Boing Boing » guns

3D printed shotgun slugs (suck)

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:59 +0000

As the 3D printed gun story unfolds, many (including me) have noted that you can't print ammo. However, you can print shotgun slugs on a 3D printer, but they suck:

Heeszel was surprised at the first two. “I didn’t think it would go through the first piece of wood at all, much less hit anything,” he says. But he also called them more of a novelty than a practical bullet. “I thought the thing was kinda lame, but I realize there’s a lot of novelty with the 3-D printed gun, and I thought it was kind of timely. But overall I think they’re kind of crappy little rounds,” he adds...
“I might be a redneck from Tennessee, but I love the technology,” Griffy says. Griffy, who runs a YouTube account ArtisanTony — where he also shows off a printable knife and buckshot rounds — tells Danger Room he printed the slugs more for their own enjoyment. “Because a real gun shooting plastic bullets is more fun than a plastic gun shooting real bullets,” he says. “You have to spend six hours printing a barrel that you’re going to use one time, and it’s not as much fun. It’s more about the enjoyment and the sport. And if you’re having to labor that much, then the enjoyment goes away.”
Griffy says he printed the slugs with a Solidoodle 3 3-D printer — which retails for $800 — using ABS thermoplastic using dimensions from one of Heeszel’s non-printed slugs. Griffy then created the computer-aided design files, converted them to a stereolithography format, and checked the files for inconsistencies with the 3-D printing software Netfabb. He also designed slugs in three sizes. The largest slug takes about an hour to print. The others take about 30 minutes. He also added a lead ball to each slug to give them more weight. The final step was mailing them to Heeszel, who fitted the slugs into hollowed-out — non-printed — shotgun cartridges.

Watch 3-D Printed Shotgun Slugs Blow Away Their Targets [Robert Beckhusen/Wired]

Modified Liberator 3D printed gun made with cheap printer, fires 9 shots

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:46:24 +0000

Joe, an engineer from Wisconsin, modified the (now censored) designs for Defense Distributed's 3D printed gun, the Liberator, and printed a working model on a Lulzbot A0-101, a $1,725 consumer printer that is much cheaper and more widely available than the Stratasys Dimension SST printer used by Defense Distributed.

The gun printed by Joe, which he’s nicknamed the “Lulz Liberator,” was printed over 48 hours with just $25 of plastic on a desktop machine affordable to many consumers, and was fired far more times. “People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that to be known.”
Eight of Joe’s test-fires were performed using a single barrel before swapping it out for a new one on the ninth. After all those shots, the weapon’s main components remained intact–even the spiraled rifling inside of the barrel’s bore. “The only reason we stopped firing is because the sun went down,” he says....
...Still, Joe’s cheap homemade gun isn’t without its bugs. Over the course of its test firing, Joe and Guslick say it misfired several times, and some of its screws and its firing pin had to be replaced. After each firing, the ammo cartridges expanded enough that they had to be pounded out with a hammer. “Other than that, it’s pretty much confirming that yes, Defense Distributed is correct that this functions,” says Guslick. “And it’s possible to make one on a much lower cost printer.”

$25 Gun Created With Cheap 3D Printer Fires Nine Shots (Video) [Andy Greenberg/Forbes]

Printing a gun is hard

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:38:33 +0000

Caleb sez, "The Department of Defense ordered that 3d printed gun removed from the Internet. That didn't work out. You can still download it and print it. I did, and found that the files are a mess and not really functional. I also took a cool timelapse video of the printing."

1. the scale on the individual files was way off.
I suspect this has something to do with the printer it was designed for. It seemed very close to being 1 inch = 1 mm. Not a completely uncommon problem. Manually resizing got some files to look right, but I found many simply wouldn’t resize.
2. Almost every single item had errors.
If you’ve done 3d printing, you’ve found that a model can have all kinds of issues that will stop it from printing correctly. I found every single item for the gun had errors. I actually learned a lot about how to repair non-manifold items from this exercise, so it was good in the end.
Some items, like the hammer and the hammer springs simply would not print. I ran them through systems to repair them and fix errors. It would say that everything was fixed, but when I tried to “slice” them for printing, the software would crash. This means that my gun is incomplete. It has no hammer. Not really that big of a deal to me.

Timelapse of the 3d printed gun being printed. (Thanks, Caleb)

3D printed guns and the law: will judges be able to think clearly about digital files when guns are involved?

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:09:36 +0000

My latest Guardian column is "3D printed guns are going to create big legal precedents," and it looks at an underappreciated risk from 3D printed guns: that courts will be so freaked out by the idea of 3D printed guns that they'll issue reactionary decisions that are bad for the health of the Internet and its users:

More interesting is the destiny of the files describing 3D printed guns. These model-files have been temporarily removed from the internet at the behest of the US State Department, which is investigating the possibility that they violate the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Wilson says that he's on safe ground here, because the regulations do not cover material in a library, and he says the internet is like a library. As this is taking place in the US, there's also the First Amendment to be considered, which limits government regulation of speech.
Here's where things get scary for me. Defense Distributed is headed for some important, possibly precedent-setting legal battles with the US government, and I'm worried that the fact that we're talking about guns here will cloud judges' minds. Bad cases made bad law, and it's hard to think of a more emotionally overheated subject area. So while I'd love to see a court evaluate whether the internet should be treated as a library in law, I'm worried that when it comes to guns, the judge may find himself framing the question in terms of whether a gun foundry should be treated as a library.

3D printed guns are going to create big legal precedents

US State Department orders removal of Defense Distributed's printable gun designs

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:00:15 +0000

The US State Department has ordered Defense Distributed to take down the designs for a working 3D printed gun, citing export control rules set out in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson is appealing, and says that ITAR does not apply to "non-profit public domain releases of technical files designed to create a safe harbor for research and other public interest activities" -- though this carve out is for works stored in a library. Wilson's appeal may turn, then, on whether the Internet is a library for the purposes of this regulation. In the meantime, the designs are still up on The Pirate Bay, and are for sale in printed form in an Austin bookseller. More than 100,000 copies of the designs were downloaded from Defense Distributed's servers in the brief time that they were online.

“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”
Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas in Austin, says that Defense Distributed will in fact take down its files until the State Department has completed its review. “We have to comply,” he says. “All such data should be removed from public access, the letter says. That might be an impossible standard. But we’ll do our part to remove it from our servers.”

Wilson's project is raising some important legal questions, such as whether design files can be considered expressive speech under the First Amendment, and whether the Internet is a library. The question of code-as-speech was famously considered in the Bernstein case, where strong crypto was legalized. However, as we discovered in the 2600 case, judges are less charitably inclined to code-as-speech arguments when they're advanced by non-academics, especially those with counter-culture stances.

Impact litigation -- where good precedents overturn bad rules -- is greatly assisted by good facts and good defendants. I would much rather the Internet-as-library question be ruled on in a less emotionally overheated realm than DIY guns.

