{"id":6279,"date":"2016-06-23T14:12:18","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T14:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=6279"},"modified":"2016-06-23T14:12:18","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T14:12:18","slug":"banning-assault-weapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/06\/banning-assault-weapons\/","title":{"rendered":"Banning “Assault Weapons” Will Not Save Lives – Article by Corey Iacono"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/a>Corey Iacono<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Last weekend, America regrettably witnessed one of the deadliest mass shootings in the country\u2019s history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were murdered and over 50 injured. The atrocity was carried out by a fanatic who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, using\u00a0a civilian semi-automatic rifle, the Sig Sauer MCX. (Early\u00a0reports that it was an\u00a0AR-15 were mistaken.)<\/p>\n

In the wake of this attack, many people have laid the blame on America\u2019s relatively lax gun laws, arguing that so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d (more appropriately known as semi-automatic rifles) and high-capacity magazines should be banned from civilian use.<\/p>\n

They note that many of the deadliest shootings in American history have involved rifles like the AR-15, and they propose that such rifles should be banned to prevent heinous crimes like the Orlando massacre from occurring in the future.<\/p>\n

Homicides Dehomogenized<\/strong><\/p>\n

But while it may be true that many\u00a0mass\u00a0shootings involved semi-automatic rifles, these events are rare. In fact, the latest data<\/a> (2014) from the FBI show that all<\/em> types of rifles were only confirmed to have been used in 248 homicides, down from 351 in 2009. Given\u00a0the total number of homicides (11,961), rifles were confirmed to have been used in only two percent of murders.<\/p>\n

You’re more likely to be stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death with bare hands than killed by someone with a rifle.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to know the true number of murders involving \u201cassault weapons,\u201d because the term is so nebulous, and because the FBI only looks at the categories of rifle, shotgun, and handgun. There are also nearly 2,000\u00a0gun murders in which the type of firearm used is unknown. But a rough estimate of 328 homicides with all rifles (extrapolated from\u00a0rifle’s\u00a0share of gun murders where the type of weapon is known) is probably\u00a0close to the truth.<\/p>\n

To be very generous to the assault weapon ban argument, let\u2019s assume that all of these 328 murders were done with assault weapons. That would imply that such weapons were involved in less than three percent of all homicides in the United States, at most.<\/p>\n

Such\u00a0deaths are as terrible as any murder, but it is also true that knives, blunt objects, and hands\/feet were confirmed to have been used in 1,567, 435, and 660 murders respectively. You are much more likely to be stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death with bare hands than killed by someone with a rifle, and the chances of being killed with an \u201cassault-type rifle<\/a>\u201d are necessarily lesser still.<\/p>\n

Bans Don’t Work<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is also little evidence that these weapons bans have worked in the past. From 1994 to 2004, Congress banned the manufacture, sale, or transfer of a large number of \u201cassault weapons\u201d<\/a> (including some handguns and high-capacity magazines). An assessment study<\/a> commissioned by the Department of Justice in 2004 found no evidence that the ban had had any effect on gun violence and concluded that \u201cshould it be renewed, the ban\u2019s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Violent\u00a0ideologues will\u00a0not be deterred from their paths of destruction by minor inconveniences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Research<\/a> by economist Mark Guis of Quinnipiac University revealed no evidence that either state or federal \u201cassault weapons\u201d bans reduced firearm-homicide rates. Carlisle E. Moody of the College of William and Mary found no evidence<\/a> that the federal ban on high-capacity magazines had any effect on homicide rates.<\/p>\n

Regarding terrorist attacks like the one in Orlando, it\u2019s not clear, even in retrospect, that they would be prevented by more restrictive gun control measures. Stringent gun laws in California and France failed to prevent the recent massacres in San Bernardino and Paris. People driven to violence by ideology will not be easily deterred from their paths of destruction by minor inconveniences; it is simply na\u00efve to believe that\u00a0smaller magazines or not having a folding stock would have stopped them.<\/p>\n

In any event, keeping in mind the horrors that mass shootings entail, \u201cassault weapons\u201d are not even connected to\u00a0a significant amount of crime in the United States. Even if confiscating and banning them completely erased homicides with committed with them, and the perpetrators didn’t substitute them with other legally available firearms, the effect on\u00a0homicide rates would be statistically very small.<\/p>\n

Many Americans simply don’t believe that some of the most popular rifles in America (overwhelmingly owned for legal and peaceful reasons) should be banned or that\u00a0tens of millions of Americans\u2019 rights should be infringed upon for so little to show for it. If you care about violence in America, you shouldn\u2019t waste your time on the red herring of \u201cassault weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nCorey Iacono<\/strong>
\n<\/a><\/h5>\n

Corey Iacono is a student at the University of Rhode Island majoring in pharmaceutical science and minoring in economics. He is a Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) 2016 Thorpe Fellow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Corey Iacono ****************************** Last weekend, America regrettably witnessed one of the deadliest mass shootings in the country\u2019s history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were murdered and over 50 injured. The atrocity was carried out by a fanatic who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, using\u00a0a civilian semi-automatic rifle, the Sig Sauer MCX. (Early\u00a0reports that it was an\u00a0AR-15 were mistaken.) In the wake of this attack, many people have laid the blame on America\u2019s relatively…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,5],"tags":[800,3357,4726,152,3610,1516,1256,187,3821,4727,4728,1265,3623],"class_list":["post-6279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-justice","category-politics","tag-ban","tag-confiscation","tag-corey-iacono","tag-crime","tag-fbi","tag-firearms","tag-gun-control","tag-orlando","tag-paris","tag-rifles","tag-san-bernardino","tag-second-amendment","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6281,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6279\/revisions\/6281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}