The New GUN WEEK, May 20 2004
Page 5

Analysis
?Assault Weapons? Ban: Data Abounds to Refute Myth
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

Just because the Senate derailed the most high-profile
attempt by congressional anti-gunners to renew and even
expand the decade-old ban on so-called assault weapons two
months ago does not mean the battle is over.

If anything, it may just be heating up.

But thanks to the Internet, the gun rights community has
some fresh ammunition. Cruising the Internet will produce
such gems as a small, and largely overlooked, document
called the Federal Assault Weapon Ban Policy Briefing Book,
released in February of this year.

Another good website loaded with information is
?www.AWbansunset.com? containing lots of data from veteran
firearms researcher David Kopel with the Colorado-based
Independence Institute. Likewise the National Center for
Policy Analysis has a section on the subject.

Yet more information is available on this year?s edition of
the NRA Firearms Fact Card.

The available data all seem to point in the same direction,
and lead observers to the same conclusion: The 1994 assault
weapons ban was symbolism, not substance, because before the
ban was enacted, these guns were rarely used in crimes.

According to Kopel, for example, in 1990 in California, only
36 of the 963 firearms involved in homicides or aggravated
assaults and analyzed by police laboratories fell under the
definition of ?assault weapon.? Of the 1,979 firearms seized
from alleged narcotics dealers in California that year, only
58 were ?assault weapons.?

From 1985 through 1989 in Chicago, only one homicide was
credited to a rifle firing a military caliber cartridge.
Slightly over 1% of the 17,144 guns seized by Chicago police
in 1989 were “military style weapons,? Kopel writes.

Down in Florida in 1989, according to the state Department
of Law Enforcement Uniform Crime Reports, all kinds of
rifles accounted for only 2.6% of firearms used in Sunshine
State homicides. ?Assault weapons? were used in 17 of the
7,500 firearms crimes between 1986 and 1989, according to
Kopel?s data.

Nationally, according to Kopel, less than 4% of all US
homicides involve any type of rifle, including so-called
assault rifles. Less than 1% of those involve rifles using
military calibers.

When the ban was being pushed in 1994, the last year
Democrats controlled Congress, proponents of the ban
insisted that the nation?s police officers supported the
idea because they faced these guns frequently on the
streets.

Not so, according to Kopel?s research Four years earlier,
more than 100,000 police officers sent a message to Congress
in 1990 advising Capitol Hill that only 2 to 3% of crimes
are committed with the demonized semi-automatic firearms.

Law enforcement opposition continues today, as demonstrated
by a letter to the editor of The Seattle Post -Intelligencer
from sheriff?s Deputy Dave Hood. In his letter Hood wrote,
?Study after study has shown that even before 1994, use of
these ?assault weapons? amounted for no more then .05% of all
reported crimes involving firearms In fact, a study mandated
by Congress determined: ?At best, the ?assault weapons? ban
can have a limited effect on total gun murders, because the
banned weapons were never involved in more than modest
fraction of all gun murders?

?I?ve been a local area cop for over 25 years,? Hood
continued. ?I don?t work from behind a desk. My office is a
squad car. My job is to respond to 9-1-1 calls. The vast
majority of the officers that I work with feel that this ban
was a foolish bit of legislation that did nothing to make
our streets and homes safer. Like all foolish laws it needs
to be taken off of the books.?

Kopel, writing in the September/October issue of The Law
Enforcement Trainer, a publication of the American Society
for Law Enforcement Training, noted, ?In November 1995,
Handgun Control Inc. (HCI), which changed its name to the
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, put out a ?study?
titled ?Cops Under Fire? The study claims that 13% of
police officers killed from January 1994 through September
1995 were shot with ?assault weapons? HCI also wrote that
in 23% of the homicides, the perpetrator?s gun could use a
magazine holding more than ten rounds.

?But these statistics appear to have been doctored,? he
said.

Looking at the HCI data, Kopel determined that several
reported incidents had inaccurate information. The wrong
gun model was listed, the firearm actually used was not
subject to the 1994 ban, the firearm was taken from a police
officer, and in some cases, the murder was committed by a
police officer against another officer.

?In truth,? Kopel observed, ?so-called assault weapons
account for a small percentage of police homicides. From
1975 through 1992, there were 1,534 police officers
feloniously murdered in the United States. Of these,
16?slightly over 1%?were killed with ?assault weapons??

While gun control advocates may have failed at the federal
level, they could increase pressure on state legislatures,
as they have in Maryland, Illinois and elsewhere.