Fact Check: White House Press Secretary Falsely Claims ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Lowered Gun Violence
CLAIM: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the 1994-2004 federal “assault weapons” ban lowered gun violence while speaking from Air Force One on Monday.
VERDICT: False. The Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) issued a report, noting that any impact the ban had on crime was negligible.
Jean-Pierre said, “You’ve heard the President say this, and I’ll just repeat what he said. When he was able to get this done, in the 90s, to ban “assault weapons,” you saw it have an effect on lowering…violence in that first ten years.”
On February 19, 2018, Breitbart News referenced the NIJ study, which was written just as the federal “assault weapons” ban was ending.
In 2004, the Washington Times quoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, an author of the NIJ report, saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”
The authors of the NIJ report observed that “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
They further explained that the “assault weapons” ban was not impactful because “assault weapons” are not the firearms of choice for day-to-day criminals.
On October 10, 2022, Breitbart News reported FBI figures showing that over two times as many people were stabbed to death with knives and cutting instruments than were shot and killed with rifles of any kind. And on January 18, 2013, Breitbart News reported that “assault weapons” were “tied to less than .012 percent of [U.S] deaths in 2011.”
Jean-Pierre’s claim that the “assault weapons” ban lowered gun violence is false.
2020 Flashback — Hawkins: Joe Biden Confirmed He’s Coming for Your Assault Weapons if Elected
ahawkins
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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