Biden Doubles Down on Gun Control Push

Biden used Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an opportunity to renew his push for gun control - and even bullet control.

According to the Daily Caller:
 

Biden pledged to continue his goal of banning “assault weapons,” saying that there is no “social redeeming value” to owning “assault weapons” because deer do not wear “Kevlar vests,” according to the president’s remarks. Furthermore, Biden questioned why Americans need so many bullets, saying “ban the number of bullets that can go in a magazine. No, no need for any of that.”

“About a month after Buffalo and Uvalde, visited both, I signed the first major gun safety legislation in 13 years and I’ll say what I said then and I’ll say it over and over again: I am going to get assault weapons banned. I did it once and I’m going to do it again,” Biden said.

Watch below:
 

Biden has oversold the supposed success of the assault weapons ban in the past, stating in May of last year that  “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) was signed into law by Bill Clinton in September 1994 and prohibited the purchase of semiautomatic weapons classified as “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines. It expired in 2004. It was an assault weapons “ban” in that it prohibited sales of “assault weapons” after the bill was passed, but everyone who already owned one was grandfathered in and did not have to relinquish their firearms.

The so-called fact-checkers rallied behind Biden’s false claim. 

As I documented in my forthcoming book Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry; PolitiFact’s Jon Greenberg rated Biden’s claim as “Mostly True,” which he says is supported by “several studies,” but he only cites one in his article (that’s behind a $60 paywall) to make his case.

The study is a 2019 study from the New York School of Medicine that found mass shooting deaths involving assault weapons fell “slightly” in the decade of the AWB and rose dramatically after it ended. Greenberg does acknowledge that the decline during the ban is too small to draw any conclusions from (but apparently not too small to assign a “Mostly True” rating from).

JustFacts’ James Agresti, who bit the bullet and shelled out $60 for the study, immediately noted some glaring flaws in it, the first being that it had a chart of mass shooting deaths which showed zero deaths in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2004—all ban years, and all years where there were people killed in mass shootings.

Agresti charted mass shooting deaths relative to population, and the chart shows a weak and unclear pattern—but it is clear that there’s no tripling in deaths post–ban expiration.

Columbia University’s Dr. Louis Klarevas also picked apart the study, noting that “the authors misidentified the involvement of assault weapons in roughly half of the incidents [mass shootings]… when erroneous cases are recalibrated the number of incidents involving assault weapons drops 62%...and the number of fatalities resulting from such shootings drops 46%.... This brings the percentage of mass shootings involving assault weapons in the [study’s] data set from 77% to 30%, which is consistent with other studies that have found that assault weapons are used in 25% to 36% of active shootings.”

Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros

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