State Department Demands Takedown Of 3D-Printable Gun Files For Possible Export Control Violations [Andy Greenberg/Forbes]

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in!)

3D printed gun fires

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:47:43 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about Defense Distributed's 3D printed handgun, and asked whether it would fire, and how many rounds it could fire before experiencing stress fractures, melting, etc. Now, Forbes's Andy Greenberg follows up with a report of the successful firing of the gun -- though not its longevity -- and says that Defense Distributed will publish the CAD files for printing your own gun on its site today, along with videos of the gun in action.

Unlike the original, steel Liberator, though, Wilson’s weapon is almost entirely plastic: Fifteen of its 16 pieces have been created inside an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a machine that lays down threads of melted polymer that add up to precisely-shaped solid objects just as easily as a traditional printer lays ink on a page. The only non-printed piece is a common hardware store nail used as its firing pin...
Even Wilson himself says he’s not sure exactly how that’s possible. But one important trick may be the group’s added step of treating the gun’s barrel in a jar of acetone vaporized with a pan of water and a camp stove, a process that chemically melts its surface slightly and smooths the bore to avoid friction. The Dimension printer Defense Distributed used also keeps its print chamber heated to 167 degrees Fahrenheit, a method patented by Stratasys that improves the parts’ resiliency.

Meet The 'Liberator': Test-Firing The World's First Fully 3D-Printed Gun [Andy Greenberg/Forbes]

(Thanks, Andy!)

Defense Distributed claims working 3D printed handgun

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 05 May 2013 13:09:31 +0000

Defense Distributed's Cody Wilson claims he has attained his stated goal of 3D printing a working handgun. There's no footage of it firing yet, nor details on how many rounds it fires before the plastic is worn out. And although this is a fascinating provocation, it is not (yet) a game-changer, especially in America where traditional guns (capable of firing thousands of rounds without melting down) are cheap and easy to get. You can even "3D print" a gun by asking different CNC shops to cut and overnight you all the parts to make up a working gun, breaking the job down into small pieces that are unlikely to arouse suspicion.

All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.
Technically, Defense Distributed’s gun has one other non-printed component: the group added a six ounce chunk of steel into the body to make it detectable by metal detectors in order to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act. In March, the group also obtained a federal firearms license, making it a legal gun manufacturer.

This Is The World's First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun (Photos) [Andy Greenberg/Forbes]

Cartoonists speak out for gun control

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:55:03 +0000

Ruben "Tom the Dancing Bug" Bolling sez, "I organized this video, getting cartoonists as diverse as Trudeau (Doonesbury), Spiegelman (Maus, etc), Keane (Family Circus), Mazzucchelli (Batman etc), Mo Willems (Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny) and others to illustrate a script advocating gun law reform narrated by Julianne Moore (!) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (!!)."

Cartoonists

San Diego cop smashes phone & beats up suspect: "Phones can be converted to a weapon. Look it up online."

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:07:20 +0000

A San Diego cop beat up a man whom he was ticketing for illegal smoking, after the man refused to stop video-recording the experience. The cop told the man that he feared the phone might actually be a gun disguised as a phone, before smashing the phone and tackling the man and smashing his face into the boardwalk. He was taken away in an ambulance.

It all seemed pretty civil until the cop writing the citation told him to stop recording, which Pringle refused to do.
“Phones can be converted into weapons …. look it up online,” the cop told him.
Last month, a South Florida cop confiscated a man’s phone citing the same reason, so maybe this is a new trend.
When Pringle tried to talk sense into the cop, the cop slapped the phone out of his hand where it fell onto the boardwalk and broke apart.
The other cop then pounced on him, slamming him down on the boardwalk where he ended up with a laceration on his chin.
“Blood was everywhere,” Pringle said. “I was laying on my stomach and he had one knee on my back and the other knee on the side of my face.
“They kept telling me ‘to calm down,’ that ‘you’re making this worse for yourself,’ that ‘you have no right to record us.’”

He didn't get the cop's name, and the SDPD won't give it to him.

San Diego Police Attack and Arrest Man Video Recording Them, Claiming Phone Could be a Weapon (Updated) 294 (via Techdirt)

Rep Steve Israel trying to score points with 3D printed gun hysteria

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:52:21 +0000

Michael Weinberg from Public Knowledge sez "Last week, Rep. Steve Israel introduced a bill designed to regulate firearms that cannot be found by metal detectors. The bill makes a passing reference the 3D printing, which is fine. But the rhetoric that Rep. Israel is using to promote the bill is both muddled and overblown, and focuses almost exclusively on 3D printing. He sent a letter to his fellow Members of Congress titled 'Co-Sponsor Legislation to Ban 3D Printed Guns.' This is a problem."

Cops in Somerville, MA: "It would endanger the public to tell you what guns we have"

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:56:45 +0000

Michael from Muckrock sez, "Want to know what guns your neighbor has? Generally public record. What guns your government has? That's top secret. A recent public records request for the armaments of a local police department in Somerville, MA., was met with a surprising response: Releasing a list of guns the department held 'is likely to jeopardize public safety,' and so is exempt from public disclosure. Maybe they're arming up for an insurrection?

Best Amendment: a game that plays out consequences of fighting bad guys with guns with good guys with guns

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:51:36 +0000

The Best Amendment is a pay-what-you-like Mac/Win/Flash game that plays out NRA president Wayne LaPierre's infamous statement that "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

The first level is straightforward. You’re a little white cone-shaped fella, and you need to go get the star before the timer runs out. With each successive level, a new black-colored cone guy is added, and you have to shoot them to get more stars. Sometimes they shoot back at you, or even at each other.
The catch: Their behavior is totally determined by your actions in previous levels. If you hang out near a wall and spray a machine gun wildly, on the next level there will be a new bad guy who does the exact same thing, and you’ll have to shoot him with a bazooka or shotgun or whatever the game has armed you with.
The result is an exponential increase in violence from level to level. The game has no set limit on the number of levels, and eventually you’ll be overwhelmed and destroyed by the perpetually repeating actions of one of your past selves.

The game was created by Paolo Pedercini, who previously created "Unmanned" (a game about drone pilots) "Operation Pedopriest" (a satirical game about the Catholic Church); Free Culture; McDonald's Video Game; and most notoriously, Phone Story, a game about mobile phone manufacture that was banned from the Ios App Store (you can still get it for Android).

Pedercini normally gives his games away, but he's asking for pay-what-you-like donations this time to fund a workshop series called "Imagining Better Living Through Play," an "initiative is meant to help activists and grassroots organizations make games for social change and personal empowerment."

The Best Amendment Indie Game Takes On the NRA [Wired/Ryan Rigney]

Just look at this liquid nitrogen-dipped banana being shot with a steel bearing.

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 19:10:25 +0000

Just look at it.

I Broke my Banana (Thanks, Philip!)

Kalashnikov made of bones

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 02:35:17 +0000

New Zealand artist Bruce Mahalski has put a new sculpture of an AK47 assembled from animal bones up for sale, with a starting bid of NZD3500. It's quite a beautiful piece of work.

