One Patriot

It doesn’t matter. But, for the record, semi-automatic guns are not assault weapons. I know the Democrats are trying to call semi-automatic guns assault weapons and have succeeded with people who don’t know much about guns. But, these same people/ Democrats don’t even know what a woman is.

LogicallyRight Loc: Chicago

Troll alert

American Scene

hygrometer3

How about k*****g little baby's in the womb--where is the outrage--Any so-call-Dr.--who would do this has a mental health problem!!!

AlexT

The M16 is an assault weapon. The AR15 looks like the M16, but is NOT an assault weapon. FJB

LaterGator

Rinaldi,
May I remind you that on Day One in the Oval Office, Biden overturned every good thing Biden wanted to that Trump did for the USA.

Brandon has been in that office more than 2 years now.

If he didn’t like what he is now blaming Trump for, then WHY has he not given Trump’s act(s) the same heave-ho?

Huh? Answer that one, will you! ! !

son of witless

This ' woman ' was not on the radar of police. Exactly how would Obama's regulations have stopped the t***s shooter ?

Drue-Marie

*That* Karen has her hair jacked up all the way to Jesus.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

FYI, nimrod, the "evil black rifle" is not, by any stretch, a supergun, it is not a "uniquely dangerous firearm", it has no special "features that facilitate mass shootings", it is not a WMD, and does not fire a nuclear warhead.

The hyperbolic over-exaggeration by l*****t morons of the appearance, function, power and use of the most popular sporting rifle in the nation is taking the gun control debate straight into the Twilight Zone.

There are hundreds of different types of semi-auto firearms, handguns and long guns, chambered in a wide range of calibers, fitted with high capacity mags, or not, that are just as lethal as an AR15.

The fact remains that in less than 3% of all mass shootings is a rifle of any type used.
The greatest percentage of mass shooters use handguns.
Moreover, the semi-auto AR15 has been used far more often to defend life and property
than it has been used in committing crimes.

Harvard Gun Study: The More Guns, The Less Criminal Activity

With gun control back in the spotlight following the Oregon college shooting, President Barack Obama suggested he may consider executive action similar to Australia's gun confiscation program, which Democratic p**********l front-runner Hillary Clinton said Friday she thinks is worthy of consideration. However, according to a recently resurfaced 2007 study published by the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, such actions would be counter-productive, with the study concluding, "The more guns a nation has, the less criminal activity."

The study, titled "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?", was conducted by Don Kates, a criminologist and constitutional lawyer, and Gary Mauser, a criminologist and professor at Simon Fraser University, and cites the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the United Nations International Study on Firearms Regulation.

"While American gun ownership is quite high, many other developed nations (e.g., Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Denmark) have high rates of gun ownership," said the report. "These countries, however, have murder rates as low or lower than many developed nations in which gun ownership is much rarer. For example, Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002."

Further, the authors noted that the same patterns emerge when comparing gun ownership to violence within a country, which often shows a "negative correlation."

"Where firearms are most dense, violent crime crates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest," said the report.

As the Daily Caller noted, this explains why many shootings take place in "gun free zones" like schools and movie theaters rather than in police stations or gun clubs.

The study pointed out that there are 40 states that allow citizens to carry concealed handguns, which the authors said reduced murder and violent crime.

"Adoption of state laws permitting millions of qualified citizens to carry guns has not resulted in more murder or violent crime in these states. Rather, adoption of these statutes has been followed by very significant reductions in murder and violence in these states," wrote the researchers.

Chicago, a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, has experienced a sharp increase in homicides and shootings this year.

Massachusetts also tried to curb gun violence with a comprehensive package of gun laws in 1998, but murders with firearms increased significantly, as did aggravated assaults and robberies involving guns and gunshot injuries, according to the Boston Globe.

Following the Oct. 1 shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that left nine people dead, Obama suggested the U.S. should pass stringent laws restricting the right to own guns, similar to the ones that were passed in Australia and Great Britain in the 1990s, despite promising to never restrict the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens during his 2008 p**********l campaign, as HNGN previously reported.

