Banning “Assault Weapons”
U.S. Senator Adam Schiff claims that he is introducing a bill today to ban “military-style assault weapons” because when a similar ban expired in 2004, “mass fatalities in gun shootings went up by 236%.”
IN FACT, Schiff’s words and statistic are deceitful on four levels:
1) What Schiff calls “military-style assault weapons” are actually common semi-automatic guns used by citizens for hunting and home defense.
2) Automatic military weapons have been generally banned in the U.S. since 1986, and there is no association between the ban and the number of people killed in mass shootings.
3) Before, during, and after the “assault weapons” ban of 1994–2004, mass shooting deaths barely budged, and this weak association is better explained by other factors.
4) Schiff’s “236%” statistic is patently false and comes from a study that ignores numerous mass shooting deaths during the 1994–2004 ban. Dr. Louis Klarevas of Columbia University, a Ph.D. who specializes in mass-casualty violence, skewered this study for having “a large number of misclassifications.”
