In an editorial this morning on “Guns and the Gipper,” the New York Times claims that criminals favored assault weapons.
A decade ago, when the proposal to create a federal ban on military-style assault weapons was teetering between Congressional passage and defeat, Mr. Reagan personally lobbied Republican House members to take what he called the “absolutely necessary” step of outlawing the bullet-spraying semiautomatic guns favored by criminals.
I myself have no particular fondness for assault weapons, but this claim is arrant nonsense. First, assault weapons spray bullets no faster than any other semi-automatic rifles, all but a listed few of which were not affected by the ban. And as for “favored by criminals,” let’s look at the record.
The most extreme claim I could find after an admittedly brief search was from the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which wrote that in 1994 “assault weapons accounted for more than 17% of fatal shootings of police.” Another group puts that number at “roughly ten percent.” Aside from police homicides, here’s what that latter group found:
Assault weapons are not the weapons of choice among drug dealers, gang members or criminals in general. Assault weapons are used in about one-fifth of one percent (.20%) of all violent crimes and about one percent in gun crimes…. [R]ifles of any type are involved in three to four percent of all homicides….
There are close to 4 million assault weapons in the U.S., which amounts to roughly 1.7% of the total gun stock.
If assault weapons are so rarely used in crime, why all the hoopla when certain military-style-semi-automatic weapons were banned by the Crime Control Act of 1994? A Washington Post editorial (September 15, 1994) summed it up best:
No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.
That report then listed several paragraphs of statistics from a leading article by David Kopel that provided numbers from various states and cities, all of which found that assault were rarely used in crimes or homicides of any kind. According to Kopel,
Less than four percent of all homicides in the United States involve any type of rifle. No more than .8% of homicides are perpetrated with rifles using military calibers. (And not all rifles using such calibers are usually considered “assault weapons.”) Overall, the number of persons killed with rifles of any type in 1990 was lower than the number in any year in the 1980s.
The report then referred to Gary Kleck’s TARGETING GUNS: FIREARMS AND THEIR CONTROL (1997), who
summarizes the findings of forty-seven such studies, indicating that less than 2% of crime guns were assault weapons (the median was about 1.8%). According to Bureau of Justice Statistics, (Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1993, May 1996) offenders were armed with a firearm in 10% of all violent crimes. That would mean less than .20% (one-fifth of one percent or 1 in 500) of violent crime offenders used an assault weapon(1.8% X .10% = .018%).
Perhaps a good case can be made that assault weapons should be banned (though I doubt it), but such a case would not include the claim that they are “favored by criminals.”
Were there any contradictions to the assertions that “assault weapons” were used in either 17% or 10% of police homicides?
If “assault weapons” were used in such a relatively high proportion of murders of police in the line of duty, perhaps the ban on “assault weapons” does make sense.
The ban on assault weapons (fully automatic firearms) to my mind is clearly reasonable. The ban on their semi automatic look alikes (“assault weapons” — the quotation marks are important!) MAY make sense IF “assault weapons” were so likely to be used in murders of police officers.
My fault. Kopel does discuss the claim that “assault weapons” are disproportionately involved in murders of police and notes that the actual percentage was about 1%
Andy, The banned “assault weapons” are not fully automatic. They are semi-automatic, i.e., the trigger must be pulled for each shot. Fully automatic weapons for all practical purposes have been banned since 1934.
Fully automatic ‘assault weapons’ may have been banned, but the semi-automatic ones can be readily converted with a conversion kit – also legal, when sold separately from the weapon itself.
Happy Sunset Day!
Happy Sunset Day to all! More of our rights as citizens in this great country are being returned to us, as the “Clinton Security Bill” is retired, or sunsetted. This guy knows his stuff and lays forth what I…