WASHINGTON — After a string of mass shootings, culminating in a massacre that left 28 dead in Newtown, Conn., the debate over banning military-style assault weapons has re-entered the public arena.
While the U.S. Senate rejected a renewed ban in April, the issue is alive at the state level — Connecticut, Maryland and New York passed legislation prohibiting assault weapons, or expanding existing bans.
In the flurry of post-Newtown, Conn., gun control legislation, it’s worth considering a case study: the provision in a 1994 federal crime bill forbidding the ownership of certain types of semi-automatic firearms and also large-capacity ammunition magazines.
The legislation President Bill Clinton signed into law included a sunset date of September 2004 for the assault weapons ban, which was included in the broader crime legislation.
But the assault weapons section left a giant question mark for analysts down the road. With only a ten-year time frame to examine and relatively few studies to go on, some have argued the law was ineffective while others say it was not in place long enough to allow a definitive verdict.
Part of the criticism of the old federal ban stems from statistics that show assault weapons were used in very few crimes. But gun control advocates argue that the instances where such firearms were employed often produced deadly, mass casualties.
Federal and state definitions of assault weapons
In Connecticut in April, Gov. Daniel Malloy signed a bill expanding that state’s assault weapons ban, enacted in 1993.
The legislative success in Connecticut contrasted with the failed effort of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was primary sponsor of the 1994 federal law and tried to reinstate a similar ban earlier this year on Capitol Hill. Unlike her previous effort, this one landed on the Senate floor with a thud — it failed in a lopsided 40-60 vote.
Clarifying what exactly constitutes an “assault weapon” is tricky.
“It’s hard to define what an assault rifle or an assault weapon is,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, “… because it doesn’t define a category of firearms that is especially unique.”
The expansion this year of Connecticut’s ban widened the statue in a way similar to what Feinstein attempted in the Senate. Both bills broadened the definition by classifying an assault weapon as a gun that had at least one type of military-style feature – a folding stock, for instance — rather than two.
Winkler, who has written about gun laws, said that most of the “features” used to define an assault weapon were “cosmetic and not particularly functional.” They include folding stocks, scopes, grenade launchers, and threaded barrels.
“Really, the way to think about this is — an assault rifle is really just a rifle that’s been cosmetically styled, likes a sports car, for military use,” he said.
Even though Feinstein’s proposal is unlikely to pass this Congress anytime soon, it is still a model for gun-control advocates. “We know how to write a strong bill,” said Kristin Rand, the legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, a pro-gun control group. “And the one that Senator Feinstein has introduced will effectively ban assault weapons and avoid all the pitfalls of prior attempts.”
But Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, a pro gun-rights group in the state of Washington, argues that such a measure would be fruitless because criminals do not follow such laws.
Did it actually reduce crime?
The federal assault weapons ban left a mixed legacy. Most studies, including a definitive work by the Justice Department in the summer of 2004, concluded it was too early to draw a conclusion on the effectiveness of the ban.
In six different municipalities, including Boston and St. Louis, the Justice study found assault weapon-related crimes dropped between 17 percent and 72 percent. But even before the ban, the use of such weapons in crimes was few and far, as low as 2 percent of all crimes in the U.S. and no more than 8 percent.
However, crimes involving large-capacity magazines, those holding 10 or more rounds, remained unchanged or rose slightly during the prohibition, according to the Justice Department report. Prior to the 1994 ban, between 14 percent and 26 percent of gun crimes used these bullet caches.
“You can have a high-capacity magazine in a handgun,” Winkler, the law professor said. “Jared Loughner in (the) Tucson (mass shooting) had a high-capacity magazine attached to a handgun; that’s a separate functional restriction that could, at the margins, possibly impact these mass shootings… But the restriction on assault weapons? Hardly likely.”
Ladd Everitt, communications director at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a pro-gun control group, said state-level bans on assault weapons will have a positive effect.
“The one common factor in nearly every mass shooting incident we see is high-capacity magazines,” he said. “And now more and more we are certainly seeing that military-style rifles, semiautomatic rifles are being used.”
The Justice Department report offered a chilling assessment of what could, and did, happen in the aftermath of letting the assault weapons ban expire. The passage reads almost like a prediction.
“It is also possible, and perhaps probable, that new (assault weapons) and (large-capacity magazines) will eventually be used to commit mass murder,” the study reads.
Context for assault weapons ban, today and then
According to a 1997 Urban Institute study, several mass shootings in the 1980s and early 1990s — one of them, a deadly incident in a California schoolyard — served as catalysts for the 1994 ban on assault weapons.
Similarly, a string of mass shootings recently – in Arizona, Colorado and Connecticut — caused the public to question the nation’s laws over guns.
Would the high-powered, rapidly fired weapons used in these incidents have been available to the suspects’ reach had the 2004 ban been renewed?
“I think it’s a complicated story that depends on the particular circumstance,” said UCLA’s Winkler. “While assault rifles are defined to be semi-automatic firearms, there’s a lot of semi-automatic firearms that aren’t assault rifles or assault weapons.”
The suspect in the Newtown, Conn., shootings, Adam Lanza, who was among the dead, used semi-automatic weapons – including a Bushmaster .223-caliber — which he took from his mother’s cache. She purchased them legally and was a law-abiding gun owner. But she too died in the gunfire that day.
“Would it (an assault weapons ban) have prevented the Newtown shooting? I don’t think so,” Winkler said. “It might have prevented him (from) having an assault weapon when he went to the school… He probably would have been capable of shooting just as many rounds with other firearms as he shot with the assault weapon.”
Jared Loughner, the shooter in the Tucson, Ariz., tragedy, used high-capacity magazines. While in Aurora, Colo., James Holmes allegedly used a large-capacity magazine that jammed.
“It seems unlikely that most of these mass shootings would have been fundamentally different in the outcome had the shooter not had access to an assault weapon,” Winkler said.