Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, said that “mass shootings decreased” as a result of the prohibition on so-called “assault weapons” that was in place from 1994 to 2004.
Conclusive evidence suggests the opposite.
Jean-Pierre began Tuesday’s news conference by addressing the recent spate of mass shootings in California, the state with the strictest gun laws in the country.
California has specific gun control measures, including prohibiting “assault weapons.”
While arguing for a federal ban on so-called “assault weapons,” Jean-Pierre said, “The last time we had an ‘assault weapons’ prohibition on the books, due to the President and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) leadership, mass shootings went down.”
Jean-assertion Pierre’s is entirely at odds with data uncovered and shared by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).
Originally released while the “assault weapons” prohibition was being lifted, Breitbart News reported the NIJ’s results. According to the NIJ, there is no way to attribute any decrease in crime to prohibition.
We cannot unambiguously credit the prohibition with any of the nation’s recent decline in gun violence,” Christopher Koper, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the report’s author, was cited as saying in the Washington Times. To add insult to injury, there has been no appreciable decline in gun violence’s toll.
The NIJ study elaborated, “The ban’s impacts on gun violence are likely to be minor at best and potentially too tiny for accurate quantification.” Putting things in perspective, it stated that “assault rifles” were “rarely employed in gun crimes even before the prohibition.”
According to an article by Breitbart News on January 18th, 2013, “assault weapons” were responsible for fewer than.012 percent of all deaths in the United States in recent years (2011). The NIJ research demonstrating that so-called “assault weapons” were “rarely utilized” in crime underlines the importance of this fact. The firearms are too large and prominent to be used by criminals trying to stay under the radar.
The assailant in Half Moon Bay on the 23rd appears to have also used a handgun, as did the one in Monterey Park on the 21st, as Christine Ni of NBC Bay Area noticed.
According to Jean-Pierre, the “assault weapons” prohibition that was in place between 1994 and 2004 helped minimize mass shootings. However, this contradicts the NIJ analysis commissioned by the Department of Justice.