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USDOJ Revelation On Assault Weapons

Mike

Well-known member
The U.S. Department of Justice’s own National Institute of Justice noted this year, “Assault weapons are not a major contributor to gun crime.” The same report also reveals the ineffectiveness of so-called large capacity magazine bans short of draconian measures. It flat-out says universal background checks won’t work without gun registration.

Even so, most survey evidence on the actual use of AWs suggests that offenders
rarely use AWs in crime. In a 1991 national survey of adult state prisoners, for example,
8% of the inmates reported possessing a “military-type” firearm at some point in the past
(Beck et al., 1993, p. 19). Yet only 2% of offenders who used a firearm during their
conviction offense reported using an AW for that offense (calculated from pp. 18, 33), a
figure consistent with the police statistics cited above. Similarly, while 10% of adult
inmates and 20% of juvenile inmates in a Virginia survey reported having owned an AR,
none of the adult inmates and only 1% of the juvenile inmates reported having carried
them at crime scenes (reported in Zawitz, 1995, p. 6).

Although AWs are used in a small percentage of gun crimes, some have argued
that AWs are more likely to be used in crime than other guns, i.e., that AWs are more
attractive to criminal than lawful gun users due to the weapons’ military-style features
and their particularly large ammunition magazines. Such arguments are based on data
implying that AWs are more common among crime guns than among the general stock of
civilian firearms. According to some estimates generated prior to the federal ban, AWs
accounted for less than one percent of firearms owned by civilians but up to 11% of guns
used in crime, based on firearms reported by police to ATF between 1986 and 1993 (e.g.,
see Cox Newspapers, 1989; Lennett, 1995). However, these estimates were problematic
in a number of respects. As discussed in Chapter 6, ATF statistics are not necessarily
representative of the types of guns most commonly recovered by police, and ATF
statistics from the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular tended to overstate the
prevalence of AWs among crime guns. Further, estimating the percentage of civilian
weapons that are AWs is difficult because gun production data are not reported by model,
and one must also make assumptions about the rate of attrition among the stock of
civilian firearms.
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
NRA video highlighting a January 4, 2013 memo titled "Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies" in which the Obama Justice Department states that an assault weapons ban would not be effective without mandatory gun confiscation.

http://youtu.be/jHmxY7zE5uc
 
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