In 2016, after a nut with an assault rifle killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I tried to rebut some of the arguments advanced by the pro-gun crowd, here. Reading it over again now persuades me that the response to another mass killing is always just another round of recycled arguments and talking point recitals. For example, I noted back then that John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, wrote:
[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.
This is the kind of claim that can be fact checked, and I set out the murder rate (murders per 100,000 population) over a 20-year period, with the middle years in which the assault weapons ban was in effect bolded. Source is United States Crime Rates 1960-2019 compiled by the FBI. Here's what it looks like:
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)
2009 (5.0)
Contrary to what Hinderaker says, the rate did not drop dramatically after the ban expired. The dramatic drop occurred during the years the ban was in place. But who cares? Yesterday, in a post titled "What to Do About School Shootings?", Hinderaker wrote:
The "solutions" proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning "assault rifles," while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on "assault weapons" expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.
So the last sentence just repeats a falsehood. Either he doesn't know what the data shows, and isn't curious about the truth, or he's a liar. His whole post is laughable, but I'm just going to note a few additional things about the above brief paragraph. Complaining that the Democrats' proposed solutions are "intended for political gain" is his way of admitting that they enjoy broad public support. In theory, the sense of the majority is supposed to prevail, but we have minority rule and the minority is in the pocket of the gun lobby. I'm not sure why he thinks an assault rifle ban is unconstitutional, since he acknowledges that one was in place in the 1990s. By the method of constitutional interpretation favored by conservatives, the North star is always the "original intent" of the authors, and the authors of the Second Amendment could hardly be referring to "arms" that hadn't yet been invented. The next sentence is just a flex showing that, as a real man, Hinderaker knows what weapons are best suited to what circumstances. (It's of a piece with the quotes around "assault rifles" and "assault weapons": he wants us to know that he knows that these are the inapt terms of effeminate wimps who are alarmed by mass murder.) It's true that the Virginia Tech shooter used handguns, but assault-style rifles, often with high-capacity magazines, were used in numerous installments of the ongoing series of slaughters—Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, many others including, now, Uvalde. That Hinderaker seems to think a handgun is a better choice for killing kids and teachers in their elementary school raises the question: under what circumstances might a private citizen need an assault rifle or, if you prefer, an "assault rifle"?
Since the answer to that question is Never, they should be outlawed, and the purchase of other firearms should be subject to, at the least, waiting periods, background checks, red-flag laws, and age restrictions—the Uvalde shooter purchased his assault rifles legally, together with 375 rounds of ammunition, three years before he would have qualified to buy a case of beer.
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