Archive | Guns

So reports a press release from last week; note these details: A Justice Department study found the Assault Weapons Ban was responsible for a 6.7 percent decline in total gun murders. However, since the 2004 expiration of the bill, assault weapons have been used in at least 459 incidents, resulting in 385 deaths and 455 […]

From a 1988 Violence Policy Center paper (emphasis added): [A]ssault weapons are quickly becoming the leading topic of America’s gun control debate and will most likely remain the leading gun control issue for the near future. Such a shift will not only damage America’s gun lobby, but strengthen the handgun restriction lobby for the following […]

A common response to arguments that attempts to keep mass shooters from getting guns are likely to be futile goes something like this: Maybe gun control can’t generally stop mass shooters from getting guns through the black market (or through straw purchasers or through theft or what have you), but sometimes maybe it might — […]

The very first comment to my post about assault weapons bans struck me as worth responding to on-blog, because I think it illustrates a particular kind of mistake that is common in these debates: You make the analogy to banning a certain kind of drink at the end, which I find somewhat entertaining given that […]

I’m on the record as saying that bans on so-called “assault weapons” are likely constitutional (see pp. 1483-87 of this article), and several state courts have held the same under state constitutional individual right-to-bear-arms provisions before Heller. Such bans leave law-abiding citizens with ample access to other guns that are equally effective, and therefore don’t […]

According to PollingReport.com, a CBS News poll conducted during Dec. 14-16, 2012 (with a margin of error of 4%), reported that 50% of the public think that stricter gun control laws would have done nothing to prevelent the Sandy Hook shootings. The specific question was, “Do you think that stricter gun control laws would have […]

A bunch of people have pointed me to this Portland TV station’s story about the Clackamas Town Center shooting in Oregon. On December 11, Jacob Tyler Roberts killed two people at the mall and wounded a third. Nick Meli, who had a concealed carry license, was apparently at the mall, took out his gun, aimed […]

Imagine that you ran a school district, and some rich foundation, worried about school shootings, gave you the following offer: We’ll hire armed security guards for you, who could try to do something about the school shooter. These aren’t going to be highly trained police officers, just typical security guards, given some modest training and […]

Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one […]

The Brady Campaign has filed a lawsuit against ArmsList.com (Complaint here). The theory: On April 13, 2011, Jitka Vesel, a 36-year-old immigrant from the Czech Republic was shot and killed by Demetry Smirnov, a Russian immigrant residing in Canada who had met Jitka online a few years earlier. Smirnov stalked her to her workplace parking […]

A guest on the HuffPost Live discussion noted in the post below mentioned that guns injure 5,000 people per year (presumably in the U.S.). Actually, according to CDC’s WISQARS, there are about 14,000-19,000 nonfatal injuries stemming from accidental shootings per year in the U.S., though only about 600 people killed in such shootings. As always, […]

I was just on a HuffPost Live panel with, among others, Elie Mystal (Above The Law), and he suggested — as a gun control proposal — that guns should be regulated like cars. This prompts me to repost an item I posted several years ago: Cars are basically regulated as follows (I rely below on […]