Actually, these rates have been declining for most of the decade. It's possible that the Brady Law had some influence across the nation as a whole, but that remains an unresolved question. It's highly likely that tough sentencing is the major influence. Also last week, a major review of violence in the weekly magazine Science reported a study of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Cincinnati and St. Louis found that every 10 percent increase in the number of people incarcerated was accompanied by a 15 percent to 20 percent decrease in killing. Brady Law or no, the number of firearms in civilian hands has been rising as the number of gun homicides has been declining.
Guns are dangerous things and require regulation as other dangerous things do.
And in deciding on those rules, more than anything else lawmakers and the public need to find out the facts and the meaning of the facts by the most hard-headed, rigorous analysis human beings can bring to bear. More studies like the one in the Journal of the AMA are exactly the kind that's needed. The instinctive horror and disgust we all feel on occasions like the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado are poor guides to policy.