Will an Assault Weapons Ban Save Lives?

In fact, the nation had an assault weapons ban between 1994 and 2004 (when a sunset provision allowed it to expire).

So now we have another school shooting, and gun control advocates are calling for a renewal of the ban.

But since we actually had a ban for ten years, it’s not necessary to merely speculate on the effects of such a policy. There is evidence.

And the evidence is negative.

The most specific and thorough evaluation of the ban comes from scholars at the University of Pennsylvania. Commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, it was published in June 2004, evaluating the effects of the ban through 2003. It’s long and a bit complicated, but some quotes from the Executive Summary (Key Finding and Conclusions) tell the story:

Because the ban has not yet reduced the use of LCMs (large capacity magazines) in crime, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.

Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading.

Reading this report closely, if one wants to tease out the possibility of legislation to reduce gun violence, targeting large capacity magazines is a better idea than outlawing assault rifles. Of course, anybody with any shooting experience can quickly change a magazine, so it’s not clear this would help any. Especially since large capacity magazines will continue to be available in the black market, available for trade among gun buffs, and so on.

Other studies have found the same thing. In 2005 the National Research Council concluded that:

A recent evaluation of the short-term effects of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence outcomes (Koper and Roth, 2001b). Using state-level Uniform Crime Reports data on gun homicides, the authors of this study suggest that the potential impact of the law on gun violence was limited by the continuing availability of assault weapons through the ban’s grandfathering provision and the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban. Indeed, as the authors concede and other critics suggest (e.g., Kleck, 2001), given the nature of the intervention, the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small and, if there were any observable effects, very difficult to disentangle from chance yearly variation and other state and local gun violence initiatives that took place simultaneously.

Finally, a 2003 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined “51 studies that evaluated the effects of selected firearms laws on violence“ and concluded:

Evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of any of these laws . . .

The report went on the explain:

Results of studies of firearms and ammunition bans were inconsistent: certain studies indicated decreases in violence associated with bans, and others indicated increases. Several studies found that the number of banned guns retrieved after a crime declined when bans were enacted, but these studies did not assess violent consequences (16,17). Studies of the 1976 Washington, D.C. handgun ban yielded inconsistent results (18–20). Bans often include “grandfather” provisions, allowing ownership of an item if it is acquired before the ban, complicating an assessment of causality. Finally, evidence indicated that sales of firearms to be banned might increase in the period before implementation of the bans (e.g., the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994) (21).

In the wake of a mass shooting, the natural human reaction is to “do something.” That is a natural response. But there are two problems with it.

First, the moral panic may lead us to embrace policies that feel good, and not ask hard questions about whether we are making things better.

Second, the highly visible outrage over a school shooting may cause us to forget that the vast majority of children and youth killed in shootings are killed in very ordinary domestic disputes, robberies, gang shootouts, accidents, and so on.

Update

Even the New York Times has published an article critical of an assault weapons ban:

OVER the past two decades, the majority of Americans in a country deeply divided over gun control have coalesced behind a single proposition: The sale of assault weapons should be banned.

That idea was one of the pillars of the Obama administration’s plan to curb gun violence, and it remains popular with the public. In a poll last December, 59 percent of likely voters said they favor a ban.

But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.

It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.

Here We Go Again

Fact Check: Obama on Mass Shootings

From the Washington Post (December 1):

. . . President Obama said at a news conference, “I mean, I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.” Is his statement true?

In one sense, the answer would be “yes.” President Obama’s statement was in the form of: “Every time X happens, I say Y.” As a historic self-description of Obama’s own rhetoric, Obama’s statement is mostly true, but only in recent years. When President Obama was running for national office in 2007 through November 2012, he never used mass shootings to compare the United States unfavorably with other countries. Nor did he use mass murders as an occasion to make political demands for gun control. This was his rhetorical approach from the Virginia Tech murders in April 2007, through the Aurora theater murders in July 2012.

. . .

