From: [s--e--t] at [as.arizona.edu] (Steve West) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: Kleck's 1992 NYT Editorial Date: 13 Oct 1993 21:51:47 GMT I ran across this article while searching for all articles that Gary Kleck has written. This article was written before I subscribed to t.p.g., and you all have probably discussed it at length then, but for us newcomers... It's entitled "Assault Weapons Aren't the Problem", by Gary Kleck in the 1992 Sept 1 issue of the New York Times pA17. Typos and other errors are of course my own: After passing a ban on assault weapons in 1990, the New Jersey legislature recently voted to repeal the law. Though Gov. Jim Florio promises to veto the repeal, there will likely be an effort to override the veto. Gun control advocates see this as a fight between good--themselves-- and evil, in the form of the National Rife Association. But that is only oratory. Let's look at the facts about assault weapons and then think rationally about how to control gun crimes. "Assault Weapon" is a vague label encompassing mostly semiautomatic firearms with the cosmetic appearance of a military gun. These guns fire only one shot with each trigger pull, unlike fully automatic weapons like machine guns which fire continuously as long as the trigger is held down. Military-style semiautomatics have become more popular in the past 15 years among criminals and non-criminals (though police records show that criminals use of them has been declining since around 1989). Contrary to widespread claims however, assault weapons are not the "preferred" firearm of criminals. I know of 24 reports on the prevalence of these weapons among guns seized by the police; in 23 of these cases, police records indicate that criminals almost never use them to commit crimes. Virtually all the studies show that only 0 to 4 percent of confiscated guns are assault weapons. Since about 12 percent of violent crimes involve guns, this means that assault weapons are used less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the time. The only source of the claim that assault weapons are commonly used in crimes is a 1989 article from the Cox Newspaper chain reporting that 10 percent of a sample of guns traced by the BATF were assault weapons. Local police submit such requests for Federal tracking when they want to know the history of a gun used in crime. These requests are optional and rare: As noted by the Congressional Research Service, "Firearms selected of tracing ... cannot be considered representative of the ... firearms used by criminals." Fully automatic military assault rifles are weapons of war, but the semiautomatic handguns and rifles covered by the New Jersey law are not. The semiautomatic assault weapons are not designed to be especially lethal. They are no more lethal, in fact, than the standard revolver. Semiautomatic "assault rifles" are generally less lethal than hunting rifles. Legally available assault weapons cannot be readily converted to fire like machine guns; guns that can be so adapted are illegal. Assault guns can fire somewhat more rapidly than regular revolvers, but there is no evidence that this increases the likelihood that someone will be killed. Most assault weapons can use magazines that can hold 30 or more cartridges, allowing many rounds to be fired without reloading. This can increase the chances that a shooter will hit someone, but studies of gun crimes show that it is rare for criminals to make use of even the six-shot capacity that most ordinary revolvers have. If we somehow deprived criminals of assault weapons and they substituted standard guns, it would rarely affect whether a victim is killed or not. It might be argued that even though criminals almost never use assault weapons, at least a few do, so why not ban them if only one or two lives can be saved? One answer is that people also use these guns for self defense. Supporters of controls might also ask, if a revolver is just as good, then what law-abiding citizen would want an assault gun anyway? Millions of people apparently do want them -- for target shooting and killing animals preying on herds or crops, among other uses. The problem is that many gun owners believe the gun-control people are targeting assault weapons as part of a step-by-step strategy to ban all firearms. The leading gun-control organization, Handgun Control, used to promise that it did not want to ban rifles, yet as soon as assault rifles became an issue, it pushed to ban them. This feeds the worst paranoia of gun owners and poisons the atmosphere for politically achievable controls. A better strategy would be to enact laws that keep firearms -- whether assault weapons or regular guns -- out of the hands of criminals through the use of mandatory computerized background checks of all would-be gun buyers.