“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
“Wide Latitude To Jackassery”: Imagine If The Government Started Policing Rush Limbaugh’s Facts
Today, Philip Bump at Grist passed along this interesting story about a shock jock in Australia who, after spewing some false nonsense about climate change on the air, “has been ordered to undergo ‘factual accuracy’ training, and to use fact-checkers.” Obviously, the government has no such powers here in America, but it’s a good reminder that America’s particular version of free speech wasn’t handed down from above, or even by the Founders. The words in the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”) are very general; the contours and details of that freedom have been given shape over the decades by a succession of Supreme Court cases. James Madison didn’t have an opinion about whether it was OK for Rush Limbaugh to go on the air and call Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” so we had to figure out later how to handle that, and we chose, for some good reasons, to let it slide (legally speaking).
In other countries where people are just as committed to freedom as we are, they’ve come to slightly different conclusions about where the limits of those freedoms are. It’s not that they don’t value free expression, it’s just that competing values like truth and civility sometimes get weighed more heavily. We believe there are limits to freedom of speech no less than the Australians do; we just put those limits farther out. There are plenty of speech acts you can be sued or even prosecuted for, from intentionally libeling someone to inciting violence to revealing state secrets to conspiring to commit a crime.
I wouldn’t be comfortable with our government making decisions like the one the Australian government did, but we shouldn’t forget that our expansive interpretation of free speech comes with a cost. Because we don’t want the government policing the truth, we have to put up with a lot of lies; because we don’t think you have a right not to be offended, we have to put up with lots of offensive speech. There are countries where the consensus belief is that personal dignity is a value that outweighs freedom of speech, so you can be punished for offending someone. This is at the heart of why many people in the Muslim world can’t quite understand why our society would tolerate something like that anti-Muslim film, and why we can’t quite understand why they got so worked up over it, since it was just some jackass making a stupid video. Here in America, we offer wide latitude to jackassery.
There are lots of Americans who only value free speech so long as their own feelings aren’t being hurt and they don’t have to hear any speech they don’t like. But democracy is often painful and unpleasant. For instance, 18 days from now, half the country is going to be very, very disappointed with the results of the election. I have a feeling that when it happens, particularly if Barack Obama wins, we’re going to see how thin the commitment to democracy is on the part of some people.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 19, 2012
“Making Things Up”: Romney’s First Foreign Stumble?
It’s treacherous for a US presidential candidate to travel overseas — lots of opportunities for mis-chosen words and getting drawn into other countries’ domestic politics. With Mitt Romney about to leave on his big trip abroad he may already have had his first big foreign stumble. At a GOP fundraiser in San Francisco last night, Romney said that Australia’s foreign minister had warned him that foreign leaders see the US in decline and — at least in Romney’s telling — was hoping for Romney-like policies to make things right.
That at least was the version of the comments that appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. A similar version, but without the full quotes, appeared in the AP.
Quoting Romney: ”And this idea of America in decline, it was interesting [Carr] said that, he led the talk of America being in decline. See that’s not talk we hear about here as much as they’re hearing there. And if they’re thinking about investing in America, entrepreneurs putting their future in America, if they think America’s in decline they’re not gonna do it.”
Whether or not the SMH got it right is one question. The Hill notes that the pool reports did not have Romney clearly characterizing the comments as a warning.
And now, Australia’s Foreign Minister’s office has come forward to shoot down Romney’s characterization of the discussion, calling Romney’s interpretation “not correct.”
You cannot take a shoot down like this at face value in any case. Whatever Carr said, he almost certainly didn’t expect Romney to turn around and use it as ammo in a political speech. Allies don’t want to get publicly embroiled in a US election — especially on the wrong side of an incumbent who they believe is more likely than not to get reelected. So he’d be under a lot of pressure to walk away from Romney’s comments, even if Romney was accurately characterizing them. On the other hand, maybe Mitt just made it up or gave it — probably the most likely option — a negative spin the retelling. One way or another, it will be interesting to see how Romney navigates this sort of stuff when he’s overseas.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, July 23, 2012
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