As Breitbart first reported yesterday, a Bloomberg School of Public Health (heh) study has found that “assault weapon” bans do nothing — zero, zip, zilch, nada — to stop mass shootings. It must have been difficult for the school’s primary gun control advocate, Daniel Webster, to approve publication of that press release.
But Webster did as much as possible to bury that information. The finding appeared near the end of an announcement of the study, long after the part where they claim that gun buyer licensing laws and “large capacity” magazine bans reduce mass shootings.
Here’s the sentence that must have given Webster a bad case of indigestion . . .
…the study did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.
But then there was also this . . .
The study did not find significant associations between the incidence of fatal mass shootings and concealed carry laws, comprehensive background check laws without licensing requirements, or firearm prohibitions for violent misdemeanor convictions and domestic violence restraining orders. Although researchers did not find a clear association between firearm restrictions for domestic abusers and reduced fatal mass shootings, other research has shown these laws do reduce intimate partner homicides.
Gosh, this should change everything! No one is going to claim that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School is in the pocket of the the gun industry. Even the gun-grabbing community doesn’t have the stones to try to make the case that they’re spinning the study’s results to go easy on firearms owners.
We already know that rifles (of any kind) only account for about 3% of all homicides in this country. And ARs and other scary-looking versions are a fraction of that small number.
So we’re good, right? With the Bloomberg School’s results and the fact that these kinds of guns are rarely used in any crimes, let alone mass shootings, we can do away with the “assault weapons” bans in California, New York, Maryland and other states, right?
Dream on.
The push to disarm Americans is a never-ending effort, one that is assiduously and stubbornly fact-free. That ARs constitute only a handful of the crimes committed every year and banning them doesn’t impact mass shootings won’t matter to the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex one whit.
They are committed to reducing the number of firearms in civilian hands in the United States any way they can. And the low-hanging fruit in that gun-grabbing battle — the type of guns that is easiest to demonize and scare non-gun owners into opposing — is the one they’ve spent so much time dishonestly disparaging as “assault weapons” and “weapons of war.”
Does anyone really think that an ignorant know-nothing like Virginia’s Mark Levine will withdraw his “assault weapons” ban bill from consideration in because of findings like these? Will Maryland’s House Speaker Adrienne Jones pull HB 1261?
As if.
No, the fight to defend and extend the right to keep and bear arms is a never-ending one. Gun rights opponents aren’t about the let little things like facts get in the way of making it as difficult, expensive, or outright illegal to own as many types of firearms as they possibly can.