Joe Biden's fixation with gun bans

Everyone is in agreement that gun violence in the United States is an intolerable and tragic blight on our society. However, President Joe Biden once again errs in pretending that the appropriate response is to pursue constitutionally suspect prohibitions on certain types of arbitrarily defined guns.

“The idea we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. Just sick,” President Biden said on Thanksgiving Day, according to the Associated Press. “I'm going to try to get rid of assault weapons.”

The president's comments followed the sickening mass shootings at a gay nightclub in Colorado and a Walmart in Virginia. The desire to do something is understandable, but precisely what actions the federal government takes should be driven by evidence and a realistic belief that such actions can pass constitutional muster.

The president's preference for an “assault weapons” ban isn't anything new. As a senator, he supported the 1994 federal ban on such assault weapons, which lasted for a decade.

The arbitrariness of what exactly an “assault weapon” is aside, research into bans on such weapons have delivered consistently underwhelming evidence of their efficacy in reducing gun violence.

In 2020, the nonpartisan Rand Corporation released a review of state and federal bans on assault weapons, with the stirring conclusion, “Assault weapon bans have uncertain effects on mass shootings. Evidence for this relationship is inconclusive.”

The 1994 federal ban likewise had uncertain impacts on gun violence, with a 2004 Department of Justice-funded study concluding, “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's recent drop in gun violence.”

A 2020 paper published in Criminology & Public Policy did find evidence that gun licensing laws and bans on large-capacity magazines were associated with reductions in mass shootings, but also found that assault weapons bans “do not seem to be associated with the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

None of the aforementioned studies just mentioned are the product of partisanship. But the president's fixation on an assault weapons ban is. The goal should be to figure out what works and what doesn't, not what sounds or feels good.