Everyone is making a big deal about the New York Times article entitled “The Assault Weapon Myth” as if the NYT has had a change of heart in their staunch stand against scary black guns, but that’s not the case at all. The article was written by Lois Beckett of ProPublica. A quick look at her published work there tells me that she may be a supporter of the Second Amendment, whereas the New York Times is not.
Ms. Beckett makes some good points in article crossposted at the Times from ProPublica, the original title was not the same title that the Times used by the way. It was “Why Do Democrats Keep Trying to Ban Guns That Look Scary, Not the Guns That Kill the Most People?“;
[I]n the 10 years since the [1994 Assault Weapon] ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.
It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.
In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR–15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots.
[…]
Handguns were used in more than 80 percent of murders each year, but gun control advocates had failed to interest enough of the public in a handgun ban. Handguns were the weapons most likely to kill you, but they were associated by the public with self-defense. (In 2008, the Supreme Court said there was a constitutional right to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.)
Banning sales of military-style weapons resonated with both legislators and the public: Civilians did not need to own guns designed for use in war zones.
Which gets to the truth of the matter; the media (including the New York Times) made an entire class of modern sporting rifles into something that they’re not based on the appearance of the weapons. Just like they’ve demonized Glock pistols by claiming that the handguns can be smuggled through metal detectors at airports (although not a single incident of that has happened). Beckett continues that the scary looking gun ban resulted in a reduction from 2 to 1% of the weapons recovered by police, that the Justice Department admitted that reinstatement of the ban would have an immeasurably miniscule impact on crime.
In another ProPublica article that Beckett wrote, which got a lot less attention, she explains why gun control advocates have moved away from banning scary looking guns;
It’s not just that the ban proved to be what [Shannon Watts, head of Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America] calls a “nonstarter” politically, gaining fewer votes in the Senate post-Sandy Hook than background check legislation. It was also that as Watts spoke to experts and learned more about gun violence in the United States, she realized that pushing for a ban isn’t the best way to prevent gun deaths.
A 2004 Justice Department-funded evaluation found no clear evidence that the decade-long ban saved any lives. The guns categorized as “assault weapons” had only been used in about 2 percent of gun crimes before the ban. “Should it be renewed,” the report concluded, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
With more information, Watts decided that focusing on access to guns, not types of guns, was a smarter approach. She came to the same conclusion that other gun control groups had reached even before the Sandy Hook shootings: “Ultimately,” she said, “what’s going to save the most lives are background checks.”
So, you see, it’s not that the New York Times has become pro-Second Amendment, it’s that the whole gun control movement is shifting their focus from scary looking guns, and the New York Times is giving them permission to make that adjustment. It’s probably mostly because the gun grabbers kept making themselves look foolish for banning guns with features that they didn’t understand, like grenade launching bayonet studs and thirty clip magazines.
It only means that they’re going after the mythological “Gun Show Loophole” and the “Internet Loophole” even though fewer than 1% of criminals admit that they obtained their guns using either of those methods. I wonder if the New York Times will write about that non-starter, or Ms. Beckett, for that matter.
