Well, to paraphrase a great Republican, here we go again. The details of Adam Lanza’s home environment—the armory of weapons there, the copy of the “NRA Guide to the Basics of Pistol Shooting,” there was a useful book kept close—are scarcely out before the insistence that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to see or to do returns, at a higher volume. The President talks, in his calm and conciliatory tones, about minimal gun control—that there’s no threat to responsible gun owners, just common sense—and gets, in return, no response, no counterproposal at all, just the usual toxic cocktail of fatalism and scorn. And he gets contemptuous references to his merely “emotional appeals” on the issue, to his talk, on Thursday, of “shame on us.” As though the horror of children ripped apart by a hundred and fifty-four bullets fired in less than five minutes is not itself rational evidence for change, as though unbearable parental grief is not itself an argument for altering the circumstance that made the mourning happen.
Then there is the “Well, we don’t really know what works!” faction, shrugging off talk of even those minimal measures. You know, there really isn’t much evidence that gun control reduces gun violence. The good and worthy David Brooks—whose role in life, unfortunately, seems to be to try to put a rational face on an irrational political faction—advises in a column that since gun deaths didn’t really end with the last, brief, assault-weapons ban, we shouldn’t press for another, at least not too hard.
Actually, it’s hard to find a more robust correlation in the social sciences than the one between gun laws and gun violence. The cry comes back: “But those are just correlations. They don’t prove causes!” And, indeed, the most recent damning study, published in that cranky, left-wing rag the Journal of the American Medical Association—which shows a clear correlation, state to state, between strong gun laws and less gun violence—ends with the orthodox injunction that the study could not alone determine cause-and-effect relationships, and that further studies are needed.
But when a scientific study ends by stating that there’s uncertainty about whether a correlation proves a cause, it doesn’t mean that correlations are meaningless in every circumstance. Everyone knows that creating false correlations between two unrelated elements is easy. But it can be that a correlation is so powerful and reliable that it may actually point to that rare thing in the social sciences, a demonstrable causal relation. As a wise man once said, “Correlation is not causation, but it sure is a hint.” When you can separate out a truly robust correlation between two elements in our social life, it’s a big deal.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/03/armed-correlations-gun-ownership-and-violence.html#ixzz2PEWbuKUx
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