Experts revealed that there’s little to no evidence that proposed gun control measures will prevent the increasing violent crimes and mass shootings.
Following the horrific mass shooting in Texas that killed 21 people including 19 children, activists and lawmakers have called for an assault weapons ban and raising the age to purchase a gun.
However, many have come forward to debunk the movement that tightening laws on guns won’t really help.
“Not really. There’s been a lot of studies done on things like assault weapons bans, background checks. Even for the assault weapons ban, even the Clinton administration – which signed it into law – paid for research on it. And even their studies couldn’t find any benefits in terms of reducing a type of violent crime or in terms of stopping things like mass public shootings.” Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott said.
Proposed gun control measures lack empirical evidence they reduce crimes, experts say https://t.co/n3Qzl1VuU4
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 16, 2022
The movement also came after U.S President Joe Biden addressed the nation on June 2 and demanded “commonsense” gun laws, arguing that the Second Amendment is “not absolute.”
“We need to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. And if we can’t ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21; strengthen background checks; enact safe storage and red flag laws; repeal the immunity, that protect gun manufacturers from liability; address the mental health crisis, deepening the trauma of gun violence,” Biden added.
After Biden’s declaration, several lawmakers from the bipartisan group of senators responded with a tentative agreement on a gun package.
However, experts claimed that banning weapons like the 1994 will have “no appreciable impact on crime.”
“President Biden’s proposed measures to curb guns would NOT reduce gun crime and also have constitutional problems,” George Mason University Professor Emerita Joyce Lee Malcolm said.
“We had an assault weapon ban for 10 years. It was allowed to expire because the Justice Department research said it had no appreciable impact on crime.” Mason added.
In 1999, the Department of Justice published a study that tested the short-term effects of banning such weapons and found that it “has failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.”
