Another mass shooting. Will any new laws work? Democrats and Republicans will forever argue about the effectiveness of gun laws to prevent mass shootings. But what does the latest academic research show? The short answer is that many proposed laws probably would not have much impact on curbing the mass shootings that dominate the news. But they could lessen their severity, and might also bring down overall gun violence. While it is generally correct that states with tougher gun laws tend to have lower gun fatality rates, those rankings change when suicides — which make up about 60 percent of gun deaths — are excluded. Rural areas, which may have less restrictive gun laws, have a lot of suicides of older single men who become lonely. Access to guns is believed to triple the risk of suicide, according to a 2014 study. In a comprehensive report, we offered a summary of key research on the effectiveness of various laws, either at the federal or state level: an assault-weapons ban, restrictions on large-capacity magazines, universal background checks and Firearms prohibitions based on mental health. Please click the link to read the full report. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. An exclusive look inside the Afghan evacuation Nine months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a question still lingers: Which Afghans actually managed to get on the planes after the fall of Kabul? The numbers often are obscured in reports written in dense government prose, and U.S. officials are reluctant to discuss the figures in on-the-record interviews. But a review of these reports by the Fact Checker and extensive interviews with U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the process — several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose information that has not yet been made public — show that the evacuees can be broadly fit into three categories, with the smallest containing qualified Afghans who already held a special visa to come to the United States because they worked for the U.S. government. Of particular note: more than 30,000 of these people, and their families, are associated with the CIA, according to U.S. government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The officials said this group of evacuees consisted of members of a controversial paramilitary group known as the Khost Protection Force (KPF) as well as people who worked directly with U.S. forces while employed by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the former Afghan national intelligence and security service. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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