The latest bone gun by New Zealand bone artist – Mahalski – is a life-size AK47 machine gun(330mm x 940mm) featuring found animal bones from rabbit, stoat, ferret, sheep, hawk, pheasant, wallaby, snapper, snake, blackbird, tarakihi, hedgehog, broad-billed prion , shear water, thrush, seal ,cat and possum (plus part of a skull from the extinct moa ). The gun is made entirely of bones mounted on an invisible wooden frame and is displayed standing upright on two rods on a piece of recycled matai timber (1130mm x 2000mm). You can see more pictures at - www.mahalski.org

KALASHNIKOV - AK47 (LIFE-SIZE REPLICA) Brand new item (Thanks, Bruce!)

Assemblage raygun

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:45:38 +0000

The latest piece from mad assemblage sculptor Roger Wood is this delightful ray-gun: "Another mental health break from clocks with this Steampunk ray gun and charging stand."

Cody R Wilson's 3D-printed guns: the VICE documentary

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:17:44 +0000

Erin Lee Carr produced this VICE Motherboard documentary on Cody R Wilson of Defense Distributed (DD), who "figured out how to print a semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of his own home" and is now spreading the gospel of "wiki weapons." Yes, they even have a manifesto.

Wilson, who recently pitched his ideas at SXSW, is sharing the HOWTO online and encouraging others to join him.

This is a story about the rapid evolution of a technology that has forced the American legal system to play catch up. Cody Wilson, a 24 year old University of Texas Law student, is an advocate for the open source production of firearms using 3D printing technology. This makes him a highly controversial figure on both sides of the gun control issue. MOTHERBOARD sat down with Cody in Austin, Texas to talk about the constitution, the legal system, and to watch him make and test-fire a 3D-printed gun.

A related item at VICE by Adam Clark Estes reports on the reaction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

The government doesn't seem entirely sure what to think of Wilson's own institution. I talked to a number of ATF representatives, all of whom sent a similar message: 3D-printed gun technology has arrived, but it's not good enough yet to start figuring out how to regulate it. "We are aware of all the 3D printing of firearms and have been tracking it for quite a while," Earl Woodham, spokesperson for the ATF field office in Charlotte, told me. "Our firearms technology people have looked at it, and we have not yet seen a consistently reliable firearm made with 3D printing."

Muzzle-suppressor shot glasses

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 18:56:44 +0000

A mere $200 gets you this pelicanoid case with four of Muzzleshot's muzzle-suppressor-shaped shot-glasses, machined from solid aluminum and covered in a matte black anodized finish.

Muzzleshot (via OhGizmo)

Proposed Maryland anti-zero-tolerance law would tell schools to stop suspending kids who point their fingers at each other and say "bang"

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:37:23 +0000

Maryland State Senator J.B. Jennings (R) has introduced Senate Bill 1058, The Reasonable School Discipline Act of 2013, which is aimed at ending the incredibly stupid "zero tolerance" policies that result in kids being suspended or expelled for pointing a stick at another kid and saying "bang!" Here's the preamble:

FOR the purpose of prohibiting a principal from suspending or expelling a student who brings to school or possesses on school property a picture of a gun, a computer image of a gun, a facsimile of a gun, or any other object that resembles a gun but serves another purpose; prohibiting a principal from suspending or expelling a student who makes a hand shape or gesture resembling a gun…

Lenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy sums up some of the incidents that inspired the bill: "the Hello Kitty bubble gun, and the Lego gun, and the imaginary grenade throw in a game of imaginary save-the-world, and last but not least the terrifying pastry gun."

Zero-tolerance is the same thing as zero-intelligence. You don't need human beings to enforce zero-tolerance systems -- if you want to run schools on the basis of "zero-tolerance," you could fire all the teachers and replace them with Commodore PET personal computers running very short BASIC programs.

Right to Bear Gun-Shaped Pop-Tarts Law Drafted

(Image: Gun, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pedroalonso's photostream)

Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak? [Part 2]

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:00:29 +0000

Part 2 of Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak?

The town of Macapá is in the north of Brazil, on the coast, where the Amazon River flows into the Atlantic. On December 5th, 2001, Sir Peter Blake and his crew decided to spend the night there. They were on their way back to the ocean after a journey down the Amazon, documenting the effects of climate change for the National Geographic Society.

That night, while their guard was down, a group of masked bandits boarded the boat.

When we talk about gun ownership, one of the primary things we talk about is self-defense. Having a gun makes some people feel safer. That’s a perfectly legitimate reason to want a gun, from a personal perspective. But from a public perspective—the place where laws are built—what we want to know is not whether people feel safer with guns, but whether they actually are safer.

The pirates who boarded Peter Blake’s boat had guns. So did Peter Blake. One of the robbers used his gun to threaten the life of a crewmember. Blake used his to shoot the robber in the hand.

But then Blake’s gun jammed. While he tried to get it to work, a second robber shot him in the back, killing him.

No one else on the boat was seriously injured. After the murder, the robbers gathered up what little haul they could—some watches, a couple of cameras, a dinghy with an outboard motor—and fled.

This tragic story illustrates one of the big questions about gun ownership that science can’t yet answer and politicians don’t yet know how to address. Did having a gun make Peter Blake and his crew safer? It’s possible that, had he not fought back and died, the robbers would have hurt more people. Did having a gun make Peter Blake and his crew less safe? It’s possible that, had no man with a rifle emerged from below decks, then the robbers would have just taken their relatively unimportant booty and been on their way.

It’s also completely possible that Blake’s gun, or hypothetical lack thereof, had no real impact on the final outcome. Other factors—the robbers’ desperation, local laws, how the pirates and the crew interacted—might have mattered more.

The fact is, we can speculate, but we don’t know. And not just in this particular instance. On a broad scale, we don’t know whether having more guns makes a society safer, or less safe. Or, really, whether it has any effect at all.

That was the conclusion reached by a panel of experts who reviewed gun research in the United States back in 2004. Since then, the situation hasn’t changed, says Charles Wellford, professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Maryland and the panel’s chairman.

But this statement doesn’t mean there hasn’t been research on the subject. In fact, in their report for the National Academy of Sciences, the committee actually wrote that this topic—specifically as it relates to laws that allow law-abiding citizens to carry a gun in public—has “a large body of research” behind it. The problem, the report says, is that none of this research has managed to make a definitive case one way or the other. Many studies exist. Those studies all produced results. It’s not like the scientists finished their papers with, “In conclusion: We aren’t sure.” It’s just that individual papers only tell you so much. To actually understand what’s going on, you have to evaluate that large body of research, as a whole.

Scientists are missing some important bits of data that would help them better understand the effects of gun policy and the causes of gun-related violence. But that’s not the only reason why we don’t have solid answers. Once you have the data, you still have to figure out what it means. This is where the research gets complicated, because the problem isn’t simply about what we do and don’t know right now. The problem, say some scientists, is that we —from the public, to politicians, to even scientists themselves—may be trying to force research to give a type of answer that we can’t reasonably expect it to offer. To understand what science can do for the gun debates, we might have to rethink what “evidence-based policy” means to us.

