Sunset

We have just seen the close of a decade-long exercise in gun-control silliness with the expiration of the "assault-weapons ban," an anti-gun bait-and-switch that squeezed through in the early Clinton administration, when the Democrats still controlled the House. The bait: The government will get rid of scary, dangerous "machine guns." The switch: The bill outlawed the manufacture, transfer and sale of hundreds of models of otherwise-unremarkable semi-automatic rifles.

Was anybody really fond of this bill? The only reason I can think of to like it is if you were for sweeping gun prohibitions, and you thought that this was a necessary stepping stone in that direction. But given that the law marked the high-tide of recent gun control rather than the first swell of a flood, I'd have to think that the law's proponents must be disappointed. By failing to build upon the ban, the bill's authors in the end are seen to have crafted ineffective legislation that went nowhere, to the benefit of no-one.

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but consider the following. It seems to me inarguable that from the gun-prohibition standpoint, ground has actually been lost in the last ten years when you consider the progress of concealed-carry in the states. So then you're left to argue effectiveness or benefit, i.e. that you saved lives or reduced crime, neither of which has been clearly shown. That the efficacy would be difficult to measure or detect should surprise no-one, since semiautomatic rifles aren't often used by criminals owing to their large size, substantially higher cost, and tendency to attract unwanted attention. A Justice Department-sponsored report noted that crimes with guns classified as assault weapons amounted to only two percent of gun crimes even at the beginning of the ban in 1994.

Meanwhile, the violent crime rate has fallen 54 percent since 1993. Simple math dictates that even had the ban eliminated all assault-weapon-related crime (and it did not), and even supposing that all violent crimes are gun crimes (they are not), that would at most have accounted for two of the 54 percent drop. And even that assumes that the assault-weapon crimes didn't just become pistol crimes, bat crimes, knife crimes, or whatever. So little wonder the Justice Department couldn't detect any benefit in crime rates from the ban. The best that could be hoped for was almost undetectable, and the effects (if any) were overwhelmed by larger trends from increased incarceration rates, dramatically higher rates of federal gun crime prosecution since 2000, and so forth.

I would be remiss in not directly acknowledging the arguments of the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) with regard to assault weapons, which you may peruse here. My big counterpunch to their advocacy is that they are entirely avoiding the important points: Was overall crime reduced as a direct result of the legislation? Were lives saved? Instead they point out (repeatedly) that assault weapons were involved in fewer crimes (and arrests). Of this I have little doubt, but why should anyone care? To illustrate, suppose that twenty thousand highway fatalities in the 1980s involved Ford cars and trucks. We could ban the sale and transfer of all Fords in 1990, beginning the "Ford Ban." We would probably notice a sharp downturn in Ford fatalities in the 1990s as a result of the Ford Ban, but that says exactly nothing concerning overall highway fatalities! It is a non sequitur.

The Brady Campaign makes several further arguments of debatable relevance, concerning for instance the meaning of the terms "cosmetic" or "rare." Two percent of crimes are made to seem less rare, I suppose, when you note that these still amount to a few thousand crimes, but in the end we're still talking about a small percentage -- and the Brady Campaign still cannot show that those crimes disappeared along with the guns. I frankly find the Brady Campaign's arguments concerning semiautomatic rifles to be at points misleading, ignorant, or downright silly. If someone should have questions regarding a specific point, I'd be happy to address them.