Mass shootings have been making their way into the news cycle once more. There were two mass shootings of note that took place in May. One was in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York that killed ten people and injured three others with a semiautomatic rifle. The other was at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. This school shooting was the deadliest in about a decade, which took the lives of 21 individuals with 18 additional injuries. Mass shootings, especially ones that take place at school, are emotionally jarring events. These shootings were so disturbing that some Republicans are treading lightly. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) cancelled their appearances at the National Rifle Association (NRA) Convention. Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) responded to the shootings by saying that he is open to an assault weapons ban. I would like to spend today focused on that policy proposal.
First, what is an assault weapon? The definition of an assault weapon can vary from jurisdiction, but the most common one is a semi-automatic firearm with a detachable magazine. An assault weapon could also include such features as a vertical forward grip, barrel shroud, and a flash suppressor. The premise behind banning what the American Academy of Pediatrics calls "dangerous, military-style guns" is to prevent would-be killers from maximizing their kill count in the shortest amount of time. Plus, the combat-style features allow for shooters to have better control of the weapon while discharging large amounts of ammunition. This sounds like a fine example of what gun control advocates like to refer to as "common-sense gun policy." However, upon closer examination, an assault weapons ban is anything but.
Yes, mass shootings strike quite the chord. The amount of senseless violence in a civilian setting outside of a war zone is unnerving. It is equally true that mass shootings are statistically rare in the United States, in spite of what you see on the news. I have made this point multiple times in my blogging, most recently in 2018. I pointed out that from 1999 to 2013, mass shootings never exceeded 300 victims per annum. Pew Research looked at 2020 data, which included 19,384 gun homicides in 2020. Pew said it mattered on the definition of "mass shooting" used. The FBI's definition had it at 38 homicides (0.2 percent), whereas the Gun Violence Archive had it at 513 deaths (or 2.6 percent of all gun homicides). Pew Research admits that "regardless of the definition used, fatalities in mass shooting incidents in the U.S. account for a small fraction of gun murders that occur nationwide each year."
Furthermore, gun homicides do not account for a majority of gun deaths; gun suicides do. In 2019, gun suicides were 60 percent of gun deaths (UC-Davis). In 2020, it was 54 percent (Pew Research), which means that mass shootings account for less than one percent of gun deaths in the U.S. As perturbing as mass shootings are, we should not make major shifts on policy that are based on statistically rare events.
Another issue is that an assault weapons ban is poorly targeted policy. Mass shootings constitute a small fraction of overall gun homicides. Even if you wanted to focus on this small subset of gun homicides, an assault weapons ban is not the best way to go about it. Why? Because a majority of mass shootings have historically not been carried out using rifles. The Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice conducted research on mass shootings from 1969 to 2019. One of the findings was that 77.2 percent of mass shootings were committed with handguns, whereas 25.1 percent of mass shootings were committed with rifles. In overall gun homicides, the figure is even smaller. In 2019, rifles were used in six percent of gun-related homicides (or 394 homicides), according to FBI data. Consider that there are 20 million AR-15 rifles in the United States, which means that in a given year, over 99.999 percent of rifles are not used to murder anyone.
Another reason that assault weapons bans are not effective is because what constitutes as an assault weapons is based on such cosmetics as pistol-grip design or folding stock. In other words, certain "assault weapons" are banned because the gun looks scary. When people bring up such a weapon as the AR-15 rifle, it's not about caliber, muzzle velocity, rate of fire, or anything else having to do with the lethality of the weapon. Once you get past the looks of an AR-15 rifle, it is functionally more similar to a handgun than it is an automatic, military-grade rifle. Plus, as an article from the Left-leaning Vox points out, an AR-15 rifle has multiple legitimate uses, including hunting, target shoot, and home defense. I covered the topic of defensive gun usage last November, but I will add that assault weapons are especially helpful in self-defense of marginalized groups, senior citizens, and the physically disadvantaged.
None of this covers the fact that during the Clinton Administration, Congress enacted a Federal Assault Weapons Ban. This Ban was in effect from 1994 to 2003. A subsequent study from the U.S. Department of Justice did not find any evidence that the ban worked (Koper, 2004). The study's main takeaway? "Should it be renewed, the ban's effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement." The effects were so minimal that "we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's drop in gun violence." This net neutral effect on gun homicide rates might have something to do with the substitution effect, i.e., offenders ended up buying guns that were not covered by the assault weapons ban. This is not the only research showing a lack of evidence for assault weapons bans:
- The Journal of General Internal Medicine looked at state-level gun policy, which included assault weapons bans. The study concluded that there was no correlation between state-level assault weapons bans and homicide rates (Siegel et al., 2019).
- Research from Applied Economics Letters found that "assault weapon bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level" (Gius, 2013).
- A report from the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, similarly concluded that assault weapons bans are not associated with changes in firearm homicide rates (Lee et al., 2017).
- A 2020 analysis from the renowned RAND Corporation found the evidence of assault weapons bans on mass shootings (as opposed to gun homicides generally) to be inconclusive.
- Another study from RAND (this one from 2018) concluded that there are no qualifying studies that bans on the sales of assault weapons decreased any of the eight outcomes that RAND studied, including the impact on violent crime.
Conclusion
Assault weapons bans miss the mark on multiple levels. These bans are enacted to try to prevent a statistically rare occurrence. The bans are poorly targeted not only because they focus on the cosmetic appearances of the guns over functionality. Most mass shootings and gun homicides generally are not committed with semi-automatic rifles, which means such a policy would not cover the majority of gun homicides. Most importantly, assault weapons have been tried on the federal and state levels in the United States. In spite of such laws in place, they have shown to be ineffective in lowering homicide rates. Instead of having emotional knee-jerk reactions, we should ask ourselves what works best. Much like we have seen with the bump stock ban, a high-capacity magazine ban, or a gun buyback program, assault weapon bans are another example of good-intentioned gun policy that are a far cry from being a silver bullet. We should strive for better instead of clinging to policies that do not work.
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