If you live under the illusion that Maryland had to pass an “assault weapons ban” because law enforcement is being overwhelmed by gangs toting AK-47s and AR-15s around Baltimore, let me educate you. In 2015, there were exactly three murders committed with rifles in the entire state of Maryland. That is not a misprint — you could literally count them on one hand. Five times as many Marylanders were beaten to death that year.
And those three rifle killings were by all types of rifles, not necessarily by the “scary-looking” (to use the technical term) types defined under the state’s 2013 law as an “assault weapon.” For all we know, there might have been zero “assault weapon” killings in Maryland in 2015, but the FBI doesn’t specifically track that number.
In case you think this is because Maryland’s ban on certain kinds of rifles has been effective, look to the last 10 years of data. Rifles (again, all rifles) have been used in a grand total of 34 Maryland homicides, or just over three per year. That’s slightly above 1 percent of 3,072 murders in the state during that period. And some fraction of that 1 percent — possibly a small fraction — accounts for all “assault weapon” rifle killings in Maryland.
The data have long been screaming out to us that “assault weapons” aren’t a thing; that to ban them is at best a waste of time and energy, and at worst it infringes rights without any corresponding benefit in deterring crime. In the nine months of 2013 preceding the effective date of Maryland’s current “assault weapon” ban, there was not a single murder in the state with any type of rifle. But the self-styled “party of science” persists in chasing unicorns.
And so here we are: On Feb. 21, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this Maryland law. What effect does the law have? It successfully antagonizes rifle enthusiasts by banning some of the nation’s most popular rifles. It evidently makes activists feel good about themselves. It also probably hasn’t saved a single life. And so it will be no great tragedy when the Supreme Court reverses this ruling.
Given our knowledge that handguns accounted for nearly all gun murders in Maryland in 2015 (266 out of 279 of them), the knee-jerk rush to ban a peculiar kind of rifle based on its cosmetic appearance is both frustrating and astounding: astounding that an entire Circuit Court’s en banc panel could construe this law as having a rational basis; frustrating that lawmakers and activists who favor gun control spend literally every minute of their public lives advocating for a form of culture-war triumphalism rather than anything resembling sound public policy.
The use of the term “assault weapon” is itself an attempt to confuse the public. It sounds like “assault rife,” which is a real thing used by the military and already illegal for you to buy. But as a propaganda tool, the phrase “assault weapon” has been the most enduring creation of the gun control movement in decades.
The activists who have used and branded and normalized this artificial term have successfully fixated the public debate on a type of weapon that is used in far less than 1 percent of all killings, and probably less than 1 percent of all gun killings as well.
But hey, it looks scary. And that’s what matters, right?
