Dr. John Lott has a bit on the Hartford Courant with Holly Sullivan, the president of the Connecticut Citizen’s Protection League.
Connecticut doubtless will lose the lawsuit towards the state’s present assault weapon ban. Nonetheless, as an alternative of studying classes from courtroom selections across the nation, Gov. Ned Lamont is doubling down and pushing to increase the prohibition to “grandfathered” firearms.
However some essential leaders within the Democratic-controlled state legislature, equivalent to Sen. Gary Winfield, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, have mentioned they’re resisting the change.
In June, after the U.S. Supreme Courtroom’s Bruen resolution, even a three-judge panel for the liberal ninth Circuit Courtroom of Appeals vacated a decrease courtroom’s resolution that upheld California’s greater than 20-year-old ban on military-style rifles. Comparable strikes are occurring throughout the nation.
Lamont calls firearms such because the AR-15 “military-style,” however they operate the identical as any small caliber semi-automatic looking rifle — firing the identical bullets, with the identical rapidity, and doing the identical injury. For semi-automatic weapons, that are round 85 p.c of the firearms bought in the USA, one pull of the set off fires one bullet, and the gun reloads itself. The choice is a manually loaded gun the place you will need to bodily put one other bullet within the chamber after every shot.
The time period “assault weapon” is nonsensical. Lastly, the Related Press’s extremely influential stylebook, utilized by the information media, acknowledges that truth. Because the AP now acknowledges, the time period conveys “little that means” and is “extremely politicized.” Politicians equivalent to Lamont and Legal professional Common William Tong will maintain calling AR-15s “assault weapons” and “weapons of conflict,” however not less than the bible of media etiquette is now recognizing that these firearms are essentially totally different than navy weapons. No navy world wide makes use of these semi-automatic rifles.
Lamont claims that these weapons have “the only real goal of killing the most important variety of people inside the shortest period of time” and that “we are able to implement legal guidelines that respect the rights of People to personal weapons for their very own safety.” However that’s not the case. He ignores that semi-automatic weapons present essential self-defense advantages. After every shot, a semi-automatic gun reloads itself. A single-shot rifle, against this, requires handbook reloading. When you face a number of attackers or fireplace and miss or wound however don’t cease an attacker, victims may not have the luxurious of time to manually reload their gun.
However there are extra essential sensible objections to the ban. Lamont is solely mistaken in claiming: “You possibly can’t be powerful on crime if you’re weak on weapons!”
In 2021, Federal Decide Roger Benitez dominated that the state of California’s specialists couldn’t present proof that both federal or state assault weapons bans diminished any sort of violent crime.
One of many co-authors of this op-ed, John Lott, was a statistical skilled in that case, and Decide Benitez adopted his findings. There was no drop within the variety of mass public shootings with assault weapons throughout the 1994 to 2004 ban. There was a rise after the ban sundown, however the change was not statistically important.
Extra importantly, if the assault weapon ban drove any drop in assaults, we must always see a drop within the proportion of assaults with assault weapons throughout the federal ban interval after which a rise within the post-ban interval. However the reverse is true. It simply doesn’t make sense for the ban to cut back the variety of assaults with out the share of assaults utilizing assault weapons falling.
With all the priority about assault weapons for the reason that federal ban sundown in 2004, all rifles collectively account for a small share of murders. Furthermore, even that share has fallen over time. The share of firearm murders with rifles was 4.8 p.c earlier than the ban beginning in September 1994, 4.9 p.c from 1995 to 2004 when the ban was in impact, and simply 3.6 p.c after that (3.9 p.c if you happen to have a look at simply the primary 10 years after the ban ended). The FBI information exhibits that solely 2 p.c of murders contain any rifle..
The overwhelming majority of handguns and rifles bought in the USA are semi-automatic. In 2018, the U.S. made virtually 3.9 million semi-automatic handguns, in comparison with fewer than 700,000 revolvers. So, about 85 p.c of all handguns made have been semi-automatic. An identical proportion holds for rifles.
Lamont’s push to undo the grandfather provision won’t solely make Connecticut residents much less secure however will additional price the state useless authorized spending for a case it very doubtless will lose.
Holly Sullivan is the president of the Connecticut Citizen Protection League. John R. Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Analysis Heart.
Holly Sullivan and John R. Lott, Jr., “Lamont’s plan to increase prohibition on ‘grandfathered’ firearms a dropping proposition,” Hartford Courant, December 22, 2022.
