Friday, July 27, 2012
‘AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the
streets of our cities,” President Obama told the National Urban League on
Wednesday. After the deadly attack in Colorado last Friday, the president’s
concern is understandable. However, even — or perhaps especially — at such a
time, distinctions need to be made.
The police in Aurora, Colo., reported that the killer
used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15. This weapon bears a cosmetic resemblance
to the M-16, which has been used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War.
The call has frequently been made that there is “no reason” for such
“military-style weapons” to be available to civilians.
Yes, the M&P 15 and the AK-47 are “military-style
weapons.” But the key word is “style” — they are similar to military guns in
their aesthetics, not in the way they actually operate. The guns covered by the
federal assault-weapons ban (which was enacted in 1994 and expired ten year
later) were not the fully automatic machine guns used by the military but
semi-automatic versions of those guns.
The civilian version of the AK-47 uses essentially the
same sorts of bullets as deer-hunting rifles, fires at the same rapidity (one
bullet per pull of the trigger), and does the same damage. The M&P 15 is
similar, though it fires a much smaller bullet — .223 inches in diameter, as
opposed to the .30-inch rounds used by the AK-47.
The Aurora killer’s large-capacity ammunition magazines
are also misunderstood. The common perception that so-called “assault weapons”
can hold larger magazines than hunting rifles is simply wrong. Any gun that can
hold a magazine can hold one of any size. That is true for handguns as well as
rifles. A magazine, which is basically a metal box with a spring, is also
trivially easy to make and virtually impossible to stop criminals from
obtaining.
Further, the guns in a couple of recent mass shootings
(including the one in Aurora) have jammed because of the large magazines that
were used. The reason is simple physics. Large magazines require very strong
springs, but the springs cannot be too strong, or it becomes impossible to load
the magazines. Over time, the springs wear out, and when a spring loses its
ability to push bullets into the chamber properly, the gun jams. With large
springs, even a small amount of fatigue can cause jams.
If Obama wants to campaign against semi-automatic guns
based on their function, he should go after all semi-automatic guns. After all,
in 1998, as an Illinois state senator, he supported just such a ban – a ban
that would eliminate most of the guns in the United States.
But despite Obama’s frightening image of military weapons
on America’s streets, it is pretty hard to seriously argue that a new ban on
“assault weapons” would reduce crime in the United States. Even research done for
the Clinton administration didn’t find that the federal assault-weapons ban
reduced crime.
Indeed, banning guns on the basis of how they look, and
not how they operate, shouldn’t be expected to make any difference. And there
are no published academic studies by economists or criminologists that find the
original federal assault-weapons ban to have reduced murder or violent crime
generally. There is no evidence that the state assault-weapons bans reduced
murder or violent-crime rates either. Since the federal ban expired in
September 2004, murder and overall violent-crime rates have actually fallen. In
2003, the last full year before the law expired, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7
per 100,000 people. Preliminary numbers for 2011 show that the murder rate has
fallen to 4.7 per 100,000 people.
In fact, murder rates fell immediately after September
2004, and they fell more in the states without assault-weapons bans than in the
states with them.
Nevertheless, the fears at the time were significant. An
Associated Press headline warned, “Gun shops and police officers brace for end
of assault weapons ban.” It was even part of the presidential campaign that
year: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault weapons ban.” An Internet search turned up
more than 560 news stories in the first two weeks of September 2004 that
expressed fear about ending the ban. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fact that
murder and other violent crime declined after the ban ended was hardly covered
in the media.
If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple-victim
public shootings, it is about time that we acknowledge a common feature of
these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year,
every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been
killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where citizens are not
allowed to carry their own firearms. The Cinemark movie theater in Aurora, like
others run by the chain around the country, displayed warning signs that it was
prohibited to carry guns into the theater.
So President Obama wants to keep guns like the AK-47 “in
the hands of soldiers.” But these are not military weapons. No self-respecting
military in the world would use them, and it is time for Obama to stop scaring
the American people.
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