Gun Controllers Knew the Assault Weapons Ban Failed in 2004 and They Know It Now.

Marking the recent anniversary of the Clinton “assault weapons” ban, I circled back to McWhirter and Elinson’s American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15. The chapter on the halfhearted efforts to renew the expiring 1994 “asault weapon” ban is fascinating.

While the ban probably was never going to be renewed in the 2004 political environment, the book explains that a major reason renewal was DOA was that gun control groups didn’t think the ban had worked…and rightly so. More AR-15s and similar rifles were made during the ban than before it. They were just made in ban-compliant formats.

Police groups which had allied with gun control groups to pass the ban in 1994 didn’t lend their support to a renewal in 2004 because they saw for themselves that the ban didn’t work. Major gun control activists ultimately decided it wasn’t worth using their limited resources and political capital to fight for a renewal.

This is all hilarious in hindsight. Today, gun control activists falsely assert the ban totally worked and so we should enact another one. But they knew that wasn’t true in 2004 and they know it now.

While mass shootings have become all too common, the surge in mass shootings involving rifles really kicked off after 2010, not after 2004. The gun control industry’s arguments also ignore the relative rarity of such shootings before 1994.

Regardless, even if there were a decrease in mass shootings after 1994, it couldn’t have been due to the Clinton ban, because more semi-auto rifles were sold during the ban than before. And in a classic case of unintended consequences, the 1994 “assault weapons” ban is probably what made the AR15 the most popular rifle in the country.