The 1996 Australian gun confiscation program was a mandatory gun buyback program that involved the government purchasing over 650,000 guns from citizens.

Friday, Democratic p**********l front-runner Hillary Clinton said a similar program "would be worth considering" at the national level in the U.S.

However, researchers from the University of Melbourne concluded in 2008 that there is little evidence to suggest that the buyback program in Australia "had any significant effects on firearm homicides and suicides."

"In addition, there also does not appear to be any substitution effects — that reduced access to firearms may have led those bent on committing homicide or suicide to use alternative methods.... Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public's fears, the evidence so far suggests that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not t***slated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths."

In Britain, which banned virtually all handguns in 1997, the total number of firearm offenses began to go up, increasing by 89 percent from 1998 to 2008, as the Daily Mail noted.

The Harvard study agreed: "Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has millions of illegal firearms. Criminals have no trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them."

"In the late 1990s, England moved from stringent controls to a complete ban of all handguns and many types of long guns. Hundreds of thousands of guns were confiscated from those owners law‐abiding enough to turn them in to authorities. Without suggesting this caused violence, the ban's ineffectiveness was such that by the year 2000 violent crime had so increased that England and Wales had Europe's highest violent crime rate, far surpassing even the United States."

As for the idea that more guns are related to increased suicide rates, the researchers said there is "simply no relationship evident between the extent of suicide and the extent of gun ownership. People do not commit suicide because they have guns available. In the absence of firearms, people who are inclined to commit suicide k**l themselves some other way."

The Harvard study concluded with the following warning to lawmakers who want to further regulate gun ownership in the U.S.: "The burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world."

And, from the DOJ, Office of Justice Programs:

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws Third Edition


Studies Find No Evidence That Assault Weapon Bans Reduce Homicide Rates
The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapon bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence.

Mass shootings are unconscionable acts of violence and are the most acutely disturbing form of gun violence. In the wake of such tragedies, many gun control advocates lambast gun rights supporters for allowing “weapons of war” onto the streets of America and not supporting “responsible gun reform.”

The measures put forth are usually either a ban and/or mandatory buyback of "assault weapons," most of which are more accurately known as semi-automatic rifles. ("Assault weapon" is a vague term that varies state to state and can include common pistols and shotguns depending out other attachable accessories.)

While these initiatives are “common sense” to advocates, if one takes the time to examine the data and evidence, it becomes abundantly clear that gun control in this form will do little to reduce gun violence.

1. Mass shootings with assault weapons constitute a fraction of a percent of gun violence

2007 - 2017

Total homicides = 150,352
Gun homicides = 103,901
Mass shooting homicides = 495
Mass shootings involving "assault weapons" = 253

Mother Jones’s database of mass shootings, defined as shootings involving three or more fatalities, shows that between 2007 and 2017, there were 495 people murdered in such events. When breaking down those shootings by the weapons involved, it is revealed that around half of those victims (253) were murdered by a perpetrator with an assault weapon (AW), such as an AR-15.

Over the same timeframe, FBI annual crime reports show that there were 150,352 homicides in total, of which 103,901 involved firearms. This means that mass shootings involving AWs constitute 0.17 percent and 0.24 percent of all homicides and firearm homicides, respectively.

To further illuminate the relative infrequency of mass shootings with “assault weapons,” consider the fact that in 2017, some 1,590 people were murdered using knives or sharp instruments.

Over the last five years, 261 people were murdered with AWs in mass shootings (an average rate of 52 murders annually.) At such a rate, it would take over 30 years of mass shootings with AWs to produce the same number of deaths as one year’s worth of knife murders. (It would take 135 years’ worth of mass shootings with AWs to produce the 7,032 deaths that handgun homicides did in 2017.)

