It won't happen as long as Trump is president and McConnell is the Senate Majority Leader, but last weekend's massacres in El Paso and Dayton have caused some people to talk again about a ban on assault weapons. Such a ban was enacted in 1994, during the Clinton Administration, but by its own terms it expired ten years later, in 2004. Seems natural to wonder what happened to the murder rate in the country while the ban was in place. Well, here, from the FBI, is the year-by-year murder rate (murders per 100,000 population) for the four years preceding the ban, the ten years the ban was in place (in bold print in my table), and the four years after it expired:
1990 (9.4)
1991 (9.8)
1992 (9.3)
1993 (9.5)
1994 (9.0)
1995 (8.2)
1996 (7.4)
1997 (6.8)
1998 (6.3)
1999 (5.7)
2000 (5.5)
2001 (5.6)
2002 (5.6)
2003 (5.7)
2004 (5.5)
2005 (5.6)
2006 (5.7)
2007 (5.6)
2008 (5.4)
If you're wondering what's happened since 2008, the answer is not much: in 2017, the most recent year for which FBI data is available, the murder rate was 5.3 per 100,000 population.
Now, I understand the argument about causation versus correlation, and even though I've forgotten the Latin phrase for the logical fallacy I know too that A happening before B doesn't mean that A caused B, but, still, you can see why the gun fetishists aren't eager to discuss the evidence and frequently just lie about it. Here, for example, is John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog:
[W]e had an "assault weapons" ban for a number of years in the 1990s, and it did zero good. The homicide rate later dropped dramatically as firearms laws were liberalized.
Uh, no, the dramatic drop occurred in the years the ban was in place. Is he ignorant or lying? I also love the scare quotes around "assault weapons," since we all should know by now that what socialists call "assault weapons" are only grampa's .22 with a little of this and a little of that (making it possible to shoot 23 people, killing 9, in the 30 seconds before the cops get to the bar).
Do they really need these kinds of "guns"? Trump gave them a "tax cut"—I think they should trade in their AKs and ARs for a big noisy motorcycle. It's fine if they don't wear a helmet.
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