 Common sense gun legislation common sense policy about guns common sense gun reforms We have to act we can't wait take the firearms first and then go to court I don't need to wait another minute to take common sense 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 borne out by the evidence and the evidence and data is in Gun safety saves lives. It's not something we assert something we could prove over and over and over again. That'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 100 or so good studies are usually ignored or misrepresented by politicians in the media Statistician Aaron Brown has taught at NYU in 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 that a specific gun control Regulation does or does not work. You would be mistaken Federal gun crime prosecutions are up 16% 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 They turn otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals and they increase prosecutorial power and mass incarceration They exacerbate the racial and socio-economic inequities in the criminal justice system Brown points to a 2020 meta analysis from the non-partisan research Organization the RAND Corporation that analyzed 27,900 studies on the effectiveness of gun control regulations The authors concluded that 0.4 percent were only a hundred and twenty three were rigorous enough to provide meaningful results And even among those many didn't answer the most pressing question for policymakers Do gun control laws reduce violence? 123 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 as statistically significant if it has a 120 chance or less of being due to random chance This means that if researchers run a hundred 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 the 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 5% 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 5% 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 what 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 The model 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. 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 1% of gun Homicides, but gun homicide rates in states changed by an average of 6% 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 722 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 and the near total absence of anti-gun control results are strong evidence That we know nothing about the effect of gun control regulations 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 ran got significant media or legislative attention It was the worst studies with the most outrageous claims from among the 27,000 that ran excluded that made the headlines 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'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 It is true that Connecticut's gun murder rate fell rapidly after that law was passed in 1995 But so did gun murder rates 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 is the actual murder rate in Connecticut compared to something They call a synthetic Connecticut that they constructed for the purpose of their study a 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 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 Worse they cherry-picked 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 and 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 a crime But the cultural differences are too big There's just too much uncertainty about this to say anything about what would happen if we enforce Grunich 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 by time place or other factors such as classifying an event as an act of terror And therefore not considering it a mass shooting these varying definitions make studies apples to orange 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 1% of all gun homicides For that 10 years we had it done The number of mass shootings actually went down and since then The number of massacres has increased 183% mass shootings went up 200% in the decade after the assault weapons been expired For example, the US federal ban on assault weapons in 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 bans 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 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 a 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 That can't easily be controlled for in social science research a gun expert with a gun safe in a high crime neighborhood May well be safer with a gun Whereas a careless alcoholic living in a low crime area who keeps loaded guns in his kid's 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 press and 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 But these policies also have significant costs Restricting our freedoms and causing more people to go to prison Disproportionately from poor and minority communities, 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 flock 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 CDC's 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 dollars in new funds towards 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 death 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 that can't possibly tell us what we need to know