NPR: “Science Provides Few Facts On Effects Of Gun Policies, Report Finds”

This article from NPR is interesting, as it refers to a recent study from the RAND Corporation (rather than some gun-control think tank) about what gun policies actually work to reduce violent crime.

The article can be summed up by the line, “The nonprofit RAND Corporation analyzed thousands of studies and found only 63 that establish a causal relationship between specific gun policies and outcomes such as reductions in homicide and suicide.”

Let’s go through the meat of the article:

“Most of the effects that we were looking for evidence on, we didn’t find any evidence,” says Andrew Morral, a behavioral scientist at RAND and the leader of the project.

This isn’t surprising: in general, criminals don’t follow laws, so gun control means little to them.

They found, for example, no clear evidence regarding the effects of any gun policies on hunting and recreational gun use, or on officer-involved shootings, or on mass shootings or on the defensive use of guns by civilians.

Again, not particularly surprising: most gun laws don’t seek to restrict hunting (other than basic things like hunting season times, restrictions on certain prey, etc.) or recreational gun use.

Officer-involved shootings and defensive gun uses by civilians (note: police officers are also civilians) are usually explicitly permitted by law in life-threatening situations, so I don’t really see the relevance.

The point about mass shootings isn’t unexpected: mass shooters tend to plan their attacks meticulously for a long period of time and are very detail-focused. All the “common sense gun laws” like waiting periods, background checks, etc. wouldn’t have any effect on someone willing to plan and wait as needed.

There were some categories with better data, however, Morral says. There is relatively strong evidence, for example, that policies meant to prevent children from getting access to firearms — such as laws that require guns to be stored unloaded, or in locked containers — reduce both suicide and unintentional injury and death.

Makes sense. Leaving loaded guns lying openly around the house when there’s kids or irresponsible adults around is an invitation to disaster. Fortunately, this is quite rare.

Guns should be secured when not under the immediate control of the owner.

Previous work has also found that places that require a permit (issued by law enforcement) for the purchase a firearm do reduce violent crime.

This surprised me a bit, but I’m curious how that works out: I suspect that criminals of any sort don’t end up getting permits, and that permit holders don’t commit much crime.

[a few minutes elapse as I read the linked study, available as a PDF]

Ok, the study basically says that if a state requires permits to purchase a gun, guns are less likely to end up being diverted to criminals. I wonder how much of this is psychological, in that the would-be straw purchaser is a bit more concerned that their name and fingerprints are “in the system” once they get a permit, even though their information is kept on the Form 4473 during a retail purchase anyway. Either way, permits should never be required for a constitutionally-protected right.

There is also some evidence that prohibitions against purchase by people who have been diagnosed with mental illness reduce violent crime, and that “stand your ground” laws, which allow citizens who feel threatened in public to use lethal force without retreating first, lead to an increase in violent crime.

As for mental health, that’s expected. As for stand your ground laws, the issue is not so much an increase in violent crime, as reported by NPR in this article, but an increase in homicides. How a homicide is classified — as a justifiable homicide, for example, or an unlawful homicide — is dependent on how police classify shootings. From an earlier NPR article on the topic, “Police guidelines likely vary from state to state, and police in different places may be interpreting shootings differently in light of stand your ground laws.”

Also interesting is the results of a survey of 95 gun policy experts “from across the political spectrum”, who they asked for their thoughts on effects of various policies including “universal background checks, bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, expanded mental illness prohibitions, minimum age requirements and required reporting of lost or stolen weapons”.

The vast majority of the specialists RAND surveyed agreed that the primary objectives of gun policies should be reducing suicides and homicides, and that protecting privacy, enabling hunting and sport shooting and preventing mass shootings were secondary priorities.

“That was a surprise, actually,” says Morral. “I think people on either side of gun policy debates think that the other side has misplaced values — or that it’s a values problem, in any case. But that’s not what we find. We find people prioritize the same things in the same order.”

However, those surveyed varied widely in their predictions about how different policies would affect each outcome.

“Where they disagree is on which laws will achieve those those objectives. So this is a disagreement about facts,” says Morral. “And the facts are sparse.”

So, no surprises there. Still, it’s an interesting study and I recommend you read it.

Heading back behind enemy lines.

