This 538 series on gun deaths in America from last year is worth revisiting.
Here’s a great accompanying article by a former 538 writer:
A very flaky article. Basically “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things” 😉
Er… I don’t think that was the throughline at all.
I think it was more along the lines of “There is a problem but people are trying to put a band-aid on it instead of addressing the root cause.”
I missed the part where it diagnosed the “root cause” and came up with a solution.
I’m extrapolating from what’s in the article:
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. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, 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 was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But 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.
Instead, 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.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. 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.
(Emphasis mine)
The root causes I identified here are: access to and stigma against mental healthcare, especially among older males (as we may be seeing in the Las Vegas incident); poverty, systemic racism, and other aspects of society that lead to gang violence; and low priority and intervention with regards to domestic violence among LE.
The solutions proposed in the article are, as written:
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
[…]
A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. 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.
“We should just ban guns” is a really easy thing to say, but let’s face it, if all guns disappeared tomorrow, would suicide numbers go down substantially? Would gang violence be impacted in a meaningful way? Would domestic be curtailed in a major way? I sadly doubt it. You can say “well it would be less deadly” but to step away from my pro-gun bias for a moment, is “less deadly” really the goal here? You might slow down or even stop mass shootings with a ban, sure, but when we look overseas at methods used in mass killings, a cursory search shows more man-portable IEDs than guns. I feel like a bomb going off in the middle of the crowd in Vegas would have been a lot worse than what we saw.
The more important use of time and resources in my opinion is to find out what makes people want to kill a lot of other people and work on a solution to that before they get to the point where they’re choosing a weapon to carry out their plan. By that time, it’s already too late.
Yes that’s a longer version of what I said originally about the article: “There is a problem but I don’t understand how to fix it, so let’s ignore the problem and fix other things”.
…or an intermediate length summary…
“America has a gun problem that other countries don’t have but I don’t understand why we have this unique problem (True we have a sh*t-ton of guns and little control unlike these other countries but that’s clearly nothing to do with it) so let’s ignore that particular problem and fix other things like mental health and violence against women that are problems not unique to America, or unique to the gun issue”
If the writer is proposing to fix mental health in human males (as if people haven’t thought of trying to do that across the globe already, for obvious reasons unrelated to guns… even if you could fix it!) and do nothing about guns, then good luck to him. He basically just said, let’s do nothing about the gun problem but buried it beneath a lot of words.