Statistician says numbers changed her mind about gun control

Statistician Leah Libresco used to think gun control was a way to stop mass shootings. But when she was working at stats blog FiveThirtyEight, Libresco and her colleagues looked at all the lives lost to gun violence each year, and to what extent interventions in the form of regulations might have saved some of those people.

In a Washington Post op-ed back in October 2017, Libresco described how she learned that gun control legislation would not have prevented most of America's gun deaths.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn't even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?

Libresco spoke to MPR News host Kerri Miller about how her deep dive into the numbers led her to change how she thought American society needs to address the problem of gun violence. It's not through sweeping legislation that aims to ban guns, Libresco said, but rather through an approach that helps protect victims and reform potential killers.

Use the audio player above to hear the full discussion.