I’ve mentioned it a few times here and there but, blog title notwithstanding, I’m not actually an Arizona native. I actually was born in San Francisco and raised in the Bay Area. How I got into shooting is a long story, but it involved a few locals, Oleg Volk, The High Road forum, and a few other online resources back in the day. I had moved to Arizona to go to university (Bear Down!), continued my interest in shooting, and started blogging, hence the name of this blog. Later, I ended up moving to Switzerland for grad school, but always planned on returning to the US (ideally to a free state) to settle down, work, etc.

Now, a decade later, I’ve got a bit more gray in my beard and a PhD hanging on my wall, and life is taking me back to the Bay Area for a new job (a postdoc), which I start in a few months. Although the job is fantastic and offers significant upward career mobility, benefits, the opportunity to be close to family and old friends, etc., the fact that it’s (a) in California and (b) in the Bay Area is a major downside in terms of gun stuff.

Things have really gone downhill on that front since I left years ago. Some things, like the absurd AWB, are still in place and haven’t really changed much (Banning “bullet button” guns? Really?), but other new things are really onerous (background checks for ammo purchases, no online ammo sales, soon state registration of each ammo purchase, etc.) and I’m not looking forward to that.

It’s likely that I’ll end up living in either San Mateo or Alameda counties, both of which are decidedly hostile to gun rights (though they have decent public ranges, shops, etc., but a CCW permit is essentially off the table), which is problematic. There’s also the possibility of living in San Joaquin county, which is a bit more CCW friendly (it’s not completely off the table). Cost of living in San Joaquin county is also significantly less, which is a plus.

The postdoc contract is only for two years, but many people are offered permanent positions upon completion of the postdoc, so I may consider it as a long-term career at the end of the contract. Who knows? I need to weigh many options, including career-related things, cost of living, family-friendliness, gun rights, etc. over the course of my time there to figure out what to do.

Anyway, I’ll continue to blog as usual (though hopefully more often, as there’s more opportunity to shoot there, clubs, etc. and I’ll have more free time). Wish me luck.

You know it’ll be an interesting day when…

…the Big Scary Laser in the lab starts making an ominous humming sound and the Swiss lab technician working on the laser shouts “PANIK!” and waves his arms around.
Fortunately, he just ended up pushing the button and everything was ok, but that’s a surefire way to get an adrenaline dump early in the morning.

Ballistic Monte Carlo Methods

This is a paragraph I never thought I’d see in the academic literature:

“[W]e advocate the use of ballistic-assisted (i.e. projectile-based) random sampling methods because they are both easily accessible and parallelizable. In particular, shotgun-assisted random sampling seems very suitable becaues of the presumed abundance of shotguns in cataclysmic times and the speed at which they can generate samples.”

– Vincent Dumoulin, F?lix Thouin – “A Ballistic Monte Carlo Approximation of ?

Awesome. That’d make for an amazing grant application.
See here for a summary article that explains things for non-mathematicians.
Edit: Somehow I borked the initial post by forgetting the title and screwing up a link. I’ve now corrected these errors. If you’re still seeing those errors in your feed reader, please refresh the feed.

I wonder…

…if anyone at the Mars Curiosity mission control named the rock they recently lasered “Alderaan”?
If I were them, I totally would. I’d also say “Commence primary ignition!” if I were the guy sending the “go” command, or “You may fire when ready!” in Tarkin’s tone if I were one of the directors.
Hey, if you can’t have fun shooting lasers at rocks on another planet, what can you do?

Science with Crossbows

From today’s seminar: “Of course, you cannot do this experiment in ordinary atmospheric pressure. It will explode. We observed this. It was quite messy.”
Also, the presenter was a German scientist with a group trying to model planetary accretion. Their experiments needed to propel marble-sized samples into a 1kg dust target in vacuum. The found the best way of doing this was with a small holder mounted to an arrow which was fired from a crossbow. The crossbow was placed in the vacuum chamber and was fired remotely. The holder and arrow would be stopped as soon as they were no longer accelerated by the bowstring and the samples would then fly out of the holder to the target.
It’s worth pointing out that the title of the presentation was “What can Wilhelm Tell teach us about planetary accretion?”
I imagine the paperwork needed to approve the purchase of the crossbow for the lab went something like this:
Item: Crossbow
Quantity: 1
Reason: SCIENCE!

