quasi-normalcy:

fandomsandfeminism:

waystatus:

fandomsandfeminism:

fandomsandfeminism:

thatonemushroom:

fierceawakening:

saywhat-politics:

The red line is when Republicans ended the national assault weapons ban.

This is why when people say “assault weapons were poorly defined in that law” my brain does the missing the point meme very hard.

We can acknowledge that parts of it were poorly worded, and even rewrite it to fix that, without throwing out the whole concept of making powerful weapons hard to get.

Said it before and will say it again, but–no, gun control will never stop people with cruel intent from obtaining and using guns, including particularly powerful ones.

The idea, as I see it, is to put roadblocks in the way of the people who flirt with such intent, so that proportionately more of the people who end up with powerful weapons are people who don’t have such intent and really are just a handful of weird guys with interesting hobbies geeking out.

Will we ever be able to stop malefactors completely? No, but we can make it annoying as all fuck to be a malefactor, because some people don’t like being annoyed and will give up.

The ban started in 1994 and the poor wording meant it didn’t meaningfully impact the availability of said weapons, though. This infographic implies a causal relationship that didn’t exist.

A 2019 DiMaggio et al. study looked at mass shooting data for 1981 to 2017 and found that mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur during the 1994 to 2004 federal ban period.

🤷‍♀️

Multi-year averages help mitigate the impact of outlier years (Like 1999, for example) and make the broader trend more noticeable.

Here, I have highlighted the years the ban was in effect. The 10 years we had the ban had fewer individual events, fewer fatalities, and fewer injuries compared to the 10 years previous to the ban and 10 years after the ban. And way way way fewer than the 10 years after that.

The escalation of these events in both frequency and severity from 2014 to today should feel shocking. It is MAY 11TH and 2023 is now tied in number of events with the WORST year during the FAWB. If it feels like these events are happening way way more than they used to- you aren’t imagining it.

And like, I know correlation vs causation is a thing. But I have yet to see another proposed explanation for why 1994 to 2003 saw such unusually low numbers compared to both the preceeding and following decades. (Maybe it was the beanie babies. Maybe the beanie babies just made everyone chill out)

There is some evidence that it was FAWBs prohibition of high capacity magazines that was most impactful, rather than the prohibition against specific models of firearms, and it is worth noting that a majority of mass shooting events involve handguns- but those events tend to be less deadly than the ones using semi-automatic rifles. (Which is why the difference in ban and non-ban years is more dramatic for deaths than events.)

Over 70% of firearms used in mass shootings are obtained legally, and frankly, the idea that there is nothing legislation can do to mitigate or reduce these events is pure NRA propaganda and misinformation.

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t appear to have changed anything from before it was passed, right? If this was *the* reason, or even a major factor, you would expect that it would lower mass shooting rates from before it was passed. But it didn’t do that. Mass shootings weren’t a major problem before it was passed.

And when it was repealed that came right in the middle of the Bush era, or in other words was correlated strongly with very conservative policy, including gun policy, being passed by Bush’s trifecta Congress.

It also went along with a general trend towards less gun control at every level in the past few decades. For instance, look at this map of concealed carry laws, which actually *were* very different in the 80s versus the late 2000s:

History of concealed carry in the United States - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

It WAS lower than compared to before it was passed.

Mass shooting fatalities

1984-1993: 148

1994-2003: 102

Like, it is ridiculous to say that mass shootings “weren’t a problem” when the FAWB passed. That’s just ahistorical. We know EXACTLY which events inspired the ban. The 1989 Stockton, California shooting. The Luby’s shooting in October 1991. The July 1993 101 California Street shooting.

Oh, maybe it’s quaint now with our 12 mass shooting events, and 70+ fatalities a year to think that 1991 was such a bad year, but the Luby’s shooting in Texas was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in US history up to that point.

Yes, there are a LOT of reasons why the number is so high NOW- including OTHER gun laws. But acting like the FAWB was ineffective is just not backed by the evidence.

I mean, at think that at this point, much of the issue is that Republicans either tacitly or explicitly regard massacres as a positive social good.