Reflexive responses don’t help gun debate

THE killing of children at school is every parent’s worst nightmare, and justifies enactment of policies to prevent similar events in the future. Yet many proposed responses to mass shootings would do little to prevent their reoccurrence.

This must change. Protection of children in public spaces is a serious topic, and deserves serious debate based on valid analysis.

Many reflexively tout “common sense” gun control after every school shooting. Events in Florida last week have followed this script. Yet it’s been proven, over and over, that most proposed gun control measures would do little to prevent mass shootings.

Writing at the Washington Post last year, Leah Libresco, a statistician and former news writer for the website FiveThirtyEight, discussed the results of three months’ work she and her colleagues did analyzing data regarding roughly 33,000 annual gun deaths in the United States. Libresco, previously a gun control advocate, conceded that the “case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.”

What of restricting gun show or online sales, which critics decry as a “loophole”? Between July 2015 and November 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated whether sellers on the internet provide firearms to prohibited individuals. GAO investigators made 72 attempts to illegally purchase firearms on traditional “surface web” sites. None succeeded.

What of banning vaguely defined “assault weapons”? It’s logistically challenging, and ignores the fact that handguns have been used more than twice as often as rifles in all mass shootings in the United States from 1982 to 2017, according to available data.

A federal Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council report also found “that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.” And studies “have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other selfprotective strategies.”

In some cases, the rush to “do something” leads to counterproductive results. After the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting, New York legislators quickly adopted new gun control measures. In their haste, they temporarily made outlaws of many New York police officers, whose standard-issue weapons had gun magazines exceeding the new legal limit.

So how to respond to school shootings? The issue of mental illness has been a recurring theme. It’s time to consider making it easier to have people involuntarily committed to treatment centers.

Schools have become targets for those bent on inflicting terror, so security measures may need to be dramatically upgraded at schools nationwide, including the hiring of far more armed security guards.

Measures like “stop and frisk” could be deployed to identify and arrest those carrying illegal weapons. Prosecution of “straw purchasers” who illegally obtain guns for others should be increased.

Many who demand gun control laws object to these alternatives, arguing they infringe upon civil liberties. There will be a trade-off in that area. But if the goal is to prevent school shootings, the debate should be based on pragmatism — What will save students’ lives? — not on political correctness.