WaPo Acknowledges That Present Gun-Control Proposals Wouldn’t Have Stopped ‘Major Shootings’

The Washington Post’s fact checker looks at gun control:

“None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.”

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). interview on CBS’s “This Morning,” Dec. 4, 2015

A colleague pointed out this statement by Marco Rubio as a possible fact check, suggesting that it was almost certainly incorrect. It posed an interesting challenge, given the reams of data to examine.

And was it “almost certainly incorrect,” as was reflexively assumed?

Nope. After going through the evidence at length the Post’s verdict was that:

Rubio’s statement stands up to scrutiny — at least for the recent past, as he framed it. Notably, three of the mass shootings took place in California, which already has strong gun laws including a ban on certain weapons and high-capacity magazines. Gun-control advocates often point to the experience in other countries that have enacted gun laws that heavily restrict gun ownership; as we have shown, quantitative measures of cross-comparative crime statistics, especially where the crime is not consistently defined (i.e., “mass shooting”), usually end up being apples-to-oranges comparisons. It is possible that some gun-control proposals, such as a ban on large-capacity magazines, would reduce the number of dead in a future shooting, though the evidence for that is heavily disputed. But Rubio was speaking in the past, about specific incidents. He earns a rare Geppetto Checkmark.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.