An Idea for Civil Discussion

Recently I had dinner with a couple friends when our conversation eventually drifted to the 2020 presidential election. One of my friends expressed disappointment that President Trump had done nothing about gun control. I said that I’m happy he hasn’t been pushing for more gun control. Knowing that my friend is liberal I figured it would carry more weight if I cited a study done by Leah Libresco, a statistician, former news writer at FiveThirtyEight, a self-described liberal and an advocate of gun control. Libresco wrote an article on a study in which she describes a study she conducted. (I also wrote a blog entry on her article.)

[M]y 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.

Libresco’s study revealed that most gun deaths fall into one of these categories: suicide, gang violence and domestic disputes. She admits that the most commonly touted gun control measures would have no impact on these outcomes. When I cited this study to my friends I also referred to the high murder rate in Chicago which has tough gun control laws.

But here is where I stumbled onto a potentially valuable approach to talking about controversial subjects. Given the findings of this study by a gun control advocate and the results in cities like Chicago I said, “I’m not sure what else we can do.” My friend said maybe longer waiting periods to buy guns and universal background checks would help. She didn’t say “let’s confiscate guns” and didn’t label me as an unrepentant gun nut. I said I’d be willing to consider her ideas. I think by citing these facts from a source on her side of the political spectrum and saying that I didn’t know what else we could do about gun violence left the door open for a civil discussion.

[Note: Libresco concludes her article with: “A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.” Amen!