Joe Biden has repeated some version of the following talking point when arguing for bringing back the Clinton-era federal assault weapons ban: “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”
As is usually the case with anything coming out of Biden’s mouth, the statement is highly misleading.
The federal assault weapons ban (AWB) was signed into law by Bill Clinton in September 1994, and prohibited the purchase of semi-automatic weapons classified as “assault weapons,” and large capacity magazines. The ban expired in 2004.
Coming to Biden’s defense as they always do, Politifact’s Jon Greenberg rated Biden’s claim about the AWB “mostly true,” which he says is supported by “several studies,” but only cites in one his article (that’s behind a $60 paywall) to make his case.
The study is a 2019 paper 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 notes that the decline during the ban is too small to draw any conclusions from, but says the study supports Biden’s claim for a post-ban increase in shootings did happen. Even if we’re to accept this study at face value, this doesn’t support a “mostly true” rating.
And the study has countless flaws that make it useless.
JustFact’s James Agresti immediately noted some glaring issues with the study, 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 that people were 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 picked apart the New York School of Medicine study further, 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.”
Interestingly, this is one topic where even the fact checkers can’t agree with each other.
FactCheck.org evaluated a version of Biden’s claim back in March and rated it “unclear,” noting that there’s contradictory research, and that the government’s own research couldn’t find support for their own assault weapons ban:
We wrote about this issue eight years ago, when the gun debate was again raging in Congress. At the time, we found that a three-part study funded by the Department of Justice concluded that the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.”
We wrote: The final report concluded the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.” Gun crimes involving assault weapons declined. However, that decline was “offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with [large-capacity magazines].”
Ultimately, the research concluded that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime,” largely because the law’s grandfathering of millions of pre-ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines “ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually” and were “still unfolding” when the ban expired in 2004.
As of writing, support for an assault weapons ban is polling at an all time low.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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