* * *

Research on the relationship between safety and gun ownership dates back to 1997, when economists John Lott and David Mustard published a now-famous paper asserting that right-to-carry laws had drastically reduced violent crime in states that enacted them between 1977 and 1992.

This was not the final word on the subject. Since then, other scientists have published papers critiquing this work—in particular, the fact that the decrease in crime Lott and Mustard found turned out to be complicated by a nationwide decrease in crime that began in roughly the late 1980s. To this day, nobody knows exactly why that decrease happened, but right-to-carry laws can’t explain it. And it makes it hard to say that the decreases in crime Lott and Mustard found were actually related to those laws, and not the larger trend. Some of the critical papers just say that the more guns, less crime hypothesis hasn’t actually been proven. Others, though, assert basically the opposite—that right-to-carry laws have actually increased certain kinds of violent crime.

For the most part, there aren’t a lot of differences in the data that these studies are using. So how can they reach such drastically different conclusions? The issue is in the kind of data that exists, and what you have to do to understand it, says Charles Manski, professor of economics at Northwestern University. Manski studies the ways that other scientists do research and how that research translates into public policy.

“What scientists think of as the best kind of data, you just don’t have that,” he said. This problem goes beyond the missing pieces I told you about in the first part of this series. Even if we did have those gaps filled in, Manski said, what we’d have would still just be observational data, not experimental data.

“We don’t have randomized, controlled experiments, here,” he said. “The only way you could do that, you’d have to assign a gun to some people randomly at birth and follow them throughout their lives. Obviously, that’s not something that’s going to work.”

This means that, even under the best circumstances, scientists can’t directly test what the results of a given gun policy are. The best you can do is to compare what was happening in a state before and after a policy was enacted, or to compare two different states, one that has the policy and one that doesn’t. And that’s a pretty inexact way of working.

To understand this problem a little better, let’s take a look at something totally unrelated to gun policy—body piercings.

* * *

Pick a random person—someone in your office, maybe, or a passerby out on the street. It doesn’t really matter whom. But once you’ve chosen them, you have a job to do. You need to count the number of piercings they have.

Up front, this seems pretty simple. You can easily see whether your person is wearing earrings, or if she has a nose stud. But it gets harder when we start talking about the potential piercings that aren’t easily observable. For the sake of this experiment, you’re not allowed to strip your person down to their skivvies. And you can’t just go ask them, either. After a certain point, you are going to have to start making assumptions. If your person is wearing a three-piece business suit and has no visible piercings, you might decide that there’s a good chance they aren’t hiding any, either. If you have reason to suspect that your person has a nipple pierced, then you can reason that, most likely, they have both nipples pierced.

Add in enough assumptions, and you can eventually come up with an estimate. But is the estimate correct? Is it even close to reality? That’s a hard question to answer, because the assumptions you made—the correlations you drew between cause and effect, what you know and what you assume to be true because of that—might be totally wrong.

For instance, John Donohue, professor of law at Stanford University, is one of those researchers who think having more guns on the street increases the risk of aggravated assaults. Basically, he thinks that guns are more likely to escalate a tense situation than to diffuse it or prevent it from happening in the first place. But the 2004 National Academies report came to the conclusion that he’d not proved his case any more than Lott and Mustard had proven theirs. And this is why. When I spoke with Donohue, he acknowledged that he could be missing factors in his analysis of the data and that cause and effect might not be tied together in the way he thinks they are.

“There’s always the apprehension that the states that pass [right-to-carry laws] also happen to be the states that were more likely to do a better job of counting aggravated assaults,” he said. “Or maybe those are the state that have laws requiring police to prosecute batters. Things like that could muddy up the results.” It’s hard to tease apart the effect of one specific change, compared to the effects of other things that could be happening at the same time.

This process of taking the observational data we do have and then running it through a filter of assumptions plays out in the real world in the form of statistical modeling. When the NAS report says that nobody yet knows whether more guns lead to more crime, or less crime, what they mean is that the models and the assumptions built into those models are all still proving to be pretty weak.

In fact, that’s the key problem at the heart of the debate over whether more guns means less or more crime, John Pepper said. Pepper is an economics professor at The University of Virginia, and one of the researchers involved in the 2004 NAS report. He’s written articles criticizing the methods of both John Lott and John Donohue and he said that he sees this particular branch of research as locked in a sort of spinning wheel—constantly producing variations on a theme, but never able to answer the questions correctly. From either side of the debate, he said, scientists continue to produce wildly different conclusions using the same data. On either side, small shifts in the assumptions lead the models to produce different results. Both factions continue to choose sets of assumptions that aren’t terribly logical. It’s as if you decided that anybody with blue shoes probably had a belly-button piercing. There’s not really a good reason for making that correlation. And if you change the assumption—actually, belly-button piercings are more common in people who wear green shoes—you end up with completely different results.

“It’s been a complete waste of time, because we can’t validate one model versus another,” Pepper said. Most likely, he thinks that all of them are wrong. For instance, all the models he’s seen assume that a law will affect every state in the same way, and every person within that state in the same way. “But if you think about it, that’s just nonsensical,” he said.

What you’re left with is an environment where it’s really easy to prove that your colleague’s results are probably wrong, and it’s easy for him to prove that yours are probably wrong. But it’s not easy for either of you to make a compelling case for why you’re right.

Statistical modeling isn’t unique to gun research. It just happens to be particularly messy in this field. Scientists who study other topics have done a better job of using stronger assumptions and of building models that can’t be upended by changing one small, seemingly randomly chosen detail. It’s not that, in these other fields, there’s only one model being used, or even that all the different models produce the exact same results. But the models are stronger and, more importantly, the scientists do a better job of presenting the differences between models and drawing meaning from them.

“Climate change is one of the rare scientific literatures that has actually faced up to this,” Charles Manski said.

What he means is that, when scientists model climate change, they don’t expect to produce exact, to-the-decimal-point answers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces these big reports periodically, which analyze lots of individual papers. In essence, they’re looking at lots of trees and trying to paint you a picture of the forest. IPCC reports are available for free online, you can go and read them yourself. When you do, you’ll notice something interesting about the way that the reports present results.

The IPCC never says, “Because we burned fossil fuels and emitted carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then the Earth will warm by x degrees.” Instead, those reports present a range of possible outcomes … for everything. Depending on the different models used, different scenarios presented, and the different assumptions made, the temperature of the Earth might increase by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.

On the one hand, that leaves politicians in a bit of a lurch. The response you might mount to counteract a 1.5 degree increase in global average temperature is pretty different from the response you’d have to 4.5 degrees. On the other hand, the range does tell us something valuable: the temperature is increasing.

Now, you could fiddle with the dials to produce a more exact result. That’s perfectly possible. But, in doing so, you might have to settle on a set of assumptions that don’t necessarily reflect reality. You can increase the pinpoint accuracy of your result. Unfortunately, you might do so at the expense of the reliability of that result.

