An Assault Rifle Education
June 16 | Posted by mrossol | 2nd Amendment, The LeftYes, yes, this is from the WSJ. I know. Instead of disparaging the source, kindly address the issue.
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WSJ 6/16/2016
In the wake of the Orlando terrorist massacre, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats have called for reinstating Bill Clinton’s ban on “assault weapons.” If her version works as well as her husband’s did, the terrorists will have won.
From 1994 to 2002 Congress barred the sale of 18 types of rifles and shotguns that had “military style” attributes. This definition was purely political because the difference between a regular rifle and what Washington calls an assault weapon is mostly cosmetic.
This is one reason the ban had a negligible impact on gun crime. So-called assault rifles accounted for about 2% of gun crimes prior to the ban, and the percentage of murders committed with rifles today (2% in 2014) is less than the 3% in the last year of the ban. Overall gun crime fell after 1994, though numerous studies, including one commissioned by the Department of Justice, attribute this to better background checks and other measures. The studies found no link to the ban and reduced crime.
The rifle ban also didn’t matter when it ended. The gun homicide rate remains about half (3.8 deaths per 100,000 people) of what it was prior to the seven deaths per 100,000 in the early 1990s. The media this week are full of stories about gun-death rates, without bothering to note that most of the surge is occurring in cities like Chicago that have the strictest gun laws. Heather Mac Donald nearby has a better explanation for the crime resurgence.
As for stopping terrorism, California is among the states that continued to ban assault weapons after the federal version expired. But that didn’t stop the San Bernardino killers, who used modified rifles that violated the law. France’s strict gun laws also didn’t stop the Paris assailants. There are some 350 million guns in America, including as many as 10 million AR-15 rifles like the one used in Orlando. If Democrats want a ban to have any chance of working, they will have to vote for and enforce a nationwide program of confiscation. The ban Democrats are pushing would be meaningless.
What has reduced gun deaths are better background checks, but Democrats are now politicizing this success. They are insisting that anyone whose name appears on the FBI’s terror watch list should be banned from buying guns. But we know that names are mistakenly on the list. The GOP alternative would alert Justice if someone on the list tries to buy a gun, triggering a special court proceeding and 72-hour investigation. Democrats say that’s not enough, no doubt because it doesn’t provide the guncontrol wedge issue they want.
By the way, how about enforcing existing law? Handguns account for more than 80% of gun crime, and the primary way felons obtain firearms is through “straw purchasing”—that is, using friends or relatives without criminal records to buy the guns for them. The Justice Department prefers not to prosecute straw purchasers on grounds that they aren’t the main problem. But surely the deterrent signal would get around if Justice began to prosecute some of these gun gophers.
We’re sorry to have to devote space to this remedial gun-control education, but most of the press corps takes this assault-weapon ban seriously. No one else should
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