Been Busy, No Shooting

Hi folks,
Things here in Switzerland have been exceedingly busy.Who knew that pursuing a graduate degree in physics would require time and effort?
While my wife has been having a lovely time, meeting new people, and traveling around to nearby European countries, I’ve been madly studying, programming, and otherwise keeping busy.
Even though Switzerland is known for being a gun-friendly place, I haven’t had a chance to go shooting since I got here. It probably doesn’t help that my German is awful (I can order drinks at the bar but otherwise it’s terrible; language has never been one of my strengths). Perhaps in the new year?
When I’m focused on my work, I don’t really have much time to be homesick, but on the few occasions when I have some time off I really miss home — the locations, the people, the food, even some of the familiar brand names and businesses. Switzerland is without a doubt a wonderful country, but I spend so much time in the lab and classroom that I don’t really get a chance to meet people, practice my German, and integrate well. My wife’s having a better time at it, for sure.
We’re really looking forward to Christmas — my parents and sister are flying out here and we’re going to celebrate Christmas here. Afterwards, we’ll be traveling to Egypt and Jordan for about two weeks. Gotta get more stamps in the passport!
As the semester closes in a few weeks, I should hopefully have some more time to post. Otherwise, I’m really bogged down with work. Sorry.

School’s In Session

So, Monday was my first day at graduate school. So far, I’m a bit less worried about the whole “grad school” thing as I am with the “learning to speak advanced German necessary for doing advanced physics”.
While the program information mentioned that the classes would all be conducted in English, this is not the case: several are in English, but a few have English lectures and German-language handouts/PowerPoints, one has German lectures and English handouts/PowerPoints, while another is all-German.
Being that the local language here is German and the majority of students are Swiss, I don’t fault them for wanting to teach the majority of students in their native language. I’ve privately met with professors to discuss the issue, and they’re willing to be flexible and work with me so that I can succeed. That’s nice.
Fortunately, I am very much a learn-by-reading person, so I was pleased when one professor recommended a few textbooks that would get me the same information as the lectures.
The whole situation is mildly frustrating, to be certain, but it gives me more incentive to study harder. It also gives me an excuse to improve my German.
Note to those looking to study in a country or region that does not speak their native language: caveat emptor. Even though the courses here are listed as being conducted in English, this isn’t necessarily the case.

Educational Updates

Long time, no post.
The results are in: I was accepted into three graduate schools: the University of Oslo in Norway, and the Universities of Zurich and Bern in Switzerland.
All are fine research institutions, but I ended up going with Bern, as it combined excellent research with a much more reasonable cost of living than Zurich or Oslo. We’ll be moving at the end of July.
In short, I’ll be spending the next two years of my life at a place like this:

Well, not quite. I’ll actually be in the science building, but it’s right next to the fancy old university building. I’ll probably be in the basement, though. Oh well.

It looks a lot nicer on the inside.
Alas, as the Swiss are nearly universally excellent shooters, it’s unlikely that there’ll be any need for me to introduce new shooters to the sport. Oh well. All the New Shooter Ammo Fund ammo is marked and store separately here in the US, so it’ll be available for teaching new shooters when I return to the US.
While the Swiss do permit me to import firearms for personal use, there’s a nominal bit of paperwork involved and I don’t want to deal with the hassle during the main move. Perhaps I’ll get the guns when I come back for holidays or something.
Much of my time in the next few months will be spent preparing for the move, so posting may be lighter than usual (amazingly enough).
I know it’s been a while since I last posted, which is mostly due to living in Arizona (arguably the least-restrictive state in regards to firearms laws, which makes things really boring when it comes to writing about firearms-related legal developments) and not having the time or money to get out and shoot as often as I’d like. Hopefully after moving to Switzerland, I’ll have a bit more opportunity to shoot. We’ll see.

On Distant Things

Voyager 1 has passed the range of solar wind (subatomic particles streaming out from the sun). After examining the data transmitted back, scientists determined that this has been the case since June.
It’s moving at 60,000 kph, and in just a few more years it’ll cross the threshold to interstellar space ((The heliopause.)) and become the first manmade object to make it into enormous emptiness between the stars. “Enormous emptiness” doesn’t come close to conveying how hugely enormous and empty the space between stars is.
According to the Wikipedia, it’s been 33 years, 3 months, and 9 days since the probe was launched, and it’s been on-mission for 31 years, 11 months, and 10 days. That’s pretty incredible, considering the technology of the day.
Its radioactive power sources have enough fuel left to power the probe (with decreasing functionality as available power decreases) until about 2025.
Although it’s merely a tiny thing hurtling through space, it pleases me that it’s been operating since before I was born, and will continue its journey — albeit out of power — long after I’m dead. I can only hope that at some point in the future, humanity will venture to the stars. I hope that when that happens, they leave Voyager to coast though the inky blackness of space as a testament to the vision of those who sent it.