538 researcher's discovery about guns

[american_ideals]

19. But I'll humor you by quoting article in support of a handgun ban anyway.

Here's the relevant section of the article I linked.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-poverty-of-data-journalism-and-the-irony-of-gun-control

We have safety regulations on children’s toys to reduce the risk of a tiny number of children who choke or could choke on tiny toy parts. Whether this level of risk aversion is wise or paranoid is an interesting question. But there’s no question that we think about risk and remediation in a radically different way when it comes to firearms.

There is a literalism here and a myopia that is not intrinsic to data journalism but is pervasive within it, a failure to think beyond the numbers to the social implications of the numbers or – more arrestingly – to get lost in a fascinating tree and not see the forest. This myopia is bound up with the irony and tragedy of the gun control movement itself. It has been argued back into such marginal and often trivial reforms that they can be plausibly and even persuasively derided as simply not worth the effort.