But that is is precisely what gun research tends to do, Manski and Pepper said. “Policy makers don’t like ranges. You don’t get called in front of Congress to testify with a range,” Pepper said.

What might a range look like, applied to crime and violence? As a hypothetical, let’s think about the impact of having a death penalty. We don’t really know whether the death penalty saves innocent lives or not, Manski said. But with some work, we could theoretically get down to a range. We could say something like, “The impact of the death penalty could fall anywhere between saving five innocent lives and losing two.” That’s the kind of range you’d get when you’re talking about whether more guns means more or less crime.

How do you get there? Manski explained it as a process; you start out looking at your data with no assumptions at all. If we were counting body piercings, we’d only be looking at the ones we can see with our own two eyes. Then you slowly add in only the strongest possible assumptions—the piercings you can kind of see an outline of through clothing. That gives you a range of possible answers. “These ranges tell you something, but not an awful lot,” Manski said. “So now let’s start thinking about what assumptions might be believable and what do they buy me?” Try adding a few assumptions with really strong logic behind them—somebody with multiple face piercings is likely to have more than one non-visible piercing. Bit by bit, you can narrow down the range, in a believable way, until you get something like, “This person probably has between 1 and 4 piercings. “ To narrow down even further, you might look at the ranges produced by a couple of different models, and see where they overlap. “You lay out a whole menu of results. It’s different from the present research, which is done in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion,” Manski said.

* * *

The problem with this is that it flies in the face of what most of us expect science to do for public policy. Politics is inherently biased, right? The solutions that people come up with are driven by their ideologies. Science is supposed to cut that Gordian Knot. It’s supposed to lay the evidence down on the table and impartially determine who is right and who is wrong.

But how do those expectations apply if the best answer we can actually get to the question of whether guns make us safer is something along the lines of, “The likely effects of right-to-carry laws range from saving 500 lives annually to costing 500 lives annually.”

Manski and Pepper say that this is where we need to rethink what we expect science to do. Science, they say, isn’t here to stop all political debate in its tracks. In a situation like this, it simply can’t provide a detailed enough answer to do that—not unless you’re comfortable with detailed answers that are easily called into question and disproven by somebody else with a detailed answer.

Instead, science can reliably produce a range of possible outcomes, but it’s still up to the politicians (and, by extension, up to us) to hash out compromises between wildly differing values on controversial subjects. When it comes to complex social issues like gun ownership and gun violence, science doesn’t mean you get to blow off your political opponents and stake a claim on truth. Chances are, the closest we can get to the truth is a range that encompasses the beliefs of many different groups.

“In politics, being evidence-based isn’t as simple as science telling you exactly what you should do,” Manski said. “I see scientists promising stuff they can’t deliver. You have people saying they know for sure, but the way they know is by making assumptions that have really low credibility.”

Photos: Reuters / Nick Adams and Andrew Winning

Bang bang: Science, violence, and public policy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:39:07 +0000

I was on CBC Radio 1's Day 6 last weekend, talking about some of the reasons why scientists can't answer key questions about guns — whether current gun policies do anything to reduce violent crime, for instance, or whether more guns cause less (or more) violence. In a related debate, you should also read the article on the science of video games and real-life violence that Brandon Keim wrote for PBS' NOVA. The truth is that this branch of science also has big problems connecting cause and effect and, as with gun policy research, the best kinds of experiments can't really be done for logistical and ethical reasons.

Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:40:56 +0000

“Our daughter lives about a mile from us, in a rural area. One night, while her son and husband were away, she comes over to visit. She’s over 40 now, but still, when she leaves, I say, ‘give me a call when you get home’.”

Charles Wellford is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at The University of Maryland. He’s a scientist who studies how social systems work, an expert in the process of homicide investigations. He knows far more about crime than the average American, but that doesn’t stop him from being scared in a very normal, average way.

On this particular night, Wellford waited the 10 minutes he thought it would take his daughter to get home, but he didn’t hear anything. At first, he figured it was no big deal. He rationalized that she must have gotten delayed. But then 20 minutes, went by and the phone was still silent. At 30 minutes, Wellford tried calling his daughter. Nobody answered. He waited a few minutes and dialed the number a second time. The phone rang. The voicemail picked up. This was the point where Charles Wellford really started to worry.

“So I went upstairs and I got a revolver and got in my car and drove out there,” he told me. “I pull up, and her car is there and all the lights are on everywhere. Now I’m convinced – somebody was in the house. Someone else was there when she got home. I get the gun and I start walking towards the house. And that’s when my daughter comes out of the barn,” he said.

“She’d just started doing chores and she’d forgotten to call.”

This is more than just a story about a jumpy father, worried for his child’s safety. It’s a story that illustrates how complicated and flawed the science on gun use and gun violence is in the United States.

If you were studying gun use, and you wanted to know how often guns were used in self-defense, how would you categorize Charles Wellford’s experience?

If you look at real-world research, Wellford said, the answer is far from consistent. Some research papers would classify his story an example of defensive gun use. Others wouldn’t. And that difference in definitions is part of why we don’t have solid answers to the big questions about gun violence, gun ownership, and the effects of gun laws.

Wellford doesn’t study guns, himself.. But in 2004, he served as the chairman on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed a huge amount of gun violence research and presented a sort of “state-of-the-field” report summarizing what we know, what we don’t know, and why.

The results were less than glowing. In the executive summary, the committee wrote that, despite lots of research, it was still impossible to answer some of the most pressing questions surrounding gun violence. The paper does its best to praise researchers for the good work they have produced – this isn’t a situation where we know absolutely nothing about gun use, gun ownership, and the impact of gun laws. But the committee members I spoke with were also critical of the field, and say that the confidence politicians, lobbyists, and activists put in this research is seriously premature.. Gun violence research suffers from a lack of consistently recorded data and, for that matter, a lack of data, in general. As John Pepper, associate economics professor at The University of Virginia and the study director on the 2004 report, put it, “The data are just terrible.”

Worse, critics say the methods used to analyze that data are also deeply flawed in many cases. What you end up with, researchers told me, is a field where key pieces of the puzzle are missing entirely and where multiple scientists are reaching wildly different conclusions from the exact same data sets. For instance, because of those differences in the definition of “defensive gun use” some researchers will tell you that Americans use a gun to defend themselves something like 1.5 million times every year. Others say it happens maybe 200,000 times annually.

That kind of variability does not create an environment where it is easy to craft evidence-based policy, and the situation has not improved since 2004, Wellford said.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a short piece here at BoingBoing, briefly addressing these issues. That piece was written quickly, mostly by reading a few review analyses. Because gun violence – and how to deal with it – continues to be a major issue in our society, I wanted to come back to these questions and dig a little deeper. We know that gun violence research is deeply flawed. We know that it cannot currently answer the questions we need it to answer. But why? What, specifically, is missing? What about this field is broken? And how do we fix it?

