Today’s a day that ends in y, so the White House is gaslighting us again. This time, it’s on gun control, with gun violence back in the headlines this week after another tragic shooting. The Biden administration once again is exploiting the news coverage to push its partisan, anti-gun agenda: namely, a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”
“We need Congress to act,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday. “If you think about the assault weapons ban, we know… we saw when the president was involved in 1994 to get that done, we saw gun violence go down. And when it sunset ten years later, it went back up.”
KJP: "If you think about Assault Weapons Ban…We saw gun violence go down. When it sunset 10 years laters, it went back up!" pic.twitter.com/4TUTkUSNNP
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 10, 2023
While the U.S. did have a ban on “assault weapons” (a made-up and largely meaningless category of firearms) from 1994 to 2004, everything else Karine Jean-Pierre said is untrue. It did not reduce gun violence, and, in fact, its statistical ineffectiveness is so strongly proven that experts from across the political spectrum have acknowledged it.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Just consider the ample research into the subject.
As FEE’s Jon Miltimore explains, a study commissioned by the Department of Justice found that “we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence” and any future reductions were most likely going to be “small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” Another study published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that assault weapons bans were statistically “unrelated to fatal mass shootings.”
Meanwhile, a comprehensive review of studies by the RAND Corporation found no conclusive evidence that the assault weapons ban reduced gun violence. Hell, even the New York Times has admitted, “The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.”
When you’re a Democrat and you’ve lost the New York Times, you know your case is weak.
The frustrating part here is that the Biden administration has to know its claims about the assault weapons ban are unsubstantiated. There’s no shortage of experts and policy advisors at their disposal who could easily explain this to them. They either don’t care or are fully aware and cynically think it’s worth it politically anyway. Either way, it’s an absolute disgrace.
There are tens of millions of so-called “assault rifles” in the U.S., and only about 300 people are killed every year with rifles of any kind, according to FBI data. That means 99.99% of them are never used to murder anybody. Yet the Biden administration wants to deprive the millions of Americans who want to own these weapons of their rights all to enact an ideological agenda that demonstrably has no improvement on public safety.
Shame on Karine Jean-Pierre and the entire Biden administration for refusing to acknowledge reality and shamelessly exploiting every national tragedy to push their useless anti-gun agenda.
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