I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. - The Washington Post

I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. - The Washington Post
"Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me.
I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way.
...I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be.
...When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.”
It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip.
But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick.
In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. 
An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer.
Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless..."
Read on!