Friday, April 20, 2018

Arguing About Gun Control—conflicting intuitions and the need for good research



Between the shooting at the concert in Las Vegas and the Parkland school shooting, people have had compelling reasons to talk about gun violence and how we should respond to it. We all have an interest in our own safety and the safety of our kids. And yet, people still come to drastically different conclusions about how to approach this.

One group of people finds it intuitively obvious that making it harder for people to get their hands on guns, especially guns that can be fired many times without reloading, will reduce deaths in school shootings. If the shooter has to keep stopping to reload, he won’t be able to shoot as many people before someone stops him.

Another group finds it intuitively obvious that having more armed adults at schools will reduce deaths in school shootings because it takes someone with a gun to stop someone with a gun. Having armed personnel on hand will mean shooters are stopped faster, before they can kill a lot of people. Therefore, they think, we should make it easier for teachers and staff to bring guns to school.

The first group, on the other hand, thinks that it is intuitively obvious that having a lot of guns and a lot of kids in the same building is a recipe for disaster.

The problem with intuition is that what seems blindingly obvious sometimes isn’t. This is well known to people involved in medicine and is the reason that new treatments have to prove themselves in trials, no matter how plausible they seem. So in making decisions about gun policies, one thing we desperately need is good research on guns and safety. The RAND Corporation recently published a review of available studies on the effects of gun policies, and one of their conclusions is that there are big gaps in the research available. They also noted that changes in the way information is collected could be tremendously useful.

I would hope good research would also try to control for different circumstances. For instance, when it comes to guns and self-defense, does it matter where you live? Whether law enforcement is five minutes away or an hour? Whether there are large predators in your area? What about your domestic situation?

I’m not saying that better research will end the arguments over gun policies. There will be conflicts of interpretation. There will probably also be some trade-offs to be argued about--personal freedom versus public safety. However, better research would give people something more concrete to argue about and something to test their intuitions against. That's worth funding.

I have one more thing to add. When I showed the draft of this post to my husband, I said that I thought the most important part of it was the link to the RAND report. He said he doubted it made any difference--that most people have already made up their minds and won't consider research except insofar as it supports what they already believe. Please, people, prove him wrong. When you read about research results, consider them with an open (but critical!!) mind. Consider the source, the reasoning, and who, if anyone, has reviewed it. Don't judge it by whether it matches your "intuition".

Till next post.

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