Deserves recognition

I have been mentioning Diane Feinstein and her prescience in warning about rapid fire bump stocks, but I didn't realise she has a long history of trying to do the right thing in US gun control:

The California senator Dianne Feinstein, who authored the now expired 1994 ban on assault weapons, has pushed for nationwide legislation banning the sale of bump stocks and related devices. In 2013, in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed the lives of twenty schoolchildren and six adults, Feinstein proposed a prohibition on the accessories. Congress rejected it. On Wednesday afternoon, Feinstein again reintroduced a bill that would outlaw bump stocks and accessories designed to mimic a machine gun’s rate of fire.

Meanwhile, I see that, predictably, Tim Blair and other excuse makers for the American gun culture are mighty impressed with the article by Leah Libresco in which she claims that gun control policies she formally believed in crumbled away when she examined the evidence.

Her article, which I first saw in the Washington Post, was in fact more about her changing attitude to risk and regulation than anything objective about gun control.    Ironically, a statistical examination of gun deaths which leads to dismissing ideas intended to limit the carnage from a small subset of  gun fatalies seems to me quite akin to commentators telling the Right that statistically they have little to worry about from Muslim terrorism - and Tim Blair just loves to hear that line, doesn't he?

What common sense suggests, rather, is that you take practical steps that are proportionate and  reasonable in response to the possibility of similar attacks being repeated, regardless of the improbable statistics of any one person being killed that way.  I have no problem at all, for example, with pedestrian malls next to roads having bollards limiting vehicle access, given the spate of those attacks.   Similarly, increased airline security is an obvious response to 9/11 and we all feel safer for it.

No, her article (and she would know this) works as a salve to the "too hard to do anything" brigade, who should rightly be viewed with disgust.   Interestingly (I had never heard of her before) she is also known for moving from atheism to Catholicism as a result of going to university.  I don't know what brand of Catholic she is, but I would have to suspect it might be on the conservative side, given the wingnutty alignment they tend to have here and in the US. 

Update:   German Lopez wrote a good article The Research is Clear:  Gun Control Saves Lives, disputing  Libresco's claims about studies.