Let’s Get the Facts to Reduce Gun Violence

With opponents of gun control already trotting out the line that President Obama’s new proposals aren’t worth pursuing because they won’t work, it is worth recalling the famous words of Mr. Gradgrind, the dictatorial headmaster in Dickens’s “Hard Times”: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Doubtless, Gradgrind went a bit far with his empiricism: informed reasoning also requires theorizing and allowing the imagination to roam. But if the theory gets detached from reality, as it did, for example, in macroeconomics during recent decades, the consequences can be disastrous. When it comes to policy making, it pays to recall Gradgrind: the first requirement is a strong grounding in empirical reality.

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