Word’s getting out to rational people, even those who appear to know little to nothing about guns.
Why a military-style weapons ban may do little to stop crime
President Joe Biden this week pushed for a ban on military-style weapons as an answer to the nation’s rise in gun violence.
But critics say little evidence supports the notion that such a ban, in force for a decade from 1994 to 2004, would reduce the crime rates gripping most cities in America.
And some jurisdictions are struggling to enforce gun laws already on the books, raising questions about how they would find the resources to enforce even stricter ones.
Guns that fall into the “assault weapons” category are indeed used in just a fraction of crimes, data show.
According to an analysis from the National Institutes of Health, “most estimates suggest less than 7%” of the firearms used for “crime in general” were “assault weapons.”
Most of the violent crimes that occurred in 2020 were committed with handguns, FBI data show.
Rifles, on the other hand, were responsible for fewer homicides in 2020 than knives or a perpetrator’s fists and feet. Rifles, which typically fall into the loosely defined “assault weapons” category, were specified as the weapon in less than 3% of homicides in 2020. Handguns were specified as the weapon in 45% of homicides.
Biden floated a renewal of the “assault weapons” ban during a speech Tuesday that the White House billed as his answer to the problem of rising crime rates nationwide. However, when he brought up the need for such a ban, he did so both in the context of street crime and mass shootings.
“We have to act for all those kids gunned down on our streets every single day that never make the news. There’s a mass shooting every single day in this country in the streets of America — every single day,” Biden said during the speech in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The FBI’s definition of mass shooting involves “any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun,” and although the term typically evokes the image of a headline-grabbing school massacre, mass shootings can include street violence if the victim count reaches that threshold.
Biden appeared to be citing data from the Gun Violence Archive, a shooting tracker used by many news outlets and advocacy groups that defines mass shootings as any incident in which multiple people are shot, even if there is no loss of life. That figure supports Biden’s claim; however, when mass shootings are defined by the criteria historically used by law enforcement, the number of mass shootings this year drops far below an average of one per day.
“You know, we’re living in a country awash with weapons of war, weapons that weren’t designed to hunt, were designed to take on an enemy,” Biden said during the speech. “That’s what they’re designed to do. For God’s sake, what’s the rationale for these weapons outside of a war zone?”
Biden’s efforts to tie street violence to “assault weapons” ignore the reality of how criminals operate, said Amy Swearer, a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
“Most of the time when criminals are committing crimes in public, they want a type of firearm that is concealable, which is why they want handguns,” Swearer told the Washington Examiner.
She pointed to a 2004 study sponsored by the Justice Department that found no meaningful evidence the “assault weapons” ban had lowered gun violence.
“They should have taken it a step further and said, you’re also dealing with a ban, a prospective ban, with aspects of a firearm that aren’t inherently related to solving the problem of crime,” Swearer said.
That’s because pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and the other components of a rifle that typically classify it as an “assault weapon” don’t make the firearm inherently more useful to a committed mass shooter, she said.
The 2004 study noted that military-style weapons “were used in only a small fraction of gun crimes prior to the ban: about 2% according to most studies and no more than 8%.”
“Although the ban has been successful in reducing crimes with” such weapons in the decade it stood, the study noted that “any benefits from this reduction are likely to have been outweighed by steady or rising use of nonbanned semiautomatics with” large-capacity magazines, “which are used in crime much more frequently than” military-style weapons.
“Therefore, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” according to the study.