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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Assault weapons bans work, don’t let the NRA “culture issues” sway you. They work. [twitter]https://x.com/mikejason73/status/1529992509920890884?s=21&t=QoUsmJbwoSilhXvC-rIebg[/twitter][/quote]

+1.  They were banned before and should be banned again.  It was fine.[/quote]

Some things haven’t changed much since then. A RAND review of gun studies, updated in 2020, concluded there is “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

“We don’t think there are great studies available yet to state the effectiveness of assault weapons bans,” Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told FactCheck.org in a phone interview. “That’s not to say they aren’t effective. The research we reviewed doesn’t provide compelling evidence one way or the other.”

There has, however, been emerging research about post-ban trends that may provide information that could be useful to evaluating what worked and what didn’t in the 1994 assault weapons ban.

For example, research published in 2019 in Criminology & Public Policy by Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, found that after controlling for population growth, the assault weapons ban did not appear to have much of an effect on the number of mass public shootings, comparing a pre-ban period with the 10 years the ban was in effect. But he found that the incidence and severity of mass public shootings, meaning the number killed and injured, has increased over the last decade, after the ban had expired.

Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History,“ documented 158 mass public shootings in the U.S. between 1976 and 2018, which included shootings that “occur in the absence of other criminal activity (e.g., robberies, drug deals, and gang ‘turf wars’) in which a gun was used to kill four or more victims at a public location within a 24-hour period.”

Duwe also looked at three-, five- and 10-year moving averages to flatten out some of the extreme spikes and dips in individual years.

Duwe found that the lowest 10-year average in mass shooting rates was between 1996-2005, which roughly corresponds with the ban period. But Duwe notes that that “aligns with broader trends observed for crime and violence in the United States.” In other words, it’s hard to know how much the assault weapons ban may have affected mass shootings during that time.[/quote]

That is actually quite misleading because it misses some critical nuance.  Overall the numbers of mass shootings were in fact down quite a bit, but the aggregate numbers ended up skewed in 1999 by an anomalous cluster and spike of shootings consisting of the Columbine shooting, LA Jewish Center shooting and some other mass shootings which didn't involve assault weapons.  [/quote]

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