[snip] Ask questions first, shoot later. A National Research Council committee that includes economists Joel Horowitz of Northwestern University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has found that nobody really knows whether popular measures against gun violence do any good (December 16 National Academics press release). For instance, there’s no credible evidence that right-to-carry laws either decrease or increase violent crime, and almost no evidence that violence-prevention programs intended to steer children away from guns actually do so. One big problem: researchers lack good information on who owns guns and how they’re used.
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[snip] “No theory of justice can free warriors from guilt,” writes Garry Wills, reviewing Michael Walzer’s book Arguing About War in the New York Review of Books (November 18). “They may have to kill, but they give rein to atrocities all the same, since even a just war is a fountain of evil.”