According to scientists who do gun research, scientists who were involved in the National Academies review, and scientists who study the way other scientists do research, there are two key problems. First is the issue of missing and poorly matched data. Second, there are also serious problems with the mathematical models scientists use to analyze that data, and with the type of conclusions they attempt to draw from it. In this first of a two-part series, I’m going to focus on the data.

About 11,000 Americans died at the end of a gun in 2010. We know that because the basic, Clue-esque information on who is killed, where, and with what gets documented by local law enforcement agencies – all of which is, in turn, compiled by the FBI into the Uniform Crime Report. This system has been around since 1930.

The other primary source of this kind of information is the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System. It’s been around since 2002 and collects more-detailed information than the Uniform Crime Report. For one thing, it includes suicides. When I say that guns killed 11,000 people in 2010, I’m only talking about deaths that were classified as homicides. Another thing the CDC records do is link deaths to other pieces of information – like previous domestic violence calls -- that can help researchers understand what lead up to the death. Unfortunately, only 18 states participate in that system.

In 1989, the FBI also started collecting more-detailed reports of crimes – including crimes that might involve a gun, but not be homicides – as part of the National Incident Based Reporting System. But that system is still used by only a small minority of law enforcement agencies.

Taken all together, these reporting systems give scientists a place to start. But it’s just that. A place to start. It’s a nice diagram of your street. It’s not a road map showing you the way to your cousin’s house in Cleveland.

One of the big problems is something that you’ve already seen here – definitions. How one person collecting data classifies a type of crime can be different from how somebody else does it, and neither of those might really capture the details of specific cases.

Mark Hoekstra is an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. He’s been studying the effects of stand-your-ground laws – legislation that changes the way the law expects people to act when they feel threatened. Historically (and this is dating back to English common law), you were expected to remove yourself from a threatening situation, rather than attacking the person you felt threatened by … unless the situation happened within your own home. Stand-your-ground laws basically expand the places and situations where it’s legally acceptable to go straight to “fight” without first attempting “flight”.

So what happens when a state institutes a stand-your-ground law? A good way to study this, as you might guess, is to start by looking at the rates of justifiable homicides and the rates of criminal homicides and see how each change after the law takes effect. The good news is that the FBI has a standardized definition of what “justifiable homicide” means.

The problem: The FBI definition doesn’t necessarily capture the full story of what’s going on. The FBI calls justifiable homicide “the killing of a felon during commission of a felony”, Hoekstra said. There are only about 200-300 of those reported annually in the entire country, he said. But nobody knows whether that is because justifiable homicide is actually rare, or whether it’s more common, but not captured by the reporting system. Remember, what’s happening here is that somebody puts another tick mark under one category or another. The details of how specific shootings happened and why don’t usually make it into the record.

It’s easy to imagine lots of situations that wouldn’t fit neatly into the FBI definitions. “Like one guy breaks a beer bottle and hits the other guy with it, and the guy who got hit shoots and kills the first guy,” Hoekstra said. “According to the FBI handbook, that’s not legally justifiable. But you don’t know the specific details of the case. In reality, you can imagine a situation where that scenario was deemed justifiable. You can also imagine a situation where it would be criminal and the guy would go to prison.”

That makes it difficult for people like Hoekstra to study justifiable homicide, and it makes it difficult for lay people, like you and I, to understand what’s going on when we hear about stuff like this in the news or see statistics repeated on a Facebook JPEG. There’s a lot of room for people and organizations to take a concept – what happens when states institute stand-your-ground laws, say – and fiddle with different ways of counting until they end up being able to make the statement they want to make. What’s more, those folks can all probably make a decent case for why they chose to tally up the numbers the way they did. It’s not really as simple as someone lying to you and someone not. At least, not always. When data and definitions don’t capture the full story, it leaves room for reasonable (and unreasonable) people to group the numbers in different ways.

Whether you think it’s the guns or the people that kill people, you’re bound to agree that homicide isn’t the only kind of violence guns end up involved in. Guns are part of burglaries. They’re used as a threat in of some kinds of rape. They’re used to harass and intimidate victims of domestic violence. Sometimes, people who are shot with guns don’t die. Sometimes, people shoot themselves, whether accidentally or intentionally.

All of those things are, presumably, affected in some way by the availability of guns and by the regulations that we place on guns. This isn’t just about people killing one another. But research on gun violence tends to focus on homicide. And there’s a very good reason for that.

“Start with deaths and go down from there to shooting yourself in the hand,” Charles Wellford explained. “As you go down that continuum, the comprehensiveness and quality of the data decreases.”

There’s a lot we just don’t know when it comes to how guns are used and misused in a whole range of violent events. The simple explanation is that a dead body is hard to hide. Murders get reported to police. The police generally follow up on those cases and report them to the FBI. Other crimes are much more of a patchwork, said John Donohue, professor of law at Stanford Law School. People may or may not call the cops to report domestic violence or an assault by someone they know. If the cops are called, the situation may or may not be taken seriously enough that it’s logged in any meaningful way. And if the violent incident in question isn’t technically a crime – shooting yourself in the foot, for instance, or drunkenly blowing a hole in your mother-in-law’s garage on the 4^th of July – there’s no reason why that information would be reported to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, to begin with.

All those things matter very much to the people who are trying to figure out how guns are used in our society and how gun use changes over time. But there’s not really a solid, nation-wide, uniform way of tracking any of it. So what we say we know about gun violence is almost always just a synonym for what we know about gun murders.

And that’s not the only information that is just flat-out missing.

Think about right-to-carry laws, which allow licensed individuals to pack heat in a holster or handbag, or even just slung over their shoulder at a JC Penny. Scientists like Donohue and Hoekstra study the effects of those laws by analyzing data on crime statistics – murders, and whatever else happens to be available in the states they’re researching. That information can help them get an idea of what’s going on. But to really understand how the specific conceal-carry laws affect those crime statistics you would need to know what people are actually doing with their newfound rights. How many people were carrying guns last year? How about this year? How often do they carry them? Where do they take them? That data simply doesn’t exist, Wellford told me.

Another thing we don’t have is reliable, long-term data on where the guns that are actually used in crimes come from. One of the ways we legislate gun use is through registration programs and systems that limit who can buy a gun legally. But if we don’t know whether guns used in crimes are purchased legally, illegally, or purchased legally and then sold or given illegally to a third party, we have no idea how to craft those laws or even if they make any difference at all.

Finally, consider the question of whether more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens serves as a deterrent to criminals. That’s a pretty basic argument that many people make, and scientists try to answer that question using lots of different methods. (For the record, the National Academies report came to the conclusion that the research is currently inconclusive on this. Right now, we don’t know whether having more guns means less crime, or more crime, or whether it has any effect at all. The research is all over the place and nobody has made a strong enough case to be conclusive.)

