Assault weapons not the issue with mass shootings

To the Editor,

     Marilyn Gray claims that a “huge number of children and adults who have been killed by assault weapons in the USA in recent years” and cites the Boulder, Colo., and Atlanta, Ga., mass shootings as examples. No children were slain in either of those shootings. While one murder is too many, children in the U.S. are murdered at a rate less than one-half their representation in the population. The U.S. per capita murder rate is less than that of over 100 other nations.

     “Assault weapon” is a vague corruption of the term “assault rifle.” It is based on the proposition that, if a gun looks like a real assault rifle, it is an “assault weapon.” A real “assault rifle” is a military rifle capable of fully automatic fire. Automatic weapons are strictly regulated and rarely used in crime. Neither of the weapons used in Atlanta or Boulder were assault rifles. The weapon in Atlanta was an ordinary 9mm pistol.

     The “assault weapon” pejorative is often applied to the AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle commonly used for hunting, target shooting, collecting, and self-defense. From 1984 through 2018, there were 12 public mass shootings where AR-15 rifles were used, defined as shootings in a public place resulting in four or more deaths. There was a total of 25 AR-15 rifles used in those shootings during that over-35-year period., or less than one per year. Twelve of those AR-15s were used in the Las Vegas shooting. Given that there are at least eight million AR-15s in private possession, a 2013 estimate, which is now undoubtedly too low, the number of rifles used in public mass shootings is approximately three millionths of the total number of AR-15 rifles, .000031 percent (thirty-one hundred thousandths of one percent).

     As of 2016, there were 374 rifle murders in the United States, using all types of rifles, out of a total of 15,070 homicides, i.e., 2.5 percent of all homicides were done with rifles. If each rifle murder were committed with a separate AR-15, that would be a total of 374 AR-15s. Of course this exaggerates the numbers of AR-15s used as (a) other types of rifles were also used, and (b) in some cases, there were two or more victims murdered with the same rifle. But even as an inflated figure, these 374 AR-15s would constitute only forty-seven ten thousandths of one percent (.0047 percent) of the AR-15s in private ownership. In other words, well over 99.995 percent of AR-15s were NOT used to commit murder in 2016. If the number of AR-15s remained at eight million, and 374 AR-15s per year were used to commit murder, it would take 213 years for 1 percent of AR-15s to be used for murder. It is obvious that the typical privately owned AR-15, as well as any other type of rifle, will never be used to commit murder.

     Ms. Gray also is concerned about the elimination of the permits to acquire and carry handguns. Permits interfere with the right to bear arms. The permit’s background check is of little utility. Both Politico (2013) and the National Academy of Sciences (2004) relied on the 2000 finding in the Journal of the American Medical Association that there was no significant difference in murder rates between states with background checks and those without. This was consistent with sociologists James Wright’s 1985 finding that background checks did not reduce violent crime, and the CDC’s 2003 finding that there was insufficient evidence to show that background checks reduced crime rates. The Crime Prevention Research Center also found that “{S}tates adopting additional background checks on private transfers see a statistically significant increase in the rate of killings (80 percent higher) and injuries (101 percent) from lass public shootings.”

     Why support background checks when the government refuses to prosecute Hunter Biden for the felony of lying on his background check form and falsely claiming he was not a drug addict?

Sincerely,

Donald W. Bohlken

(former Monticello area resident)

Indianola, Iowa