House passes foolish ‘assault weapons’ ban

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 217– 213 to pass H.R. 1808, the so-called “Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.” The bill has no chance of advancing in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass. The vote, then, was inconsequential in some sense, but potentially highly consequential in another.

In the lead up to the vote, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-North Carolina, declared that “assault weapons” were “the weapons of choice for murderers responsible for America’s deadly mass shootings.” As Jacob Sullum from Reason Magazine points out, that’s simply false.

“According to a recent National Institute of Justice report on public mass shootings from 1966 through

2019, 77% of the perpetrators used handguns,” Sullum noted. “About a quarter of the perpetrators used weapons that would be covered by legislation like H.R. 1808.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared the bill “a crucial step in our ongoing fight against the deadly epidemic of gun violence in our nation.” But there’s plenty of reason to doubt even that broader claim as well.

For one, the concept of an “assault weapon” is a fiction. As the Associated Press advises journalists, the term ““convey[s] little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon.”

Second, the type of weapon most commonly used in both mass shootings (which are relatively rare) and non-mass shootings is actually handguns. According to Pew Research, citing FBI data, handguns were used in 59% of homicides and non-negligent manslaughters.

Third, evidence the 1994 assault weapons ban significantly reduced gun violence is at best mixed. “A recent evaluation of the short-term effects of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence outcomes,” observed the National Academies of Sciences in 2005.

Of course, with bans like this, there’s a central problem: gun laws only impact those who follow the law.

In a nation with more guns than people, illegal weapons throughout the country and the availability of 3D printing technology, one must deal with those realities.

Pretending a ban on arbitrary classifications of weapons when such weapons are already broadly owned and broadly available will meaningfully reduce gun violence does nothing to save lives or prevent future tragedies.

It could potentially, though, contribute to an even bigger defeat for the Democrats in the midterms, as Democrats who opposed the bill themselves warned.

“This is a bill that destroyed the Democrats in ‘94,” Rep. Kurt Schrader, DOregon warned to Politico in July. “Do we really have a death wish list as Democrats?”

In 1994, many Democratic representatives desperately sought to remove the assault weapons ban of that year from the bigger crime bill passed that year, fearing an electoral fallout.

“[W]e put a lot of folks on the line ... In really strong gun states, it was seen as poison,” Rep. Vic Fazio, DCalifornia, told The Daily Beast in 2019.

The result? A historic loss known as the Republican Revolution.

Amid undeniable economic problems, it is politically foolish for the House Democrats to have wasted time and political capital on a do-nothing stunt bill targeting legal gun owners.

And yet, that’s what they chose to do.