But here’s one thing nobody has ever done: Find out what the criminals think. That same issue also came up when John Pepper was involved in a National Academies panel considering research on the death penalty. “If you think about whether it has a deterrent effect, we know almost nothing, because we know almost nothing about how offenders perceive the risk of execution,” he told me. And the same is true of the risk of being shot by a potential victim.

Sixty years ago, nobody really knew how America had sex. Sure, scientists could guess sex was happening, based on the basic population numbers collected in the census. But who was doing it, when, with whom … that was all lost in the mists of incredibly awkward conversations that nobody wanted to have. Figuring out ways to collect and compile that data was a daunting task. And, in fact, a lot of people likely would have thought it was pretty invasive for scientists and government entities like the CDC to even want to know the answers to those questions.

But here we are, in 2013, and even if we don’t know exactly what people get up to between 9:35 and 9:37 on a Wednesday night, we do know a lot more about American sex habits. More importantly, we know how those sex habits affect other parts of people’s lives, and we know a lot more about how public policy affects both sex and quality of life. That matters. It’s uncomfortable, potentially invasive research that actually makes us aware of rapes and sexual assaults that go unreported in crime statistics. It’s that research that helps us track STD rates, and makes sure we notice when those patterns change for the better or worse. Research on sex means that we know more about teen sex, teen pregnancy rates, and how to reduce the latter.

“We made progress,” Charles Wellford told me. “There are lots of examples of difficult measurement issues and we didn’t just throw our hands up and walk away from them.”

We can solve the problems with gun violence data, scientists say, but it’s going to take funding and it’s going to take political willpower. There are a few key solutions that the researchers I spoke with suggested.

First, we need to expand the crime reporting systems that track a broader range of incidents and collect more detailed accounts of what actually happened in those incidents. That means expanding the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System from 18 states to 50. And it means getting more local law enforcement agencies using the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System. The basic Uniform Crime Report has been useful, they say, but it’s time to bring this kind of reporting into the 21^st century.

The harder task is going to be finding ways to collect a new kind of data. Wellford calls it the “left side variables”. If you think about the relationship between crime and guns as an equation, he said, all we really have right now is the information in the right-hand side of that equation. We have data on the occurrence of gun violence. What we’re missing is all the stuff that connects people to those guns.

“None of the surveys used to study other crimes, where you could include information about guns and then link that up to other things we care about like crime, labor markets, schooling outcomes … we just don’t have the data,” John Pepper said. “Take a simple question about correlation between gun ownership and crime, or gun ownership and suicide. We can’t even answer that.”

There are two ways to study questions like those. If you had a survey or some reports that could tell you how many gun owners in the state of Virginia had committed suicide, then you could compare that to suicides among people in Virginia who didn’t own guns. Alternately, you could take broadly aggregated data about how many suicides happen in the state of Virginia and broadly aggregated data about gun ownership rates in the state of Virginia, and you can compare those statistics to other states. You can easily tell that the former method is going to produce a much more accurate estimate of the relationship between gun ownership and suicide than the latter. But we have no way to do that.

Creating a system that allows scientists to gather that data might be objectionable to some people who own guns. But think of it this way. Right now, whatever your beliefs on guns happen to be, it’s incredibly difficult to back them up with solid science. If you want to be able to make any kind of statement about gun ownership and the effects thereof – and have anybody who doesn’t agree with you 100% actually take you seriously – then you should support better data. This should be the first step. Because right now, we don’t know enough to know definitively what effects guns have, or what effects gun policies have.

Better data would help that. But, unfortunately, it’s not the only thing that needs fixing. In my next post on gun violence research, I’ll focus in on the way scientists analyze data. To avoid misleading conclusions, we need good mathematical models. But some experts say we don’t have those. So what does that mean for the research scientists are publishing? And what does it tell us about the usefulness of evidence-based policy making, in general? Stay tuned.

Playing politics

This is a story about science, a peek behind-the-scenes at some of the factors that make it difficult for experts to come to definitive conclusions about how gun ownership and gun laws affect crime, violence, and self-defense. But, in a lot ways, it’s impossible to separate that from politics. Data and methodology are the gooey filling. Politics is the crust. It’s all one pie.

In particular, it’s important to acknowledge that politics is a big part of why some of the missing data discussed here is actually missing. This issue goes far beyond a simple lack of funding for the expansion of improved crime reporting systems.

For instance, in this piece, I mentioned that social scientists don’t have a good way to track where a gun used in a crime came from. And that problem isn’t unique to science – local law enforcement runs into the same roadblocks. From a practical perspective, this is an easy problem to solve. From a political perspective, it’s not – the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms is prohibited by law from setting up a national, centralized gun tracking system. While the agency does collect data on gun sales and background checks, it’s forced to regularly destroy some of that information. And it can’t share the information it does retain with any member of the public. This was a key complaint voiced by Charles Wellford and other scientists, who count as members of the public.

Another key problem, at least in the eyes of the researchers I spoke with, was the existence of Public Law 104-208 and Public Law 112-74. Passed in 1996 and 2011, respectively, these pieces of legislation included provisions that prevented first the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and then all Department of Health and Human Services agencies, from using federal funding to advocate or promote gun control. The language used in this legislation was both broad and vague. According to researchers I spoke with, those laws have had a chilling effect on government-funded scientists, who worried any research they did could be construed as gun-control advocacy if legislators didn’t like the results.

Charles Wellford described a meeting he attended he chaired recently, aimed at formulating research goals and figuring out how to fill in some of the most important blanks in gun violence research. Of the 15 people at the meeting, one was from the CDC. Throughout the meeting, the man began nearly every statement he made by first hedging, explaining that he didn’t want ideas attributed to him and that the CDC would never consider research directions he might personally recommend. “[That legislation] doesn’t say we can’t do research on, say, whether someone has a gun in their home, but careers were damaged and people lost jobs and that has a lasting effect,” Wellford said.

Not all research is done the same way or with an equal level of quality. John Pepper, for instance, was very critical of the gun violence research coming out of the public health sector, which would include work being done by the CDC. This kind of research often matches populations of people who have been subjected to violence to populations that have not and looks for commonalities and differences between them. But that perspective is based on modeling the spread of disease, not on modeling complex behaviors and decisions, Pepper said. He didn’t think it did a good job of dealing with questions of correlation vs. causation. “A gun isn’t a virus,” he said.

But, even so, Pepper thought the legal restrictions were unreasonable, and he thought they had a detrimental effect on gun violence research, in general, not just on the research coming out the public health tradition. For instance, some of the important work the CDC used to do, he said, included adding questions about gun ownership and gun violence to national surveys that tracked a wide variety of health issues and outcomes – data that would have been useful to social scientists and public health experts, alike.

Some of this may change in the future. On January 16^th, President Obama issued an executive action authorizing (and, in fact, mandating) the CDC to do gun violence research and collect better crime data. But the pesky money problem still exists. The action called for $10 million in funding for research and another $20 million in funding to expand the National Violent Death Reporting System. That cash, however, has to come from congress. And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that this is probably not the ideal time to push large spending bills through Capitol Hill.

