The Failure of Banning So-Called Assault Weapons

Whenever I’m asked about gun control and “assault weapons,” my first instinct is to steer people to the scholarly work of John Lott or the practical analysis of Larry Correia.

Unfortunately, some politicians in Washington haven’t gotten the message.

Here are excerpts from an article in the Pacific Standard, starting with a claim from Senator Feinstein that gun control works.

In the 10 years since the federal assault weapons ban expired, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has kept trying to renew the law, which she authored. In a press release this month honoring the 20th anniversary of the ban, she wrote, “The evidence is clear: the ban worked.”

So let’s look at what the experts say.

…gun violence experts say the exact opposite. “There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives,” Duke University public policy experts Philip Cook and Kristin Goss wrote in their book The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. A definitive study of the 1994 law—which prohibited the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic guns with “military-style features” such pistol grips or bayonet mounts as well as magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition—found no evidence that it had reduced overall gun crime or made shootings less lethal. “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the Department of Justice-funded study concluded in 2004.

It turns out that Senator Feinstein based her argument on a discredited study. Indeed, the findings of that study have been repudiated by one of the authors!

The key statistic that Feinstein cited in her recent press release—that the ban “was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal”—was rejected by researchers a decade ago. …one of the authors of that study, Dr. Christopher Koper, a criminologist from George Mason University, told ProPublica that number was just a “tentative conclusion.” Koper was also the principal investigator on the 2004 study that, as he put it, “kind of overruled, based on new evidence, what the preliminary report had been in 1997.”

In other words, Senator Feinstein’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on guns is akin the Obama’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on tax havens.

Let’s close with some gun control humor. Back in March of last year I shared a satirical look at left-wing social science research involving Chicago.

Since Chicago is a case study of gun control, here are two additional images worth sharing. I don’t know if this is a real street sign, but it’s amusing.

And, technically, the people doing the shooting presumably were outside the city limits, so no laws were broken!

Here’s another one, highlighting the great success of gun control in Chicago.

If you want more gun control humor, you can find some good links by clicking here.

P.S. I’m very proud of the folks in Connecticut who are engaging in civil disobedience and defying the new gun control laws in the Nutmeg State.

P.P.S. Massachusetts passed Feinstein-type gun control policies. Needless to say, the results were not positive. No wonder front-line cops overwhelmingly reject gun control.

P.P.P.S. There are some sensible leftists on the issue of gun control, as you can see by clicking here and here.