Someone looked at facts and not feelings.
Like with any mass shooting that happens in the United States, the central conversation shifts almost immediately to what our lawmakers in Congress can do to restrict the sale and purchase of firearms beyond what is already regulated.
However, according to one statistician from the website FiveThirtyEight who researched gun deaths in America, sweeping common-sense gun control legislation is not the answer to prevent mass shootings like in Las Vegas, Orlando, or Sandy Hook.
Leah Libresco, a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, wrote in the Washington Post that she used to think gun control was the answer, until she did her own three-month research project with her colleagues at the data journalism website. She admitted that she grew frustrated when analyzing all 33,000 gun deaths per year in the United States.
“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,” Libresco wrote. “The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.”
She found that using the examples of Britain and Australia, who have very strict laws on gun ownership, aren’t the perfect examples that liberals use in their pro-gun control arguments. In Britain, the gun ban and buyback program in 1996 had little impact on crimes involving guns as they continued to rise in the late 1990’s and peaked in 2003-04.