Thus, the President’s Dec. 1 statement is mostly accurate as a self-description of what he frequently says, at least from December 2012 onward.

Is the president’s statement about “other countries” accurate? No. For example, on Nov. 20, 2015, mass shooters attacked a hotel in Mali, murdering at least 19 people.

Although President Obama has relatives in Kenya, his statement suggests a lack of awareness of events there. On April 2, 2015, criminals murdered 142 students at the University College Campus of Garissa, in northeastern Kenya. Among the other mass shootings in Kenya in recent years are those as Lamu (29 murdered, July 5-6, 2014), Mpeketoni (53 murdered, June 15-17, 2014), Majembeni and Poromoko (15 murdered, two days after Mpekoni) and the Westgate Mall in Nairobi (67 murdered, Sept. 21, 2013). Kenya, by the way, has extremely strict laws against the possession or carrying of firearms, as well as bows, as I detailed in a Quinnipiac Law Review article with Joanne Eisen and the late Paul Gallant.

On Saturday, Boko Haram attackers murdered four people in Nigeria, and four more in Niger. Last weekend, four Egyptian policemen were murdered in a drive-by shooting. As reported by CBS News the day before Thanksgiving, “Two massacres that killed 15 people in less than 12 hours rocked Honduras and left the country’s top cop in tears on Wednesday.”

Perhaps President Obama does not know about the above events or believes that for some reason that mass shootings in Africa, Asia or Latin America don’t “count.” This is a surprising perspective for someone who, in his autobiography, claims to have closely studied the works of radical anti-colonialist “Franz [sic] Fanon” and to have spent much time discussing “Eurocentrism” with his Columbia University friends.

Suppose we accept the president’s implicit premise that “other countries” includes only the most-developed countries of the West. With this limitation, what is the accuracy of his statement that “these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries”? Plainly false, especially considering that the president was speaking in Paris, the site of multiple mass shootings on Nov. 13 and of the Charlie Hebdo mass shootings in January.

More generally, an October article in the Wall Street Journal looked at mass shootings in 14 countries from 2000 through 2014. The article reported the research of professors Jaclyn Schildkraut (State University of New York Oswego) and H. Jaymi Elsass (Texas State University). They are co-authors of the forthcoming book “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” to be published in 2016 by Praeger. All of the countries had one or more mass shootings in this period, but the United States had by far the most. In terms of per capita fatalities, the United States was fourth, after Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Another article, at the Independent Journal website, provides a “Rampage Shooting Index” for 10 countries, covering 2009-2013. Again, the United States is first in total number of incidents, and sixth in per capita fatalities. (Behind Israel and Slovakia, as well as the previously mentioned nations). Updating the index to account for 2015 would put France ahead of the United States. (French data are reported in the I.J. article, but not the Wall Street Journal article.)

. . . Regardless of definitional boundaries, the broader point of the Schildkraut and Elass research is consistent with all the other data: The United States has more mass shootings than other most-developed nations, and a lower per capita fatality rate than at least several of them.

It would be interesting if the data were expanded to fully account for mass shootings in nations such as Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria, where the homicide rate is far higher than in the United States. If we say that having an economy as “developed” as a member of the Organization for Economic Co‑operation and Development is what constitutes a “developed” country, then the U.S. gun homicide rate is about in the middle for “developed” countries.

As President Obama pointed out today, he has repeatedly made the same claim about “other countries” and mass shootings. When he did so last June, Politifact examined the issue, including the research of Professors Schildkraut and Elsass. Politifact rated the Obama claim “Mostly False.” Yet he continues to make the claim, speaking in a city with repressive gun control and which only 18 days ago suffered a horrific series of mass shootings. President Obama’s second book touted his “audacity,” and the president’s remarks today demonstrated chutzpah.

Why would Obama so badly misstate the facts? Quite simply, like liberal and leftist elites generally, he assumes that the socialist countries of Europe are better than America. Once one starts assuming that, actually looking at the data does not seem particularly necessary.

Gun Control and Mass Shootings