Shooting Down Solutions – An Assault Weapons Ban History

by Jack R. Johnson 04.2023

On January 17, 1989, Patrick Edward Purdy, armed with a semiautomatic rifle returned to his childhood elementary school in Stockton, California, and opened fire, killing five children and wounding 30 others. Purdy, a drifter, squeezed off more than 100 rounds in one minute before turning the weapon on himself. Since 1989, we’ve seen variations of this scenario played out time after time, ad nauseam.  The most recent, of course, happened just last week in Nashville’s Convenant School. In this most recent incident, three children and three adults were slaughtered. No action looks to be forthcoming from our Republican House, preoccupied as they are with naked Italian statues and book banning. But Purdy’s massacre of January 17, 1989 held one important distinction from today’s current morass. Back then, in 1989, the US Congress actually did something. Through four years of concerted effort, they mustered the votes to pass the Crime Control Act of 1994. The act banned the manufacture, transfer, and possession of certain semiautomatic firearms designated as assault weapons and “large capacity” ammunition magazines. 

It was not perfect by any means: the ban only blocked a narrow range of weapons and did not prohibit the continued transfer or possession of assault weapons manufactured before the law’s effective date. Manufacturers took advantage of this loophole by boosting production of assault weapons in the months leading up to the ban, creating a legal stockpile of weapons. To secure the votes for passage, the ban's sponsors agreed to allow those who already had these guns to keep them. Sponsors also accepted a "sunset provision" by which the 1994 ban would automatically expire after ten years unless renewed by a vote of Congress. No renewal was forthcoming.

Despite its shortcomings, though, the ban proved effective.

A Justice Department report compared actual 1995 state gun murder rates with the rates that would have been expected in the absence of the assault weapons ban. “Overall, 1995 gun murder rates were 9 percent lower than the projection. Gun murders declined 10.3 percent in States without preexisting assault weapons bans. The study found that 1995 gun murder rates were 10.9 percent below the projected level.”

Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History”, found that the lowest ten-year average in mass shooting rates was between 1996-2005, which largely corresponds with the ban period. In separate research published in Criminology & Public Policy in January 2020, Christopher S. Koper, argued that the “most important provisions of assault weapons law” were restrictions on large-capacity magazines. “Data on mass shooting incidents suggest these magazine restrictions can potentially reduce mass shooting deaths by 11% to 15% and total victims shot in these incidents by one quarter (25%).”

Koper argued that “exemptions and loopholes” in the 1994 assault weapons ban likely blunted the short-term effects of the law. Millions of existing weapons and magazines were “grandfathered,” making them legal to own, and dealers were able to import tens of millions of large-capacity magazines manufactured before the ban took effect.

To understand how a truly effective ban could mitigate murder on a national scale, it might be useful to examine Australia’s assault weapons ban. 

A massacre occurred in Australia one year prior to the Columbine massacre in the United States, in 1996. It involved the usual script. A lone gunman, mentally unstable, goes on a shooting rampage, murdering 35 innocent people. Like citizens in the U.S., the Australians acted with shock and horror. Unlike the United States, the Australian government—a conservative government—successfully sought to ban rapid-fire rifles—our infamous assault weapons. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns, and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. Importantly, the law did not end gun ownership in Australia, but it reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth. They were the kind of weapons most likely to be used in mass shootings. 

The results were profound. After Australia’s national firearms agreement, not a single mass shooting has occurred since. Gun homicides have fallen by 59 per cent and firearm-related suicides have fallen by 65 per cent with no consequential rise in homicides and suicides by other means.  

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “researchers at Harvard University, concluded that ‘The National Firearms Agreement seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved.’ To be specific, we’ve had no gun massacres since 1996, compared with 13 such tragedies during the previous 18 years. Total gun deaths have been reduced: gun homicides and gun suicides had been falling gradually before Port Arthur, but the reforms in 1996 caused that decline to accelerate dramatically. In the early 1990s, about 600 Australians were dying each year by gunfire; that figure is now fewer than 250.”

Could we do the same in this country? Certainly. It only requires intelligence and courage.  Our representatives failures in both regards was made evident when 1100 black “body bags”  were laid over a section of grass on the National Mall on March 24 after the recent Covenant School massacre.  Each bag represented 150 individuals (100 x 150=165,000).  Which mean, since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, that’s the number of gun-related deaths in America. Incidentally, the bags on the Mall spelled out “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS.” 

Inside the Capitol, Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat blasted the Republicans’ stonewalling, “…there are six people that are dead in that school including three children because you guys got rid of the assault weapons ban. Because you guys made it easy for people who … are mentally incapable of having weapons of war, being able to buy those weapons and go into schools….You know why you don’t hunt [deer] with an AR-15? Because there’s nothing left. And there’s nothing left of these kids when people go into school and murder them while they’re trying to read. You guys are worried about banning books? Dead kids can’t read.”

The victims at the Covenant School were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney, all nine years old; Katherine Koonce, the head of the school, who was 60; Cynthia Peake, a substitute teacher who was 61; and Mike Hill, the school custodian, who was also 61.