Not the NRA; not people who voted for Donald Trump; not people who own guns, who like country music or pickup trucks: No one* wants it to be possible for a Stephen Paddock to murder even one person with a gun. However, none of the political policies put forward to ban or restrict weapons and ammunition actually address the problem. No one proposing them is able to say what set of laws could have prevented the Las Vegas massacre. They appeal to magical thinking.**
There’s a good reason for that. From the Washington Post:
I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.
Leah Libresco is a person who dislikes guns, but she follows the evidence instead of the cynical talking points.
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.
I don’t expect this article will change the calculations of politicians and anti-Second Amendment types who can’t bear wasting any fundraising crisis, but any reasonable person – especially including those who dislike firearms – will gain from reading it.
Thank you, Leah Libresco, for your courage and honesty.
Read the whole thing, and the links there are also worth checking out.
Update, 1:25PM
*Maybe I spoke too soon, but I did say “sane”:
