“What Gives?”: Public Policy Polling Found Wide Majority In Favor Of Assault Weapons Ban, Gallup A Majority Against
Ten days ago, Daily Kos commissioned Public Policy Polling to field a poll on a variety of topics related to guns. One of the simplest questions we asked—just eight words long—was this:
Would you support or oppose banning assault weapons?
Even though our survey oversampled gun owners considerably, respondents said they favored such a ban by a broad 63-32 margin. Now, you might wonder if the people we polled know what exactly an assault weapon is, what a ban might cover, and whether such a ban would even be effective.
Those are all legitimate questions, but regardless of how well-informed our respondents might be, they stated a preference in response to a simple, clear question—and as we move forward, the public debate on this question will indeed generally be referred to, by politicians and the press, as “a ban on assault weapons.” In other words, we framed our question to reflect the rubric people will hear when they tune into the news.
Contrast our approach with Gallup’s, which also released some new data on gun issues. Here’s their assault weapons question:
Are you for or against a law which would make it illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semiautomatic guns known as assault rifles?
By a 51-44 spread, Gallup’s respondents oppose such a ban—which is actually a little tighter than the 53-43 against they found the last time they asked this question (in Oct. of 2011). No matter what, though, that’s wildly different from the huge numbers PPP sees in favor of such a ban. So what gives?
Well, frankly, Gallup’s question sucks. It’s too long, too wordy, and too confusing. As I noted above, for decades, this public policy issue has been described—by supporters and opponents alike—as an assault weapons ban. Everyone knows what the word “ban” means. So why complicate things with legalistic phrasing like “illegal to manufacture, sell or possess”? Normal people don’t talk that way. Hell, even abnormal people like Beltway pundits don’t talk that way.
The final part of the question is problematic, too. Gallup wants the phrase “semiautomatic guns known as assault rifles” to be interpreted as “the sub-set of semiautomatic guns that encompasses assault rifles.” That alone is too verbose and requires too much mental processing. Does it really help anyone to give this extended definition? Put another way: I can think of no good reason to not just say “assault rifles” and eliminate the part about “semiautomatic guns.”
But it would also be all too easy for someone to come away with the impression that Gallup is saying “semiautomatic guns, which are also known as assault rifles.” In response to that, you might think, “Hell no! ‘Assault rifle’ is not a synonym for ‘semiautomatic gun!'” Or you might think, “Hmm. This proposal sounds way too broad. Now we’re calling all semiautomatic guns ‘assault rifles?'”
Oh, and one more thing: Why assault rifles? Again, it’s always been referred to as an assault weapons ban. No one’s ever talked about banning rifles or other long guns used for hunting, so if your mind happened to focus on the word “rifle” instead of “assault,” you might think the questioner was asking whether hunting weapons should be made illegal.
Even if you think all these various chains of thought are ridiculous or stupid, well, it’s just very easy for one human to misunderstand another—especially a stranger calling on the phone who’s trying to get through an interview as quickly as possible. That’s why pollsters should always strive for maximal simplicity when they ask questions. That’s not always possible—sometimes you can’t get useful data without first offering a bit of explanation—but even then, there are better ways to do so on this topic than the way Gallup did.
But I don’t think extra verbiage is necessary at all here—as demonstrated by the fact that a mere five percent of respondents to PPP’s question said they were undecided. “Assault weapons” is a phrase people have heard (and, lately, have heard all too often). And whether people have a perfect understanding of the matter or not, citizens are allowed to express their opinions. You could try to craft a question which offered more background on what an assault weapons ban might mean, but Gallup certainly didn’t do that.
What they did, instead, is cloud the issue with a confusingly-worded question. If they’d adopted the phrasing we instructed PPP to use, I bet they’d find similar numbers to what we saw. And that’s a broad majority in favor of a ban on assault weapons.
By: David Nir, Daily Kos, December 28, 2012
“NRA Misleads On Assault Weapons”: The ’94 Assault Weapons Ban Was Full Of Loopholes, But Studies Prove It Was Effective
As Democrats move to once again ban assault weapons and NBC host David Gregory gets investigated for using a high-capacity magazine, banned in D.C., as a prop in his interview with the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, one key question still hasn’t been properly addressed by the media thus far — did the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban actually work?
Even Gregory, who convincingly played a devil’s advocate to LaPierre Sunday, was dismissive of its effect on Sunday. “I mean the fact that that it just doesn’t work is still something that you’re challenged by if you want to approach this legislation again,” he said of the ban to New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a supporter of the ban.
There’s a dearth of quality empirical research on the efficacy of the ban, thanks in part to Congress’ statutory limitations on the type of gun violence research the federal government is allowed to conduct. Pro-gun lawmakers made it illegal for research agencies to advocate for gun control, which effectively means looking for any connection between guns and gun violence, but the evidence suggests the law had positive effects, if not as much as advocates would like.
The single formal assessment of the ban, as required by Congress in passing the law, was conducted by criminologists Christopher Koper, Jeffrey Roth and others at the University of Pennsylvania (Koper is now at George Mason). The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, paid for the evaluation, which was first conducted in 1999 and updated in 2004, and looked at everything from homicide rates to gun prices.
A few key findings emerged. Overall, banned guns and magazines were used in up to a quarter of gun crimes before the ban. Assault pistols were more common than assault rifles in crimes. Large-capacity magazines, which were also prohibited, may be a bigger problem than assault weapons. While just 2 to 8 percent of gun crimes were committed with assault weapons, large-capacity magazines were used in 14 to 26 percent of of firearm crimes. About 20 percent of privately owned guns were fitted with the magazines.
But even though assault weapons were responsible for a fraction of the total number of gun deaths overall, the weapons and other guns equipped with large-capacity magazines “tend to account for a higher share of guns used in murders of police and mass public shootings,” the study found.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone paying attention to the recent history of mass shootings. In just the past year, the same .223 Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle was used in the Aurora, Colo., theater massacre, the shooting at the Clackamas Mall in Oregon, the Newtown elementary school shooting, and, just a few days ago, the killing of two firefighters in upstate New York. Jared Loughner used 33-round high-capacity magazines in a handgun to shoot former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen others. Seung-Hui Cho used a 15-round magazine to kill 32 and wound 17 at Virginia Tech in 2007.
An October 2012 study from Johns Hopkins, which looked at newer data than Koper’s, concluded that that “easy access to firearms with large-capacity magazines facilitates higher casualties in mass shootings.”
So, according to the official study, was the ban effective in stopping killings? The short answer is yes, though it’s a bit unclear because of the massive loopholes in the law. “Following implementation of the ban, the share of gun crimes involving AWs [assault weapons] declined by 17 percent to 72 percent across the localities examined for this study (Baltimore, Miami, Milwaukee, Boston, St. Louis, and Anchorage),” the Koper study concluded.
Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) also shows a significant drop in assault weapon usage in gun crimes. In the five-year period before the enactment of the ban, the weapons constituted almost 5 percent of the guns traced by the Bureau (the ATF is responsible for tracking guns used in crimes), while they accounted for just 1.61 percent of gun traces after the ban went into effect — a drop of 66 percent. The effect accelerated over time, as the guns presumably became harder to find.
The problem with the ban, as both gun rights advocates (seeking to cast aspersions on the law) and gun control proponents (seeking to explain its limited impact) agree, is that it was weak to the point of being meaningless. As the bill made its way through Congress, gun lobbyists managed to create bigger and bigger carve-outs, the largest being the grandfathering in of guns and magazines produced and owned before the ban went into effect. The guns and magazines could also continue to be imported, as long they were produced before the law went into effect.
At that time of the ban, there were already more than 1.5 million privately owned assault weapons in the U.S. and 25 million guns equipped with large-capacity magazines. Another almost 5 million large-capacity magazines were imported during the ban. These could continue to be used and traded completely legally.
“The ban’s exemption of millions of pre-ban AWs and LCMs ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually. Those effects are still unfolding and may not be fully felt for several years into the future,” Koper and his colleagues added.
The other big exemption in the law was the narrow definition of what the government considers an assault weapon. The ban initially targeted 18 gun models, and then prohibited any future models that contained two or more “military-style” features. Some of these features are decidedly superficial, such as a collapsable stock or muzzle shroud, leading the NRA to dismiss the category of assault weapons as artificial and “cosmetic.” Indeed, gun manufacturers were able to legally produce and sell nearly identical guns to ones that were now prohibited by making a few minor tweaks.
Since the ban was allowed to lapse in 2004, there hasn’t been another comprehensive national study. There is, however, some encouraging data on the state level. A Washington Post analysis of gun seizures in Virginia showed a significant drop in the number of high-capacity magazines seized by police during the 10 years the ban was in effect, only for the number to return to pre-ban levels after the law expired. In 1994, the year the ban went into effect, police in the state seized 1,140 guns with high-capacity magazines. In 2004, its last year on the books, that number had dropped to 612. By 2006, it was back to over 1,000.
Garen Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis Medical School, looked at his state’s experience and found a troubling pattern in who purchases guns that were once banned. First, “among those purchasing handguns legally, those with criminal records were more likely than others to purchase assault-type handguns,” he told Salon. Second, “among those purchasing handguns legally who had criminal records, those purchasing assault-type handguns were much more likely than those purchasing other types of handguns to be arrested for violent crimes later.” He wasn’t able to study rifles because the state’s archive of purchases was limited to handguns.
Abroad, the data is even more convincing. In Australia, a 1996 mass shooting that left 36 dead led the conservative government to act swiftly to ban semi-automatic assault weapons with a much stronger law. They did not grandfather in old guns and paid to buy back old ones. Gun-related homicide plummeted by 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. Meanwhile, gun suicides — which are responsible for most firearm deaths in most developed countries — dropped by a whopping 65 percent. Robberies at gunpoint also dropped significantly. In the decade prior to the ban, there were 18 mass shootings. In the decade following it, there were zero.
The resounding success of the Australian model shows where the U.S.’s attempt to ban assault weapons failed. By the same token, it shows where we could succeed by implementing a real ban without the carve-outs of the the 1994 law.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, December 26, 2012
“Beating The Odds”: Health Care, Guns And The Will To Win
For supporters of the urgent push for sensible gun laws, the fierce national battle over health care is a good example of how folks can beat the odds.
One of the most extraordinary things about the campaign to win Obamacare was the sheer will of its supporters — the ability to maintain momentum and keep going in the face of one challenge after another. The campaign for commonsense gun laws needs the same thing right now. While advocates have been slogging away for years, the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School and so many other places have created an historic opportunity for change. We cannot afford to let the momentum and attention slip away.
We can already see the obstacles. Just a few days after the National Rifle Association (NRA) had a press event where they offered a shockingly stupid and tone deaf response to the massacre in Newtown, Conn., they’re back to doing what they do best — telling everyone what they’re against. Anything that smacks of regulating guns is a bad idea, they say. The only way to end senseless firearms violence is more guns, they say.
Already the apologists for the NRA and the gun manufacturers are out in full force, explaining that there are so many factors that contribute to this problem that we can’t possibly tackle one of the solutions that’s within our reach.
This time, it appears, members of Congress are not cowering. Many former opponents of sensible gun laws are announcing their support for measures like criminal background checks for all gun-buyers and bans on military-style assault rifles and high-capacity magazines — the equipment used in the most recent mass shootings. Polls show that the public and most NRA members are on their side.
The outcome of the gun debate, as in the health care battle, will be determined by political will and the courage of individual members of Congress to stand up for what they believe to get results.
When she was Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi was a big reason we won health care. She defined what it means to be a leader. She was smart and strategic, and she got others to follow. But perhaps most importantly, in the dark days of January and February of 2010, when it looked like health reform would fall short in Congress, Pelosi was willful. She wouldn’t give up. Pelosi boldly told the American people what it would take to win — and gave us a roadmap for this fight:
We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in, but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the America people.
We must ensure that the innocent victims of Newtown and other mass shootings, along with the 12,000 people killed each year by gun violence, did not die or suffer in vain. The fallen and their families deserve better. It’s time for Congress to pole vault in and break the political inertia that leaves us all at risk.
We took on the mammoth task of reforming a broken health care system, and our political leaders beat the odds through sheer force of will. Now our leaders must use the same single-minded determination to end rampant gun violence.
By: Ethan Rome, Executive Director, Health Care for America Now, The Huffington Post, December 26, 2012
“Freedom Isn’t Free”: Congress Won’t Act On Gun Control, But The President And The States Can
It has now been nearly two weeks since the Newtown massacre once again cast an ugly shadow of gun violence over our country. In the ensuing fortnight, the pundits have been working overtime generating their ideas on “what to do” about guns.
Their ideas aren’t new: Ban assault weapons. Limit high-capacity magazines. Make access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun. All reasonable ideas, though it must be acknowledged that 1) such hand-wringing after past shootings has faded rather quickly as the public moves on and 2) if anything, because today’s congressional districts are drawn up so safely, lawmakers are less inclined to do anything about guns than ever before.
Let’s face facts: Congress hasn’t passed a major gun control bill since 1994, when at the behest of Ronald Reagan, it approved an assault weapons ban (long since expired) and, in 1993, the Brady Bill, which requires background checks on gun buyers when a gun is bought for the first time. (Subsequent sales of those used weapons are often unregulated, thus the so-called “gun show loophole.”) The fights to pass those laws were nasty and protracted, and in the ensuing years, positions have hardened even more. Bottom line: As disturbing and outrageous as the Newtown massacre was, there is essentially zero chance that Congress will do anything of substance about it.
So what can be done?
The Constitution grants any president of the United States executive powers. Some have argued that President Obama could exercise them to close the gun show loophole — which has arguably allowed up to 40 percent of all private gun purchases to occur with no background check whatsoever, just pay and be on your way. This appears to be easy politics. Even before Newtown, a survey by GOP pollster Frank Luntz said that 85 percent of non-NRA gun owners and 69 percent of NRA members favored this.
Look for this to be among the recommendations given to Obama by his “gun czar,” Vice President Biden. These background checks could also include any known information on a customer’s mental health. The Justice Department has also studied the idea of better information-sharing among different agencies, sort of like how the CIA and FBI began working better together after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. These are all ideas worth discussing, though state’s rights and privacy laws are legitimate barriers.
Even the National Rifle Association has a few ideas. The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, blaming just about everyone other than his own organization for Newtown, says Hollywood is at fault for gratuitous violence, as are the manufacturers of violent videogames (one, he said, was called “Kindergarten Killer”). He calls this kind of content “the filthiest form of pornography.” On this one point, LaPierre is right. Parents should know better than to expose their kids to this kind of garbage. But here’s a question for Mr. LaPierre: If the NRA insists that the Second Amendment is sacred and must be protected, is it not hypocritical to suggest that the First Amendment, whose free speech protections cover movie and game makers, be weakened? (It’s a moot point anyway: The Supreme Court, in June 2011, upheld the free speech rights of videogame makers to spew out their filth.)
LaPierre has also suggested, as you’ve no doubt heard, that guns in schools might have prevented the Newtown massacre. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he insisted. LaPierre, whose rantings caused former President George H.W. Bush to quit the NRA in outrage in 1995, seems to have forgotten that an armed guard at Columbine High School couldn’t prevent the murder of 12 students and a teacher (he fired four times and missed). There were plenty of good guys with guns at the Fort Hood army base in 2009. And on and on.
So why not go after guns — and the NRA itself — the way 46 states went after cigarettes back in the 1990s? Guns are similar to cigarettes in one key respect: Long after they are used, both incur very large and ongoing costs that states, local communities, and thus taxpayers are forced to absorb. Aside from the immediate anguish and grief that can result from the use of a gun, the economic burden is spread over many years, in the form of lost work, medical care, insurance, law enforcement, and criminal justice. One study puts a price on this: $174 billion a year.
The societal cost of just one gun homicide averages $5 million, according to the institute. That includes $1.6 million in lost work; $29,000 in medical care; $11,000 on surviving families’ mental-health treatment; $397,000 in criminal-justice, incarceration and police expenses; $9,000 in employer losses; and $3 million in pain, suffering and lost quality of life.
Who pays for much of this? You do. Doesn’t matter whether you have a gun or not. Just like smoking. You pay for much of its after-effects whether you smoke or not.
Here is what the states did about cigarettes: In November 1998, Big Tobacco, worn down by legal wrangling on dozens of fronts, agreed to pay 46 states a minimum of $206 billion over 25 years. The landmark deal, known as the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), exempted Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard from private tort liability resulting from harm caused by tobacco use. In addition to paying billions, the companies agreed to end or limit marketing of cigarettes, fund anti-smoking education campaigns, and dissolve industry-funded trade groups such as the “Tobacco Institute.”
The landmark agreement with the states wasn’t designed to put cigarette makers out of business, just make them more accountable and responsible for the use of their product, which was and remains legal. Guns, by virtue of the Second Amendment, are even more protected, but this hardly excuses their defenders from accountability for their use. Only a handful of states and the District of Columbia have laws governing private sales at gun shows. Those who lack such laws can cite states’ rights, a legitimate point — but often it’s the taxpayers in those states who pay for years to come. States with tougher laws can sue neighboring states that don’t to recover their costs; the NRA can be sued for similar reasons. Want a gun? Oppose reasonable restrictions on them? Fine. But you know the saying: Freedom isn’t free. Give those who oppose tighter gun laws an economic incentive to comply.
By: Paul Brandus, The Week, December 26, 2012
“NRA Getting A Bang For Its Bucks”: Gun Sales Rise Sharply After Newtown Shooting
Firearm sales are surging across the country in response to President Barack Obama’s promise to pursue new gun control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT.
According to a December 18 Fox News report, shortly after the massacre, consumers began buying huge numbers of AR-15 rifles — the same type used by shooter Adam Lanza — in preparation for Congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban:
–The Colorado Bureau of Investigation says it set a new record for single-day background check submittals this past weekend.
–In San Diego, Northwest Armory gun store owner Karl Durkheimer said Saturday “was the biggest day we’ve seen in 20 years. Sunday will probably eclipse that.”
–In southwest Ohio, from dawn to dusk a Cincinnati gun show had a line of 400 waiting to get in, said Joe Eaton of the Buckeye Firearms Association. ”Sales were through the roof on Saturday,” said Eaton. “People were buying everything they could out of fear the president would try to ban certain guns and high-capacity magazines.”
The initial sales surge has proven surprisingly durable in the days since the shooting. Several gun store owners told Outdoor Life’s John Haughey that the weekend before Christmas was one of their busiest ever.
According to local reporting, gun sales have also skyrocketed in Arizona and New Mexico.
One weapons company, Brownells Inc. — which claims to be the world’s largest supplier of firearms accessories and gunsmithing tools — says that it sold an astonishing three and a half years worth of ammunition magazines in three days after the Newtown shooting.
This is the second major surge in gun sales over the past two months; they also rose sharply directly after President Obama’s re-election on November 6th.
The rapidly rising sales help to explain the motivation behind the NRA’s inflammatory response to the Newtown shooting. Although Wayne LaPierre’s defiant speech and appearance on Meet The Press were widely panned, they kept guns in the headlines, which have kept gun sales high. Over the past seven years, the gun industry has donated between $14.7 million and $38.9 million to the NRA’s corporate-giving campaign; even if Congress does reinstate the assault weapons ban in the coming months, it’s pretty clear that the NRA has gotten a good bang for its buck.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, December 26, 2012
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