For further reading on the political side of gun research:

• A New York Times story by Erica Goode and Sheryl Gay Stolberg that digs into the restrictions placed on the ATF.
• Justin George of The Baltimore Sun writes about the ATF restrictions and the problems this presents for policy making.
• A CBS Evening News report by Mark Strassman on the legislation that blocked gun research at the CDC.

Supersonic ping-pong-ball gun leaves cartoonish ball-shaped hole in hapless paddles

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 02:27:24 +0000

The finest moments in physics instruction always involves something going bang, blam, or boom, and this is no exception: Purdue's prof Mark French and grad students Craig Zehrung and Jim Stratton built a supersonic ping-pong-ball gun that attains supersonic muzzle velocity:

To demonstrate the conversion of subsonic to supersonic flow, Prof. French and his team designed the gun shown above. The end of the pressure vessel is sealed with laminating tape. Both the nozzle and the barrel are evacuated so the the gas flow is unobstructed. Overall, the gun is a bit less than 12 feet (3.65 m) in length.
To fire the gun, the pressure is increased in the pressure vessel until the tape breaks. French found that two layers of tape ruptured at about 60 psi (414 kPa), and three layers at about 90 psi (620 kPa). The speed of the ball was measured using a high-speed camera viewing the ball moving against a calibrated scale. A typical velocity was a bit over 1,448 km/h (900 mph) – nominally a velocity of Mach 1.23, which is about the top speed of the Soviet-era MIG-19 fighter.
The lead photo should convince the reader that this ping-pong gun is not a toy. The energy and momentum of the ping-pong ball is roughly the same as that of a .32 caliber ACP pistol – not the best choice for defense, to be sure, but quite lethal under the right circumstances.

Ping-pong gun fires balls at supersonic speeds [Gizmag/Brian Dodson]

(via DVICE)

Letters to Newtown: digitally archiving sympathy cards sent to town after school shooting massacre

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:01:51 +0000

In Mother Jones, the story behind "Letters to Newtown." This project was instigated by Boardwalk Empire prop-master, freelance illustrator, and Newtown resident Ross MacDonald, and it serves to digitally archive some of the half million cards, letters, and drawings sent to the town of Newtown, CT after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Jacques Hebert of Mother Jones, the magazine putting this all together with Tumblr, explains, "These messages of love, hope, and sadness have been on display in Newtown Town Hall, and have been viewed by many residents. To broaden access to these cards and preserve them as memories of what Newtown residents and the nation experienced on that tragic day, Mother Jones in partnership with Tumblr is launching the 'Letters to Newtown' project."

"The project will aim to digitally preserve these cards (the town of Newtown can't afford to store them any longer and many will be turned into ash for a future memorial site) by photographing them and uploading them to a special Tumblr for the world to see."

"We are overwhelmed," MacDonald writes in his post. "Residents like me, who were lucky enough to have our children come home that night; town leaders struggling to support the community and deal with the deluge of letters, toys, school supplies, and other donations sent to Newtown; and the volunteers who have been opening and sorting it all."

"In their shock and grief, people were compelled to make these intensely raw, personal expressions, and send them to a town they probably hadn't heard of before, not knowing if they would even reach us. They offered help, love, condolences, prayers. They came from children, parents, families, school classes, church groups, soldiers, mayors, survivors, inmates, and entire towns. The letters on display at town hall form a massive tapestry of a world's sorrow."

They're launching the Tumblr with 25 images, and adding 6 new ones every day.

(via Mike Mechanic)

Man walked into grocery carrying assault rifle. Not illegal.

David Pescovitz — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:29:35 +0000

On Sunday, a man walked into a Kroger grocery store in Charlottesville, Virginia with a loaded AR-15 assault rifle on his back. Why? Because he could. From NBC29:

Charlottesville police drew their guns on the man after witnesses reported he brought a gun into the store. They restrained the man to ask him questions, but released him after they confirmed he is not a convicted felon, owned the gun legally and it was not concealed.
Police say he was cooperative and did nothing illegal. Officers did find a note in his pocket spelling out his intent to express his 2nd Amendment rights.

"Kroger Gun Stunt Sparks 2nd Amendment Debate" (Thanks, David Steinberg!)

Pennsylvania kindergartener uses Hello Kitty bubble-gun at school, suspended for "terrorist threat"

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 19:43:06 +0000

Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania suspended a five-year-old girl for pointing a Hello Kitty bubble-gun at another student, characterizing this as a "terrorist threat." The little girl had to undergo psychiatric evaluation before she was allowed back in. Her parents say that they couldn't get their daughter into another school, because no one wanted a kid with "terrorist" on her transcript. They're considering a lawsuit.

The school claims "the information supplied to the media may not be consistent with the facts" but declines to correct the record. They do, however, offer this empty, mealy-mouthed rubbish: "The Mount Carmel Area School District takes the well-being and safety of students and staff very seriously."

The kindergartner, who attends Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Pennsylvania, caught administrators’ attention after suggesting she and a classmate should shoot each other with bubbles.
“I think people know how harmless a bubble is. It doesn’t hurt,” said Robin Ficker, an attorney for the girl’s family. According to Ficker, the girl, whose identity has not been released, didn’t even have the bubble gun toy with her at school.

Kindergartner Suspended Over Bubble Gun Threat (via Reddit)

Improvised "Chechen" firearms

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 17:12:44 +0000

From English Russia, original source unknown, "These are the Chechen homemade guns. There is a risk that the war will never end if they use such weapons..." No way to tell how accurate that description is -- Chechens are such bogeymen in the Russian press-pantheon that I always take anything ascribed to them with a grain of salt.

Assorted Russia, Part 65 (some NSFW stuff on this page) (via Kadrey)

Man points gun at politician's face

Rob Beschizza — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 18:58:27 +0000

*click*

A helpful reminder: Video game consumption is not correlated with gun violence

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:12:14 +0000

The focus on video games as a source of American gun violence is driving me a bit crazy, so I just wanted to toss some evidence out there. Even though most of you have likely long suspected the two things were not related, you'll be happy to know that science agrees with you. Consider this a helpful kit for forwarding to concerned relatives. Here's a 10-country comparison that found no correlation between video game consumption and gun violence. Here's a Harvard Medical School summary that explains why some people claim video games cause violence, and why the studies behind those claims aren't actually telling us that. And here's a PBS FAQ explaining a lot of the same issues. With violent video games (as with everything else) context matters.

Piers Morgan interviews "Deport Piers Morgan" guy

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 04:17:16 +0000

I don't quite know what I expected.

Trailer for Warren Ellis's Gun Machine: narrated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by Ben Templesmith

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 17:13:55 +0000

On New Year's Day, I posted a review of Warren Ellis's new novel Gun Machine, a taut, supernatural hard-boiled cop novel set in NYC. Now there's an accompanying trailer, narrated by Wil Wheaton and drawn by the incomparable Ben Templesmith, a real happy mutant trifecta.

(Thanks, Warren!)