In the aftermath of Monday’s shooting incident at a Louisville bank, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated the false claim that the 1994 ban on so-called “assault weapons” reduced crime in the U.S.
This is demonstrably false.
To disprove this fallacy, look no further than the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report on the issue. The 2004 study revealed that researchers could not establish a link between the “assault weapons” ban and spotty reports of lower shootings or crime from far-flung locations.
It was the author of the NIJ-commissioned independent study, University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, who dumped cold water on the faulty assertion.
“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”
Koper continued. “It is thus premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun violence. 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.”
To be crystal clear, the government’s own commissioned research debunked the idea that the decade-long ban on “assault weapons” had any discernible effect on violence. Further, its possible renewal was anticipated to have a miniscule — if any — impact on the nation’s crime rate.
The report also noted that “assault weapons” were rarely used in crimes even before the ban. The simple fact is that weapons that fit into this dubious category are much more difficult for violent criminals to transport and conceal.
The reality is that relatively few crimes in America are committed using so-called “assault weapons.” For evidence, look no further than the FBI’s own Uniform Crime Report (UCR) from 2021.
It showed that 447 people in the U.S. were killed with rifles that year. Now, compare that number to the 1,035 people who were killed “with knives or cutting instruments.”
And that year was hardly an anomaly. The UCR for 2020 revealed that over 3.5 times as many people were killed with knives and other sharp objects than with rifles. The number for 2019 is more than four times as many.
There is another key fact to consider when noting the vast disparity between killings involving rifles and sharp objects.
The FBI statistics include all categories of rifles. Everything from bolt action, pump action, break action, and those semiautomatic firearms falsely labeled as “assault weapons.”
Even further evidence that raw numbers do not back up the wild claims of anti-gun zealots.
Yet the White House and self-serving politicians continue to spout untruths in the raging gun control debate. It is not beneath them to dredge up debunked ideas that there is a correlation between gun control measures and violent crime in the U.S.
For further evidence, consider that major cities almost universally have the strictest gun control statutes on the books. Yet from coast to coast they are currently experiencing a wild surge in violent crime, proving there is no cause-and-effect between stripping away Second Amendment rights and protecting citizens’ safety.
No, the White House is clearly wrong. The federal government’s own studies show that the ban on so-called “assault weapons had a negligible effect if any at all, and shrill calls to wipe away constitutional liberties are at best showboating.
