GunControlKills.com in LoUiSiAna

When the federal assault-weapons ban expired in September, its fans claimed that gun crimes and police killings would surge dramatically. Sarah Brady, one of the nation’s leading gun-control advocates, warned, “Our streets are going to be filled with AK-47s and Uzis.” The Columbus City Council racheted-up the rhetoric, claiming the banned guns are “the weapons of choice for terrorists.”

Well, more than 10 months have gone by and the only casualty has been gun-controllers’ credibility. Letting the law expire only showed its uselessness. In fact, the FBI announced last month that the number of murders nationwide fell by 3.6 percent last year, the first drop since 1999. Murders declined in both halves of last year from year earlier levels.

Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own assaultweapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders last year than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. States with bans averaged a 2.4 percent decline in murders; in three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4 percent.

And the drop was not just limited to murder. Overall, violent crime also declined last year, according to the FBI, and the complete statistics carry another surprise for gun-control advocates: Guns are used in murder and robbery more frequently then in rapes and aggravated assaults, but after the assault-weapons ban ended, the number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of rapes and aggravated assaults.

It’s instructive to remember just how passionately the media hyped the dangers of “sunsetting” the ban. It was even part of the presidential campaign: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault-weapons ban,” one headline said. A search of a computer database of news stories turned up more than 560 articles in the first two weeks of September that expressed fear about ending the ban. Yet the news that murder and other violent crimes declined last year despite the ban ending produced just one very brief paragraph in an insider political newsletter.

Despite the media bias, the irrelevance of the assault-weapons bans to crime rates was to be expected. Not a single published academic study has ever shown that these bans have reduced any type of violent crime. Even research funded by the Clinton administration didn’t find that it reduced violent crime.

Why? Simple: There’s nothing unique about the guns that these laws ban. The phrase assault weapon conjures up images of the fully automatic weapons used by the military, but the weapons in the ban actually function the same as any semiautomatic hunting rifle. They often fire the exact same bullets with the exact same rapidity and produce the exact same damage.

Read more at John R. Lott.com