In the wake of the Florida school massacre that left 17 innocents dead, there’s been a push to renew the Assault Weapons Ban. “Courage and conviction led to an assault weapons ban once before. Let’s do it again,” tweeted Bill Clinton, who signed the Assault Weapons Ban into law in 1994. The federal law—which banned a number of semi-automatic weapons by name, as well as any semi-automatic weapon with certain features and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition—wasn’t renewed in 2004 when a sunset provision took effect.
The last time Congress voted on the measure was 2013, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 20 first-grade children and 6 adults were murdered. Though Democrats controlled the Senate 55-45 at the time, the assault weapons ban got only 40 votes. Just one Republican (Mark Kirk of Illinois, who was defeated in 2016) voted for it. Sixteen Democrats, including several blue state Democrats like Michael Bennet of Colorado (whose state experienced a mass killing in Aurora in 2012), voted against it. Among the 16 Democrats against it, nine are still serving in the Senate:
With every GOP senator from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz opposed to a renewed assault weapons ban, it’s understandable that gun-control advocates would target Republicans for defeat. But until they go after pro-gun Democrats in primaries, particularly Democrats in blue states, it’s difficult to see some of the calls to enact the assault weapons ban as little more than partisan posturing. When Democrats had huge majorities in Congress from 2009 to 2011 and held the White House, they held zero votes on gun control. As a deliberate electoral strategy, many Democrats retreated on gun control from 2004 to 2012. Barack Obama, for example, said in 2008 that he never supported a handgun ban, despite the fact that his handwriting was on a 1996 questionnaire indicating that he did.
Should Democratic senators who oppose the assault weapons ban be primaried? Or is the plan to get 70 Democratic senators? https://t.co/mirWoE6qvJ
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) February 17, 2018
Whether or not the assault weapons ban makes sense is of course a different argument. The office of California senator Dianne Feinstein wrote in 2013 that the “1994 Assault Weapons Ban was effective at reducing crime and getting these military-style weapons off our streets. Since the ban expired, more than 350 people have been killed … by these weapons.” That represents a very small percentage of overall gun deaths: In 2013 alone there were 11,208 homicides committed with guns (and 21,175 suicides).
But gun control advocates argue that the assault weapons ban could curb the number of mass murders. The Washington Post’s WonkBlog points out that in the decade before the ban was enacted there were 19 incidents of mass murder (defined as six or more deaths), 12 incidents while the ban was in effect, and 34 in the decade following its lapse.
Mass murder can be committed with fairly typical handguns, as the massacres at Virginia Tech and Charleston demonstrated. The Virginia Tech shooter killed 33 people with two handguns (using 10- and 15-round magazines). It takes only a couple seconds to change magazines, but in a rampage seconds can make a difference. In 2011, for example, after the shooter in Tucson emptied a 33-round magazine, he “was tackled by two men when he tried to reload his pistol—while a woman in the crowd, Patricia Maisch, took away the fresh magazine” he had dropped. What’s really at the heart of the debate is whether or not the assault weapons ban would either make mass murder less attractive to psychopaths or marginally reduce the death toll of massacres—and whether the possible deterrent is worth imposing limits on law-abiding citizens.
