Sunset

The National Bad Columnist Warning Center has issued a Nick Coleman warning. The warning indicates that conditions are favorable for a self-righteous, alarmist, yet ill-informed burst of hot wind from Strib columnist Nick Coleman.

Yes - the Feinstein assault weapon ban is a thing of the past, for now at least.

There'll be carnage in the streets, in the special little world in Nick Coleman's mind.

Bet on it.

The ban, of course, is a big political football for the professionally-indignant - but not much else. Remember - in the twenty years before the ban, exactly one crime was ever committed in Minnesota with a legally-owned "assault weapon".

After 10 years, the federal ban expires Monday because for a majority of politicians, the issue is too hot to touch no matter what the public thinks.

No one is more agonized about this than California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who sponsored the legislation in 1993 and for whom it had become a signature issue.

"This is the darkest time for me in my Senate career," she said in an interview last week. "I really believe people are safer because of the ban. I really believe the number of weapons on the street has diminished."

The expiration of the federal ban will not mean Armalite's renewed product line will be sold in California gun shops, however. Since 1989, California has had an assault weapons ban even stronger than the expiring federal law.

Unusually for a dead-tree media outlet, the bitter truth actually leaks in - well below the jump, naturally:

There is conflicting information about whether the ban has made any difference in reducing gun crime, which was its goal.

In a 1997 report, the Urban League said the ban has had only a limited effect on the number of gun murders because assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, the domestic production of which also was banned, weren't involved in that many such crimes in the first place.

"We were unable to detect any reduction to date in two types of gun murders that are thought to be closely associated with assault weapons, those with multiple victims in a single incident and those producing multiple wounds per victim," the report said.

A June assessment of the ban by the University of Pennsylvania's Jerry Lee Center of Criminology said one of the reasons the ban on domestic manufacture of large-capacity magazines hasn't had much impact is because merchants could still sell those produced before the ban took effect in 1994, or those models that are imported.

"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," the center said.

But that's not good enough...

But the report also noted a danger in letting the ban expire.

"If the ban is lifted, gun and magazine manufacturers may reintroduce assault weapon models and large-capacity magazines, perhaps in substantial numbers," it said.

"In addition, pre-ban assault weapons may lose value and novelty, prompting some of their owners to sell them in undocumented second-hand markets where they can more easily reach high-risk users, such as criminals, terrorists and other potential mass murders."

Right. Exactly the ways they weren't used back before the ban, when they were widely (and cheaply!) available.

Note to any Republican legislators out there; take this off your list of bones to throw the Dems. The first time you caved on "assault weapons", I joined the Libertarians. You don't want to know how far I'll go this time.

Posted by Mitch at September 13, 2004 07:49 AM | TrackBack