Assault Weapons Bans Have No Impact On Crime

The gun control movement in America has been reinvigorated, and at the top of its agenda are bans on assault weapons. “The killers in San Bernardino used military-style assault weapons — weapons of war,” President Obama said Saturday, calling for a ban on these guns. Gun control proponents were also emboldened by the Supreme Court's decision Monday to allow an Illinois ban on assault rifles to stand.

Yet we already know that banning assault weapons won't reduce gun crime or deaths. Worse, the bans may make it harder to enact more effective gun control laws.

The problem starts with the term itself. The “assault weapons” for sale in the U.S. now aren't really weapons of war. Many people mistake these firearms for machine guns capable of shooting multiple rounds of ammunition with a single pull of the trigger. The federal government banned the sale of machine guns to civilians in 1986. (The National Rifle Assn. likes to claim that gun laws never work, but the machine gun ban has worked just fine. Such guns are almost never used in criminal activity, and none of the recent mass shootings in the U.S. involved a machine gun. The San Bernardino terrorists tried to modify one of their guns to turn it into a machine gun.)

Gun rights supporters often point out that so-called assault weapons that some people seek to ban aren’t materially different from other guns that will remain allowed. I think that’s factually right (and some pro-gun-control liberals, such as my colleague Adam Winkler, agree).

Assault weapons aren’t fully automatic; they are semiautomatics, like many tens of millions of other guns out there. They aren’t unusually powerful — “assault rifles” are generally more powerful than handguns, because generally rifles are more powerful than handguns, but many ordinary hunting rifles (such as a .30-06) are more powerful than many assault weapons (such as the .223s that were used in the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting). The features that are often used to distinguish them, such as bayonet lugs, barrel shrouds, and pistol grips, don’t actually make them materially deadlier. (Magazine size may be relevant to deadliness, though it’s not clear that magazine size limits are a good idea; but in any event, magazine capacity is a separate matter from assault weapons bans as such, since large magazines can fit all sorts of guns.)