Consequently, even a completely effective ban/buyback of AWs would have an incredibly small impact on rates of homicide and gun violence, and then there is always the probability that people intent on committing mass violence will substitute AWs with other available firearms or methods of destruction (such as homemade explosives.)

2. Studies find no evidence assault weapon bans reduce homicide rates

There are theoretical reasons to doubt the effectiveness of a ban or buyback of assault weapons, but it also doesn’t help that real-world evidence suggests these measures fail to produce reductions in gun violence.

Between 1994 and 2004, the federal government banned the manufacture, sale, or t***sfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. A subsequent Department of Justice study found no evidence that the ban had had any effect on gun violence and stated that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

A recent study published this year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine examined state gun control policies and found no statistically significant relationship between assault weapon or large-capacity magazine bans and homicide rates. A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study came to the same conclusion.

3. Australia doesn’t prove gun control works

In 1996, Australia experienced a horrific mass shooting. In response, the government implemented a mandatory buyback scheme that banned and confiscated certain types of firearms, including assault weapons.

A 2016 JAMA study on the matter found no statistically significant change in the trend of the country’s firearm homicide rate following the law’s passage. The authors also noted that the decline in firearm suicides post-ban could not clearly be attributed to gun control since non-firearm suicides fell by an even greater magnitude.

4. There is inconclusive evidence that assault weapons bans reduce mass shootings

See Graph below

Last year, the RAND Corporation released an extensive scientific analysis of available evidence on gun control measures and how they relate to various crime outcomes. Regarding the effect of assault weapons bans on mass shootings, they determined the evidence was “inconclusive.”

When former President Bill Clinton claimed the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban was associated with reduced mass shootings, Politifact rated that claim as “half-true,” noting that “the ban’s impact remains unclear.”

Using Mother Jones’s data on mass shootings, I constructed the graph you see above. Prior to the ban, on average five people were k**led with assault weapons in mass shootings per year. During the ban, that number went slightly down to four. Post-ban, it rose to 22.

But mass shootings with assault weapons didn’t rise until 2012—eight years after the ban ended. In the seven years after the ban, there was only an average of four people k**led in mass shootings with assault weapons per year.

Given the fact that the pre-ban period and the seven years after the ban had essentially the same rate of mass shooting deaths with assault weapons, it is hard to prove that the ban had any effect on mass shootings.

In Conclusion

The studies, data, and examination of the available evidence by scholars suggest that assault weapons bans or buybacks will have little if any effect on rates of violent crime and gun violence. There seems to be no relationship between these gun control measures and reductions in firearm homicide or suicide, and there doesn’t appear to be any clear evidence they reduce mass shootings. Source: Foundation for Economic Education

SeaLass Loc: Western Soviet Socialist Republics

And the specific TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS that classify a firearm as an assault weapon are ? ? ? ?

SeaLass Loc: Western Soviet Socialist Republics

Gee, I seem to recall a few years back a slew of news reports about people being k**led or injured in accidents caused by SUVs. Haven't heard anything lately, so I guess that problem was fixed. Must be some other type of rogue vehicle causing problems.

SeaLass Loc: Western Soviet Socialist Republics

Why stop there; auto, gun, knife, baseball bat, hands, ax, poison, arson or hat pin, dead is dead, what difference does it make how it was done?

I'm not whining and crying, I just want to know WHY you call it an assault weapon, a) it was used in a mass shooting or b) you think it looks scary?

American Scene

If you weren't so obtuse, assault weapon is the term used by the media, including the fools at fox/

I would call it what it is, and that is a murder weapon.

Rose42

No, its another stupid and dishonest thread. Blaming trump for this is dishonest. Get real. The problem is not due to either party, it goes much deeper

You people want to take the easy and self serving way out. Solving the root of the problem takes work which these days people are loathe to do. Instead they post stupid memes and opinions of others who aren’t inclined to work at it either

SeaLass Loc: Western Soviet Socialist Republics

Okay, call it a murder weapon, along with knoves, clubs, fists, etc. etc.