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IPFS News Link • Government

Mass Shootings, Climate, Discrimination: Why Government's Fear of Data Threatens Us All

• https://www.wired.com

In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It's a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It's the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last month, and by the killer who murdered 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, and the one at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. And the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And the party in San Bernardino, California.

Oh but wait: It's also the gun, apparently, that someone in Texas used to shoot back at the killer at First Baptist Church, accurately enough to pinpoint places his tactical vest didn't protect. "We keep hearing that AR's are useless for self-defense, that they're simply 'weapons of war,' useful only for mass killing. This is simply not true," writes David French at The National Review. He didn't save lives inside the church, French goes on to say, but this straight-from-the-gun-advocate-storybook good guy with a gun "did stop the shooter and prevented him from harming anyone else. He did so with exactly the kind of weapon that the gun control lobby would like to deny to law-abiding Americans."

Well, OK. Good question, then. Is it possible that the AR-15 isn't just an overpowered long gun beloved by the National Rifle Association but a necessary component of civilian defense in the absence of armed authorities? Somebody should figure this out, right?

Except you can't. The government doesn't keep track of how many AR-15s are out there or who owns them. Only through painstaking excavation of crime reports could anyone even begin to figure out which crimes involved AR-15s or when AR-15s stopped crimes—much less where those ARs came from, how they were stored, or how they were modified.

That data is either off-limits or simply doesn't exist. "If we had easy access to the kind of data we have on motor vehicle crashes for firearm violence, we would be able to answer much more clearly a whole host of questions about gun policy—about which state laws are working, which storage practices work, which guns are riskier than others, what ammunition sizes and magazines matters. I could go on and on," says Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. "We're already in a world where science is questioned, in particular the role of science in policymaking. No one who's realistic thinks science is sufficient for good policymaking. But it's clearly necessary."

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