Gun Safety

I drafted one my posts, collecting information and analysis on gun control, and then read Kristof's oped in today's NYT, How to Reduce Shootings. A great summary. I'm going ahead and publishing this post, even though it is a work in progress, because Kristof's piece is thorough and a great starting place. He frames the issue as a public health issue, like automobile safety, and tries to avoid the  moralistic and inflammatory rhetoric of liberals and conservative--the left and the right.

His oped is comprehensive. And near his conclusion he writes:

If you’re wondering how we managed to crank out all these charts and data in the immediate aftermath of the Texas shooting, here’s the secret: We didn’t. We spent weeks gathering the information and preparing the charts, because we knew that there would be a tragedy like this one to make it all relevant.

In October, 538's Julia Azari also summarizes the current data on gun violence, and advises us not to focus on mass killings to drive policy. She includes a good data visualization of gun deaths:

• suicide vs homicide vs accident
• men vs women
• age
• ethnicity

Different solutions are required for different causes. (I'm waiting to see another domain added to the visualization: type of gun (handgun, rifle, assault rifle ...)

Everytown For Gun Safety reports that 54 per cent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence:

But there’s a loophole in the federal system. Federal law only requires background checks for gun sales at licensed dealers—a gap referred to as the unlicensed sale loophole. Nineteen states and Washington, DC have acted to close this dangerous loophole by requiring background checks on all handgun sales.13 There is strong evidence that closing this loophole saves lives. In states that have done so, 47 percent fewer women are shot to death by their intimate partners, 53 percent fewer law enforcement officers are killed with guns, and there is 48 percent less gun trafficking in cities.14

Only 10 per cent of mass shootings took place in gun-free zones:

Take, for example, the October 1, 2015 mass shooting in which Christopher Harper-Mercer fatally shot nine people in an attack at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR. At the time of the shooting, there were several students carrying concealed handguns on campus. But they recognized that an attempt to provide help may have confused law enforcement and decided not to intervene. As one student, a military veteran who was carrying a concealed gun at the time, explained: “Luckily, we made the choice not to get involved…not knowing where SWAT was on their response time, they wouldn’t know who we were, and if we had our guns ready to shoot, they’d think we were the bad guys.”15

Everytown For Gun Safety is backed, in part, by independent and former NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC is also active on gun control.

Good summary of NRA vs Bloomberg's PAC campaign spending in 2016 election.

A 2014 report, by Propublica, on Myth vs Fact: Violence and Mental Health. I hadn't seen this concept before of a "gun violence restraining order"--this seems like a tool the judicial system should have access to.