“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
“The NRA’s War Of All Against All”: The World Is Not Made Up Of “Good Guys” And “Bad Guys.”
It’s quite salutary that Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association are getting so much attention, because the truth is that most Americans aren’t familiar with their rhetoric and the reality they inhabit. If you didn’t know too much about LaPierre but tuned in to see him on Meet the Press yesterday, you probably came away saying, “This guy is a lunatic” (a word we’ll get to in a moment).
I’m not talking about his preferred policy prescriptions. I’m talking about his view of the world. LaPierre gets paid close to a million dollars a year, which I’m guessing allows him a comfortable lifestyle. But he seems to imagine that contemporary America is actually some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape a la Mad Max, where psychotic villains in makeshift armor and face paint cruise through the streets looking for people to kill.
Why do we need armed guards in every school? “If we have a police officer in that school, a good guy, that if some horrible monster tries to do something, they’ll be there to protect them.” Monsters? Yes, “There are monsters out there every day, and we need to do something to stop them.” Should we improve our mental health system? Well, maybe not improve it so much as keep track of everyone who has ever sought mental health services. “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics…We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that’s got these monsters walking the streets.” There was also this: “Most of the media, when I go around this country, they’re protected by armed guards.” This got a lot of guffaws from journalists, because no one who works in the media knows anyone in the media who is protected by armed guards, except maybe Roger Ailes. Does LaPierre actually think that your average working journalist takes an armed escort when he goes down to City Hall to interview the deputy mayor? Who knows. But as LaPierre has candidly said, before “We have nothing to fear but the absence of fear.”
At his Friday press conference, LaPierre effectively offered a one-sentence summation of his group’s philosophy: “The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you talk without irony about “bad guys” and “good guys,” you’re inhabiting an imagined world that has absolutely nothing to do with reality, and it’s a good bet your ideas about policy are similarly absurd. But you can’t understand the NRA’s perspective without grasping the importance the good guy/bad guy dichotomy plays in their worldview. As far as they’re concerned, we are indeed living in that post-apocalyptic nightmare, where murderers and rapists are going to come banging down your door any second and the police are ineffectual.
What they never acknowledge, however, is that the typical gun murder isn’t a home invasion. Harold Pollack got data for his hometown of Chicago, and according to the police there were 433 murders there in 2011. How many happened in the course of a burglary? One. In the whole country, we get about 100 murders that happen this way. In 2011, 14,612 Americans were murdered; gun murders account for about 9,000 of those.
So what do the actual gun murders look like? They’re disagreements that get out of hand, people taking revenge for real or imagined slights, family members killing each other. They’re not the work of super-villains, or “lunatics,” or commando squads of “bad guys” (David Frum has more on this). But the NRA and its supporters believe that the home invasion is always just moments away, and that’s why our laws must allow everyone to be armed to the teeth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 24, 2012
“We Are Better Than This”: Facing A New Epidemic With The Lives Of Our Children At Risk
In June 1944, polio was sweeping across the country with devastating swiftness.
Children would leap out of bed in the morning, and by nightfall, they were unable to feed themselves. It was only a matter of time before it swept through Hickory, NC “like a tidal wave.”
“Youngsters with painful, useless limbs,” Life magazine reported at the time, “some unable to swallow or scarcely able to breathe, they came from mining villages up in the hills, mill towns in the valley, from outlying farms and urban centers.”
Fear reigned, but it was no match for the citizens of Hickory.
The lives of their children were at risk. They could lock up their homes, isolate their children and hope for the best. Or they could spring into action to fight a peril with no known cause and no certain outcome.
David M. Oshinsky, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Polio: An American Story, describes what happened next in the Miracle of Hickory:
“A call went out for volunteers. Hundreds showed up, ‘hiding the fear,’ said one, ‘that had [us] quaking in our boots.’ Merchants donated building material made scarce by wartime rationing. Carpenters, plumbers and electricians brought their own tools to the site.
“Floodlights were installed to allow round-the-clock construction. The telephone company installed a switchboard. Families loaned their electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Carloads of toys appeared. Farmers trucked in meat and vegetables. County convicts cleared brush and dug water mains, watched by shotgun-toting guards. The governor paroled 32 female prisoners to help with the domestic chores.
“It was up and running in 54 hours: a ‘rough pine board hospital’ containing an admissions center, a kitchen, and a laundry; a laboratory and an operating room; isolation wards, dormitories and a therapy wing …”
The hospital treated 454 patients before closing its doors at the end of summer. Two-thirds of them, Oshinsky writes, “were said to have ‘recovered completely.’”
The people of Hickory were scared, but they harnessed their fears to save their children.
We are still that America. We just have to act like it.
Our country is facing a new epidemic. President Obama described it in a news conference Wednesday as an “epidemic of gun violence.” We must learn many lessons from the massacre of those young children in Connecticut, but the immediate threat is clear: If this can happen in Newtown, it can happen anywhere.
Once again, we face tough choices. We can throw up our hands and surrender to a gun culture fueled by one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, or we can spring into action. By “we,” I mean we the citizens, because it is up to us to embolden our legislators to stand up to the National Rifle Association and make them pay if they don’t.
This is not the first time children have died of gun wounds, and too many of those names are known only to those who loved them. This is also not the first time a troubled man has unleashed a nightmare of firepower on innocent people.
Each time, the crisis swells and dissipates. That is a sad fact of our past, not a predictor of our future.
