Leah Libresco, a statistician and journalist, completely changed her opinion on the gun control debate after teamed up with FiveThirtyEight to closely analyze gun control facts from both Great Britain and Australia.
She investigated Great Britain and Austrailia because former President Barack "Obama has held up Great Britain and Australia as models for what we might try, and Hillary Clinton has said on the campaign trail that Australia’s ban and buyback model is worth considering," she said on FiveThirtyEight.com.
Before she researched the gun control laws and their impact on violent deaths, Leah used to support gun bans. She thought, as many liberals do, that if Australia and Great Britain can totally and successfully ban all rifles and guns, the United States of America could do it too. But after she crunched the numbers, she came away feeling like an idiot--there were just too many aspects to the bans that she didn’t initially take into account.
She discovered neither nation experienced a significant decrease in mass shootings after the gun control was implemented.
“Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths,” she said in a Washington Post editorial.
When she looked into Britain’s gun control laws and discovered that there weren’t a lot of lives saved with the ban or the buyback. The number of gun-related deaths kept rising even when guns went away. There was a big gun-related death drop in 2004. But the post-2004 drop wasn’t due to the buyback, rather it was because there were more police officers cracking down on violence in general.
As for Australia, homicides were already falling before they implemented the gun ban. Firearm use continues to fall at the same rate as before the ban. Even so, the violent deaths weren’t going away because people used other weapons for homicides
Leah also pointed out the practicality of banning guns nationwide in a country that has land borders. Australia and Great Britain are more likely to successfully ban guns because they’re both on islands, so it’s harder to smuggle guns into the countries. If there were a nationwide gun ban in place, you’d be more likely to successfully smuggle guns across the border than if the U.S. were blocked off by the ocean.
It's also hard to guess how well gun bans and reforms will do to prevent mass shootings. "...It is hard to predict what would happen if those measures were enacted in the U.S., which has a different relationship to firearms, to begin with: We offer firm legal protections for gun ownership, and far more Americans own far more guns," she said.
While Leah doesn’t personally support gun ownership, she says she “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,” she said.
Instead, she looked into “narrowly tailored interventions” that she hopes could prevent suicide, which make up two-thirds of gun deaths in the U.S.
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