WaPo Op-Ed: ‘I Used to Think Gun Control Was the Answer Until My Research Told Me Otherwise’

After mass casualty gun-related tragedies, you immediately start seeing the same, predictable pattern. Leftists wring their hands, saying “something needs to be done,” then conservatives point out that some things can’t be prevented and — guess what? — the 2nd Amendment is not a suggestion.  It goes on and on.  That’s why I wanted to point out this article in the Washington Post, because it’s a rational piece from a leftist about gun violence.

Yes, I know.  Hard to believe, but it really is. Leah Libresco writes:

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000lives 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 the lethality of guns.

So what did she do?  She didn’t go to a rally and protest, or post memes on Facebook.  She researched.  Not only did she look into other countries’ legislation, she looked at the proposed “solutions” offered up by emotional liberals in the aftermath of the tragedies.  Guess what?  She realized that “it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference.”

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 that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

The sad hard-to-accept fact is that sometimes really bad things happen and there’s simply no better way to prevent it.  Regrettably, you can’t eliminate evil through legislation.

Read all of the WaPo article here, and kudos to Libresco for looking at an emotionally tough issue with open, reasonable eyes.

Image Credit: Screen Cap

Hat Tip: Washington Post