No, an Assault Weapons Ban Won't Stop School Shootings, Despite What Opportunistic Democrats Say | Opinion

A tragic shooting at a Nashville-area Christian school this week left Americans reeling and grieving. But many elected officials have already moved on to using the tragedy to push their pre-existing agenda. Just hours after the shooting unfolded, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre publicly asked, "How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?"

President Biden himself later followed up on his press secretary's remarks and again called on the very day of the tragedy for the passage of his pre-existing gun control agenda, a so-called ban on "assault weapons." Meanwhile, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi blasted the GOP, saying, "To my Republican colleagues, it's time to choose—your political future or our children's lives."

All of these leaders in the Democratic Party hardly waited for the bodies to be cold before seizing on the tragedy as an opportunity to push their agenda. There's just one problem: The Nashville shooting doesn't do anything to justify such a ban on "assault weapons," and, emotional blackmail and demagogic rhetoric aside, the actual evidence shows that such a ban would do little to nothing to make Americans safer.

It's true that the Nashville shooter, who I will not name, reportedly had two "assault-style" rifles and one handgun. But even if one (rather dubiously) assumes that a legal ban on assault weapons would have stopped a murderous criminal from obtaining and using one, there's no reason to believe that this shooting would've been any less deadly even under a legal regime that bans "assault weapons."

The shooter killed six people, three adults and three children. That is a horrifying human toll, an unimaginable loss beyond words. But a shooter using a handgun or a shotgun could just as easily kill six people in the roughly 15 minutes between when the shooting started and police heroically took down the shooter.

This isn't conjecture. We've seen countless mass shootings carried out with handguns, like Columbine, where 13 victims were killed. And no one—not Joe Biden, not Nancy Pelosi, or any other prominent Democrat—is seriously discussing confiscating or banning handguns.

Democrats pushing an assault weapons ban in the aftermath of this shooting aren't responding to an event by taking steps that could have prevented or mitigated it. They're exploiting a national tragedy to push a controversial, partisan policy that wouldn't have made any difference—in this incident, or more broadly.

You don't have to take my word for it. As Biden and Pelosi love to point out, the U.S. actually had a ban on "assault weapons" in place from 1994 to 2004. But what they don't ever seem to mention is that research almost universally shows it made no difference on mass shootings or violent crime.

Study after study evaluating this ban reached this conclusion, and a RAND Corporation review examined qualifying studies and found no conclusive evidence that the federal assault weapons ban reduced mass shootings. The findings were so stark that even Left-leaning media outlets like Vox have admitted an assault weapons ban is "one of the gun control measures with the least supportive evidence behind it."

Why didn't it work? Well, you have to remember that there are millions and millions of "assault-style" rifles out there and will be for the rest of our lifetimes. A truly determined killer could still likely get their hands on one even if their sale is banned, and, if they can't, in most cases, they can wreak similar levels of devastation with other kinds of weapons. The designation of what counts as an "assault weapon" is actually largely based on cosmetic factors, after all. That means the only people truly impacted by such a ban are the millions of law-abiding Americans who own these weapons for self-defense and sport.

Biden and many of his fellow Democrats are fanning the flames in the aftermath of the Nashville tragedy all to push a policy that wouldn't have made any difference and wouldn't make Americans safer overall. That's not just having a noxious impact on the national conversation; it's also taking oxygen away from more practical solutions that could actually help reduce the frequency of these atrocities.

These range from reforming media coverage of mass shootings, which some experts estimate could reduce their frequency by up to one-third, to further protecting schools so armed officers like the heroes who killed the Nashville shooter aren't 15 minutes away next time.

But it's much harder to have productive conversations about real solutions when President Biden and his allies insist on exploiting this tragedy to push an unrelated, pre-existing, partisan agenda.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist and the co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.