The Democrat-controlled Virginia General Assembly continues to move forward with unconstitutional legislation banning commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms and standard capacity magazines. In January, the RAND Corporation culminated a decade of surveying gun control research and published the fifth and final edition of its “The Science of Gun Policy.” The outfit found that the impact of semi-automatic firearm and magazine bans on violent crime was “inconclusive.”
As NRA-ILA and others have documented over the years, most gun control social “science”/public health research is junk. This will be obvious to those who understand the pitfalls of social “science”/public health research broadly.
Today, much of the public health field is concerned with empowering government to dictate an ever-expanding array of individual behavior, including what people can eat, drink, read, think, drive, and how to protect yourself and your family. The project is fundamentally opposed to individual liberty. All the while, we’re assured that it’s necessary for an ever-growing amount of taxpayer resources to be devoted to public health “experts” studying and implementing these efforts. It doesn’t take a public choice theorist to understand how these incentives work to create a feedback loop.
Incentives matter. That’s why gun owners should know that the RAND corporation has received funding for gun research from the gun control-supporting Laura and John Arnold Foundation. For more information on the significance of this connection, readers are encouraged to read firearms journalist Lee Williams’s piece on the topic here.
Given this funding source, it’s even more telling that RAND couldn’t come up with evidence for semi-auto and magazine bans as crime control.
Specifically, RAND researchers sought to determine the impact of “Bans on the Sale of Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines.” Unable to find a meaningful relationship between what they termed “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines” and violent crime, the study concluded,
available evidence is inconclusive for the effect of assault weapon bans on total homicides and firearm homicides. Similarly, we find inconclusive evidence for the effect of high-capacity magazine bans on total and firearm homicides.
As Northeastern Professor of Criminology James Alan Fox has noted, crafting gun control policy based on high-profile shootings is pointless. In 2012, the professor wrote,
Mass killers are determined, deliberate and dead-set on murder. They plan methodically to execute their victims, finding the means no matter what laws or other impediments the state attempts to place in their way. To them, the will to kill cannot be denied.
Given this and the relatively small sample size, research involving such incidents is of dubious value.
In attempting to determine the impact of bans on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms and their magazines on “mass shootings,” RAND concluded,
We found inconclusive evidence for the effects of assault weapon bans on mass shootings and their fatalities and limited evidence that bans on high-capacity magazines reduce mass shootings and fatalities.
The lack of empirical support for gun and magazine bans shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Long guns of any description are rarely used in violent crime. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting breaks down homicides by weapon. In the preceding five years, the FBI reported that there were more than three times as many individuals listed as killed with “knives or cutting instruments,” than with rifles of any kind. The data also shows that rifles were listed as being used in fewer homicides than “personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.).” More than nine times as many people were listed as killed using “knives or cutting instruments” than shotguns. More than four times as many people were listed as killed using “personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.)” than shotguns.
Moreover, the entire country ran a natural experiment on semi-auto gun and magazine bans from 1994 to 2004 and the results didn’t favor gun controllers.
In 1994, a 10-year federal ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms and magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition was enacted as part of the Clinton Crime Bill. A 1997 Department of Justice-funded study of the Clinton ban determined, “At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders.”
A 2004 Department of Justice-funded follow-up study of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban determined, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
Regarding high-profile shootings, the 1997 U.S. Department of Justice-funded study of the federal semi-auto ban noted,
We were unable to detect any reduction to date in two types of gun murders that are thought to be closely associated with assault weapons, those with multiple victims in a single incident and those producing multiple bullet wounds per victim.
The 2004 Department of Justice-funded study of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban found that, “relatively few attacks involve more than 10 shots fired,” and that, “it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability to fire more than 10 shots (the current limit on magazine capacity) without reloading.”
Researching a potential federal semi-automatic ban in 2013, the Department of Justice National Institute of Justice (under President Barack Obama) noted:
a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides.
…
Since assault weapons are not a major contributor to US gun homicide and the existing stock of guns is large, an assault weapon ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence.
After a decade of looking into the policy, RAND came to the same conclusion as everyone else who has seriously studied the matter – the evidence doesn’t show that bans on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms and standard capacity magazines impact violent crime.
Given the observed inefficacy of semi-auto gun and magazine bans, gun control advocates and politicians’ insistence on pushing this policy underscores that their motivation is not public safety, but rather a hostility to individual liberty and a desire to indulge ugly political and cultural prejudices.
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