Posted: 3/9/2003 7:25:59 AM EDT
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The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (the anti-gun lobby formerly known as HCI, Inc.) has launched an effort to pool the presumably limited resources and membership of anti-gun groups for the purpose of ensuring the ban on so-called "assault weapons" is renewed in an even more restrictive form. A PDF file, available for download from www.bradycampaign.com, consists of several paragraphs of predictably distorted and misleading text, along with a space for leaders of other anti-gun groups to pledge their support and fax the form back. Amusingly, the 1999 NIJ study, which proves the ban has had virtually no effect on crime (because the banned firearms were rarely used in crime), serves as the centerpiece of their case for renewing the ban. "The law has worked. In 1999, the National Institute for Justice (NIJ) reported that trace requests for assault weapons declined 20% in the first year after the federal ban took effect," Brady Campaign states in the PDF. Apparently they didn't notice the fact that the bulk of the study actually indicates the ban has been an utter failure: "A number of factors--including the fact that the banned weapons and magazines were rarely used to commit murders in this country...posed challenges in discerning the effects of the ban." "...other analyses using a variety of national and local data sources found no clear ban effects on certain types of murders that were thought to be more closely associated with the rapid-fire features of assault weapons and other semiautomatics equipped with large capacity magazines. The ban did not produce declines in the average number of victims per incident of gun murder or gun murder victims with multiple wounds." "Given the limited use of the banned guns and magazines in gun crimes, even the maximum theoretically achievable preventive effect of the ban on outcomes such as the gun murder rate is almost certainly too small to detect statistically..." "The public safety benefits of the 1994 ban have not yet been demonstrated." Let that last one echo in your head for a few moments.................. ok, you may continue. In addition, Brady Campaign fears that if the ban is allowed to expire, "...our neighborhoods will once again be flooded with these combat weapons..." It's difficult to comprehend how a person can justify writing such blatantly false statements. After reading the above mentioned Clinton era study, how can it be said that communities will "once again be flooded" with "assault weapons" when they were never there to begin with? These and other statements made by Brady and other anti-gun groups are actually very encouraging. They indicate these groups are acutely aware that no substantive data exists to justify renewing the ban, so they must therefore resort to spreading false information and tossing out scary sounding names like "AK-47" and "UZI" in the hopes of confusing and frightening an unknowing public into supporting their twisted agenda. Fortunately, the facts are on our side. While making our case based on factual information requires more effort than the simple, emotionally spiked one-liners employed by anti-gun forces, the overwhelming amount of data that supports our position will make the passage of a renewal a very difficult task. |