There are signs that this time, this moment, could be different. President Obama supports a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition clips. He also wants to close the gun show loophole that allows some weapons to be sold without buyer background checks.
U.S. senator Joe Manchin — a conservative Democrat and ardently pro-gun in the past — said he’s committed to bringing “the dialogue that would bring a total change.” For emphasis, he added, “And I mean a total change.”
Michigan governor Rick Snyder just vetoed legislation that would have allowed guns in schools and churches.
There are seismic shifts in corporate America, too. Private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, for example, announced it’s selling the Freedom Group, maker of the .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used in the Newtown shootings.
The New York Times reported that Cerberus made this decision after the California Teachers Retirement System said it was reviewing its investment in Cerberus because of its holding in Freedom Group.
“It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level,” Cerberus said in a statement.
Maybe you’ve never thought of yourself as political. The thought of writing, calling and visiting your elected officials might even make your skin crawl. If so, I ask you to recall how you felt the moment you found out 20 first-graders were gunned down in Newtown, CT.
Let’s get busy and brave.
It’s not too late to be the Americans we want to be.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, December 20, 2012
“The Mark Of A Weak Organization”: The NRA And America’s Long History Of Absolutist Extremism
Watching Wayne LaPierre’s press conference today (transcript here) I found myself searching for various synonyms of “insane” to describe it. Unglued, unhinged, taken leave of his senses, etc. It reads like the nutty handwritten letters to the editor magazines get, complete with lots of italicizations and exclamation points.
But the truth is this is not true madness. It’s something as old as the country, which bears some eerie similarity to the extremism of the slavery movement, as a lovely piece Ta-Nehisi Coates put up today argued. Here’s a taste:
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren’t satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln–who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South–as members of a “Black Republican” conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery.
Rather than accede to Douglas’s nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln’s path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed.
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a “massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.” It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA’s mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over “Fast and Furious.” Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat.
This could be a positive development in the medium term, I suspect. The NRA still has a lot of clout, and they’re not clinically insane, but they’ve clearly lost the ability to know what they sound like to non-gun nuts, or a view of sensible tactics. That kind of overreach is the mark of a weak organization—one particularly vulnerable to being baited by the other side into overreach. I predict much trolling of the NRA in the coming weeks.
By: Ryan Cooper, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“A Crazed Romance With Guns”: The Answer To Gun Carnage Is Not Arming Teachers
Have you ever seen the holiday film classic “A Christmas Story”? Set in 1940s Indiana, it’s the charming tale of young Ralphie, whose only wish for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun. Poor Ralphie is constantly rebuffed by the adults in his life, who warn him, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
During this shattered holiday season, with so many Connecticut families experiencing unimaginable loss, the movie is a reminder that guns have always been popular in the American imagination. It also gently reminded me, however, that previous generations were much more circumspect and cautious in their attitudes toward firearms.
I am delighted that President Obama, shocked to his senses by the carnage in Connecticut, has finally found the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and take steps toward more regulation of firearms. But I fear that won’t be enough.
Don’t get me wrong: I support a ban on assault-type weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and waiting periods for gun purchases. All of those are common-sense measures that should already be the law of the land.
But I don’t think those steps will be enough to change a culture steeped in gun lore and conditioned to believe that firearms hold some magical powers to keep the streets safe. Somehow, our crazed romance with guns — a dangerous and dysfunctional relationship — must end.
It hasn’t always been this way. My late father came of age in the 1930s and ’40s in deepest, reddest Alabama. He was an avid outdoorsman who loved fishing and hunting. Nothing made my father happier than awakening in the wee hours on a crisp morning in November to go out into the cold and stalk deer. Go figure.
I think he would have been amused — or perhaps puzzled — by the ad campaign that Bushmaster adopted to sell its AR-15 assault-type rifle, which was used by the Connecticut shooter. The campaign bestowed “manhood” on Bushmaster buyers. I don’t think my dad — who worked hard, supported his family and tried to teach his children right from wrong — ever thought his manhood was in question.
A veteran of combat in Korea, he was as strict about gun safety as the National Rifle Association is imprudent. He and his hunting buddies refused to hunt with rifles because the projectiles are too powerful and travel too far; they used shotguns instead. They banned hunters whom they deemed careless. Dick Cheney would not have been welcome.
As a young college graduate headed for the big city, I contemplated buying a firearm. My father wouldn’t hear of it, noting that I’d be more likely to be a victim of my own handgun than to ward off danger with it. He suggested that I stay out of dangerous places instead.
My dad was also a junior-high-school principal, and I think he would be horrified — simply horrified — by the irrational suggestion from some political leaders that the answer to school shootings is to arm teachers. He knew perfectly well that arming teachers would be a way to get more children killed.
As the term “friendly fire” connotes, soldiers and police officers, who undergo intense weapons training, frequently miss their targets or hit others by mistake. Last August, as just one example, New York City police officers killed a gunman outside the Empire State Building. Nine bystanders also ended up wounded, all by police gunfire or ricochets.
When did so many of our political leaders — governors, members of Congress, state legislators — lose their senses about guns? How did we come to have a culture in which public figures believe it is rational to advocate arming teachers to prevent school massacres?
Even as some of the loudest gun advocates have become more hysterical in their absolutism, the number of households with guns has actually decreased over the last few decades, according to polls and federal data. Unfortunately, the number of guns owned by a smaller portion of households has increased.
Meanwhile, reasonable, old-school outdoorsmen like my dad aren’t speaking up. They need to stand up and be counted.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 22, 2012
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