NIJ Report Casts Doubt on Ban Renewal
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
“Should it be renewed, the (assault weapon) ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
That bombshell admission appears in a report prepared for the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerry Lee Center of Criminology. The report was authored by Christopher S. Koper, with Daniel J. Woods and Jeffrey A. Roth. Though finished in June, it is just now becoming widely available.
The report also revealed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) apparently overstated the use of these firearms in crime during the 1980s and 1990s.
The significance of this report, titled An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003, is that it appeared just weeks before the 10-year-old ban is set to expire. The ban, unless re-enacted, will end at midnight Sept. 13. Gun control proponents have been traveling the country, urging its renewal.
The report noted that even before the ban took effect, so-called assault weapons were used “in only a small fraction of gun crimes . . . about 2% according to most studies and no more than 8%.” The report added that “most of the (assault weapons—AWs) used in crime are assault pistols rather than assault rifles.”
There was no definition of an “assault pistol.” However, the report does include handguns that were banned under the 1994 Clinton Administration law including the Mac 10 and TEC-9, DC9 and TEC-22.
The report also suggests that many proponents of the original ban based their arguments “on data implying that AWs are more common among crime guns than among the general stock of civilian firearms.”
However, the report adds, statistics on these guns from ATF “are not necessarily representative of the types of guns most commonly recovered by police.”
According to attorney Richard Feldman, there are “at least six” pieces of legislation now lingering in Congress that would extend and/or expand the ban. Citing the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), he noted that “in the past three years . . . federal gun prosecutions have increased by 68%, with the number of persons charged with federal firearms offenses rising by more than 22% in fiscal 2003, the largest single-year increase ever recorded.”
This revelation tends to refute allegations by gun control advocates that the Bush Administration has been soft on gun crime.
The NIJ report noted that the ban not only affected firearms, but also large capacity magazines (LCMs). It stated that there were an estimated 25 million such magazines in circulation prior to the ban, and since 1995, another 4.7 million pre-ban magazines have been imported, with the largest influx in 1999.
Though it did not explain how, the report said that “LCMs are used in crime much more often than (assault weapons).” This may suggest that many pre-ban handguns or rifles that fall outside the definition of assault weapons, and are equipped with large capacity magazines, are involved.
The report says many non-banned firearms can accept the LCMs. Researchers estimated that “approximately 18% of civilian-owned firearms and 21% of civilian-owned handguns were equipped with LCMs as of 1994.”
The NIJ report says that “It is premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime.”
“Because the ban has not yet reduced the use of LCMs in crime,” the report added, “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”
According to the BJS data quoted by Feldman, violent crime has fallen 54% since 1993, and there were 980,000 fewer violent crimes reported in 2002 than in 2000.
However, the report also suggested that if the ban on LCMs expires, “gun and magazine manufacturers may reintroduce AW models and LCMs, perhaps in substantial numbers. In addition, pre-ban AWs may lose value and novelty, prompting some of their owners to sell them in undocumented secondhand markets where they can more easily reach high-risk users, such as criminals, terrorists, and other potential mass murderers. Any resulting increase in crimes with AWs and LCMs might increase gunshot victimizations for the reasons noted above, though this effect could be difficult to measure.”
Whether that translates to fact remains conjecture until it happens.
Not conjecture, however, is data from several large cities showing that so-called assault weapons were used in a small fraction of crime before the ban. Data included in the report came from Baltimore, Miami, Milwaukee, Boston, St. Louis and Anchorage.
The report further noted that “The gun ban provision targets a relatively small number of weapons based on outward features or accessories that have little to do with the weapons’ operation.”
Whether available or not, the report acknowledges that “most survey evidence on the actual use of AWs suggests that offenders rarely use AWs in crime.”
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