Description: What Actually Works is a Second Amendment litigator's evidence-based approach to a debate that has been stuck for thirty years. Jonathan S. Goldstein defends the right to keep and bear arms; a brief he co-authored was among those cited in Justice Alito's concurrence in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. He writes not as a neutral, but as a partisan who believes a movement confident in its cause can afford to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
He asks the question we should all be asking: what policies measurably reduces the number of people shot and killed in America and how do we implement them? Follow the peer-reviewed evidence honestly and a pattern emerges. Focused-deterrence programs, violence interruption, the READI Chicago randomized trial, hospital-based violence intervention, and lethal-means counseling during suicidal crises have produced real, replicated reductions in shootings. They are also underfunded, underdeployed, and largely missing from the political conversation. This is an honest ledger, and the honesty cuts in every direction: the book reports findings that weigh against restrictions and findings that weigh for narrow, targeted ones, and it counts the civil-liberty and public-safety costs on every side. One principle sits above all of it - it rejects the medicalization of lawful gun ownership. Every clinical recommendation attaches to an event: a suicidal crisis, a gunshot wound, a concrete and imminent threat - never to a status, and never to the lawful owner or the mere fact of his gun ownership. Written for the clinician who treats the wounds, the policymaker who writes the laws, and the gun owner too often left out of a conversation that concerns him, What Actually Works trades slogans for evidence - and shows where real reductions in firearm injury and death are already being won.