Are we trying to be deontologist here (enough! we shouldn’t have massacres of children!), or consequentialist (involuntary human deaths are bad).
If the former, this is a standard (note: I didn’t say easy) causal inference problem. What you want to do, ideally, is select two reasonably large communities to serve as a test group and a control group. The communities have reasonably similar laws on the books, composition, etc. except we implement a form of gun control in one. We then check back later.
Some reasons gun control might work to stop photogenic tragedies: harder to access guns in general. Some reasons gun control might not work to stop photogenic tragedies: doesn’t address the underlying problem (crazy people can use other methods to kill, like the recent China thing, or obtain guns illegally if there are enough in circulation like in the US).
In practice, the above setup is probably too good to hope for. Perfect randomized experiment are difficult to set up for social policy. What we can do is try to look for “natural experiments.” That is, situations where somewhat similar communities exist that happened to have gone a different way on gun control. Barring that, we want to use observational data (that is no experiment was done), but control for enough confounders to be persuasive if we do a study. Things like ethnic and socioeconomic composition, community politics, mental health, etc.
If the latter, concentrate on reducing human deaths directly. Guns are not the best bang for buck for reducing deaths given American political climate and the relative deadliness of other sources of deaths compared to guns.
crazy people can use other methods to kill, like the recent China thing
If you mean this one, they weren’t in fact killed. As far as I know, the death toll from the Chinese attack still stands at 0. When you’re a madman attacking children in a rage, a knife just isn’t as effective a killing tool as an AR-15.
Are we trying to be deontologist here (enough! we shouldn’t have massacres of children!), or consequentialist (involuntary human deaths are bad).
If the former, this is a standard (note: I didn’t say easy) causal inference problem. What you want to do, ideally, is select two reasonably large communities to serve as a test group and a control group. The communities have reasonably similar laws on the books, composition, etc. except we implement a form of gun control in one. We then check back later.
Some reasons gun control might work to stop photogenic tragedies: harder to access guns in general. Some reasons gun control might not work to stop photogenic tragedies: doesn’t address the underlying problem (crazy people can use other methods to kill, like the recent China thing, or obtain guns illegally if there are enough in circulation like in the US).
In practice, the above setup is probably too good to hope for. Perfect randomized experiment are difficult to set up for social policy. What we can do is try to look for “natural experiments.” That is, situations where somewhat similar communities exist that happened to have gone a different way on gun control. Barring that, we want to use observational data (that is no experiment was done), but control for enough confounders to be persuasive if we do a study. Things like ethnic and socioeconomic composition, community politics, mental health, etc.
If the latter, concentrate on reducing human deaths directly. Guns are not the best bang for buck for reducing deaths given American political climate and the relative deadliness of other sources of deaths compared to guns.
If you mean this one, they weren’t in fact killed. As far as I know, the death toll from the Chinese attack still stands at 0. When you’re a madman attacking children in a rage, a knife just isn’t as effective a killing tool as an AR-15.
You’re absolutely right; this isn’t the low hanging fruit for human deaths.