Gun Statistician’s Opinion Magically Flips When She Looks at the Data

By John Falkenberg

When Leah Libresco, a statistician and a former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site, got into studying firearm-related statistics, her world changed.

Namely, she changed her opinion from wanting some serious gun control to realizing that “common sense” gun control isn’t so smart, and she shared her findings with, among others, The Washington Post.

Not a historically gun-friendly group, folks.

The next segment is long, but it’s more than worth a read. It’s where a gun-hater who faces hard data logically lands.

From her opining at The Washington Post, posted earlier this month:

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.

I researched the strictly tightened …Read the Rest

Source:: Concealed Nation