It's All About the Feelz. And The Compulsion.

California has some fairly stringent firearms laws, with more coming into effect on January 1st. How have our laws been working so far?  Is California a true utopia yet?

A new academic study has found that, once again, gun laws are not having their desired effect.

A joint study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California at Davis Violence Prevention Research Program found that California’s much-touted mandated background checks had no impact on gun deaths, and researchers are puzzled as to why.

A major law was passed in 1991.

More than a quarter of a century later, researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC Davis dug into the results of the sweeping legislation. Researchers compared yearly gun suicide and homicide rates over the 10 years following implementation of California’s law with 32 control states that did not have such laws.

They found “no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.”

The findings, which run counter to experiences in Missouri and Connecticut that did show a link between background checks and gun deaths, appear to have startled the researchers.

When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts, right? I mean, science!  Well, statistics, anyway.

“We know at the individual level that comprehensive background check policies work, that they prevent future firearm violence at this level," said Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, a researcher who led the survey...

Apparently, to the Washington Post, California’s failure to effectively enforce background checks that had no discernible impact on gun deaths is evidence that more gun control laws are needed.

Essentially, the study’s authors, the AMA, and the Post appear incapable of seriously entertaining the possibility that sweeping gun control legislation might not have produced the results desired and expected: fewer deaths.

Any article that quotes Milton Friedman gets my attention:

California’s failed gun control law appears to be yet another example of experts, to quote the great Milton Friedman, judging “policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Liberals refuse to accept human nature, and the liberty foundation of moral psychology, when they bob their heads in unison and squeal for more gun control.  Those of us on the right know that gun control is far less about the gun and far more about the control.

Update:  And on a related note:

“Sugar taxes have not reduced obesity rates anywhere in the world and smoking is much more prevalent among the poor than among the rich, despite decades of high taxes on tobacco. There is precious little evidence that poor people benefit from being taxed. On the contrary, sin taxes drive them further into poverty.”