"Shooting Down Gun Lobby Myths" by Greg Mitchell

[sylvi]

5. Well

"After the ban expired, 37 percent of police departments reported noticeable increases in criminals’ use of assault weapons, according to a 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum."

What does that even mean, "noticeable increase"? If you had one assault weapon use one year, and two the next, that would be a 100% increase. Quite "noticeable", but meaning little in the grand scheme of things. Without some hard numbers and some context of how they stack up against other gun crime, this statement is meaningless.

"In Virginia, the number of guns with high capacity magazines seized by police dropped after they were included in the 1994 weapons ban, but then rebounded sharply after the ban expired, according to a 2011 study by The Washington Post. Maryland enacted its own more stringent ban on assault weapons ban in 1994, and a 55 percent drop in assault pistols from crime scenes was reported by the Baltimore police.

First off...assault pistol? Really? WTF is that? And again, there's no hard numbers for context here. As far as the fall and rise of "high capacity magazines" seized, there's still no statistical correlation demonstrated between them and the rate or severity of gun crimes, so what is all this proving as far as real world results go?