From The Washington Post: “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”

Research has a way of doing that.

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly. Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. 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. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

In other words, the shouting to confiscate guns after mass shootings such as that in Las Vegas comes from emotion, not logic or facts, and certainly no serious thinking.

Because when a honest liberal looks at data, she concludes that gun control doesn’t stop gun crime.

And as others have observed, in Chicago in September, 59 people were murdered, bringing the total for 2017 to more than 500. That’s a “mass shooting,” too, that typically includes multiple murders in a matter of hours. They just doesn’t happen in 10 minutes, with a maniac shooting from a hotel. It’s black or Hispanic gangs turning the streets into a war zone.