials don’t know where crimes occur, how criminals get guns, what
kind of guns they use, or how other risk factors such as poverty or
drug use affect gun crimes. I asked if it was then true that all existing
laws were created in absence of this critical information. Patti Culross,
associate program officer of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,
brought down the house with, "I don’t think it’s surprising to anyone
here that sometimes laws are not based on information." Douglas Weil,
research director at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence,
seemed to think that was just fine. "One reason for trigger locks, even
if you don’t think trigger locks are going to be that effective, is
because it is a good way to get people to think about [gun safety]...
Maybe it won’t be that effective, maybe it will. It doesn’t mean there is
no logic behind it."
Lois Mock, an analyst at the National Institute for Justice, was
discussing how difficult it was to turn good local data into reliable
national numbers when she cast doubt on the very idea of national gun
laws. "Firearm problems are local," she said. "They differ from one city
to another, from one state to another, from rural and suburban areas to
cities, even from one neighborhood in a city to another... So there is
no one-size-fits-all in terms of a program to intervene in firearms
violence."
And even when there is data, the feds don’t always use it, according
to Dr. Stephen Hargarten, director of the Firearm Injury Center at the
Medical College of Wisconsin, one of the few organizations with
reliable statewide data. He said the CDC and The Johns Hopkins
University couldn’t find numbers on assault rifle deaths for the Clinton
administration’s campaign against the guns, so the administration
turned to the FIC. Hargarten said he told the feds that short-barreled
pistols were a much bigger problem, at least in Wisconsin. "Did that
inform the subsequent political discussion? No. ... The assault weapon
ban was so much hot air," he told the panel.
So what now? The committee will try to pull together all the best data
from around the country and devise ways to put the data together. A
National Review Online article by Dave Kopel and Glen Reynolds
argues that the scholars selected for the committee and the private
foundations partially bankrolling it all but guarantee an anti-gun report.
On the other hand, the committee did hear from an NRA spokesman,
and there was some talk of trying to calculate the benefits of gun
ownership along with the costs. Let’s hope the numbers they cook are
fair -- two years from now they will be the only numbers anyone has.
Remember, we got thousands of laws when there weren’t any
numbers at all.
reason.com
tom watson tosiwmee |
