Fact Check found
that while Murphy was entitled to make up his own mind on assault weapons, he
was not entitled to make up his own facts, and the Junior Senator from
Connecticut was given three Pinocchios.
Let’s deal first
with Murphy’s AR-15 claim, Fact Check began. In support of Murphy’s claim
that tough gun law states like Connecticut and Chicago that “keep criminals
from getting guns, that keep those dangerous weapons like AR-15s out of the
hands of civilians, have dramatically lower rates of gun violence," a
Murphy spokesperson pointed to “several studies” that backed Murphy’s
assertion.
Fact Check examined
the studies, the bedrock upon which Murphy’s claims rest, and found: “None of the studies [cited by the
spokesperson] address bans on assault weapons such as the AR-15, but the
effectiveness of an assault weapons ban was widely studied after Congress
imposed a nationwide 10-year ban in 1994.”
Pointing to one
such study undertaken by Christopher Koper of George
Mason University and
his colleagues, Fact Check summarizes the finding of that study: “The
effectiveness of the ban was inconclusive. Gun violence declined nationwide
into the 2000s, but the researchers ‘cannot clearly credit the ban with any of
the nation's recent drop in gun violence.’ The researchers estimated that the
effects of the ban ‘may not be fully felt for several years into the future,’
and ‘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.’ The ban was not
renewed.” Murphy’s claim is not supported by the study.
Fact Checker notes
the deficiencies of the ban itself: The 1994 ban “may not have covered all
forms of assault weapons because it did not ban all semiautomatic weapons.
Instead, it banned semiautomatic weapons with large-capacity magazines and
weapons that ‘appear useful in military and criminal applications but
unnecessary in shooting sports or self-defense.’" The observation raises the
ticklish question: What weapons would an effective ban exclude? And the honest
answer to the question is all "assault weapons" -- possibly including the recently favored
weapons of terrorists, such as knives, vans and exploding pressure cookers -- not
to mention a repeal of the Second Amendment supported by former Hartford Courant
columnist Bob Engelhart, and the confiscation of all guns in the United States,
the Australia solution to gun violence.
The problem with
partial bans is that they are “not comprehensive,” a favorite expression of the
anti-Second Amendment left. Englehart is right: We should learn to speak of
partial weapons bans with the same smiling contempt used by people who speak of
partial pregnancies, partial round circles and partial square holes. The ban
enacted into law in Connecticut, if nationally replicated, would not
substantially drive down murder rates in Chicago or Hartford.
A recent 2016 study
published in Criminal Justice Review, Fact Check notes, addressed “the
connection between 19 different gun-control laws and violent crime in roughly
1,000 U.S. cities. Kleck [co-author of the study] found that ‘gun control laws
generally show no evidence of effects on crime rates, possibly because gun
levels do not have a net positive effect on violence rates.’ But there were a
few exceptions. Requiring a license to possess a gun and bans on gun purchases
by alcoholics appeared to reduce the homicide and robbery rate.” And, of
course, the licensing of guns is as common as table salt. The gun violence
figures recently used by Murphy as emotional props to acquire campaign funds include suicides, which account for nearly
60 percent of gun crimes.
On this latter
point, Murphy defended himself from the Pinocchio assault by pointing out that
suicide was also a violent crime. True enough, but it is a different kind of
violent crime, entailing much different consequences, and the General Assembly in
Connecticut doubtless would not have successfully passed laws banning the AR-15,
a weapon not useful in suicides, had it been forced to argue that the ban would
reduce the incidence of suicide alone. The shooter in Sandy Hook first murdered 27 innocent people, 20 of them children, and then turned
a pistol on himself, committing suicide. In a cooler movement, Murphy should
ask himself whether the tears poured out in Connecticut and Las Vegas would
have flowed so copiously if both shooters had committed suicide before they
pulled the trigger on their many victims.
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