Did the Previous Federal ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Actually Work?

This week, President Joe Biden claimed during remarks that ruptured the audience’s eardrums that the previous nationwide ban on so-called “assault weapons” was successful in the mid-1990s and helped to reduce mass shootings for 10 consecutive years until its expiration a decade later. So, did the federal ban actually work?

CLAIM: “I’m determined to ban assault weapons in this country,” Biden declared in a Tuesday speech as he campaigned in the battleground state of Pennsylvania ahead of November’s midterm elections. “Determined,” he repeated. “I did it once before, and we will do it again…It’s not about taking away anybody’s guns,” he insisted.

BIDEN: "I'm determined to ban assault weapons in this country. […] It's not about taking away anybody's guns." pic.twitter.com/k3LoAGKitF

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) August 30, 2022

FACTS: Congress passed a 10-year ban on “assault weapons” under the Violent Crime Control and Law enforcement Act in 1994 back when Biden was a U.S. senator. As a compromise to secure enough votes, the law contained a sunset provision calling for the ban’s repeal after 10 years, and it was not renewed in 2004.

A plethora of research was conducted on the ban’s effectiveness and “consistently found no statistically significant impact on mass public shootings or any other type of crime,” according to a 2018 analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center. The findings hold true for research funded by the Clinton administration, per think tank Urban Institute’s conclusions in a 1997 final report for the National Institute of Justice: “The evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).” The same criminologists published a follow-up NIJ study in 2004 where the researchers found: “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.” The assessment added, “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,” mentioning that “[assault weapons] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”

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