At the Hartford Courant: Connecticut Governor Lamont’s plan to expand prohibition on ‘grandfathered’ firearms a losing proposition
Dr. John Lott has a piece at the Hartford Courant with Holly Sullivan, the president of the Connecticut Citizen’s Defense League.
Connecticut likely will lose the lawsuit against the state’s current assault weapon ban. Still, instead of learning lessons from court decisions around the country, Gov. Ned Lamont is doubling down and pushing to expand the prohibition to “grandfathered” firearms.
But some important leaders in the Democratic-controlled state legislature, such as Sen. Gary Winfield, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, have said they are resisting the change.
In June, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, even a three-judge panel for the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s decision that upheld California’s more than 20-year-old ban on military-style rifles. Similar moves are occurring across the country.
Lamont calls firearms such as the AR-15 “military-style,” but they function the same as any small caliber semi-automatic hunting rifle — firing the same bullets, with the same rapidity, and doing the same damage. For semi-automatic guns, which are around 85 percent of the firearms sold in the United States, one pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the gun reloads itself. The alternative is a manually loaded gun where you must physically put another bullet in the chamber after each shot.
The term “assault weapon” is nonsensical. Finally, the Associated Press’s highly influential stylebook, used by the news media, recognizes that fact. As the AP now acknowledges, the term conveys “little meaning” and is “highly politicized.” Politicians such as Lamont and Attorney General William Tong will keep calling AR-15s “assault weapons” and “weapons of war,” but at least the bible of media etiquette is now recognizing that these firearms are fundamentally different than military weapons. No military around the world uses these semi-automatic rifles.
Lamont claims that these guns have “the sole purpose of killing the largest number of humans within the shortest amount of time” and that “we can implement laws that respect the rights of Americans to own guns for their own protection.” But that is not the case. He ignores that semi-automatic guns provide critical self-defense benefits. After each shot, a semi-automatic gun reloads itself. A single-shot rifle, by contrast, requires manual reloading. If you face multiple attackers or fire and miss or wound but don’t stop an attacker, victims might not have the luxury of time to manually reload their gun.
But there are more important practical objections to the ban. Lamont is simply wrong in claiming: “You can’t be tough on crime if you are weak on guns!”
In 2021, Federal Judge Roger Benitez ruled that the state of California’s experts could not provide evidence that either federal or state assault weapons bans reduced any type of violent crime.
One of the co-authors of this op-ed, John Lott, was a statistical expert in that case, and Judge Benitez adopted his findings. There was no drop in the number of mass public shootings with assault weapons during the 1994 to 2004 ban. There was an increase after the ban sunset, but the change was not statistically significant.
More importantly, if the assault weapon ban drove any drop in attacks, we should see a drop in the percentage of attacks with assault weapons during the federal ban period and then an increase in the post-ban period. But the opposite is true. It just doesn’t make sense for the ban to reduce the number of attacks without the share of attacks using assault weapons falling.
With all the concern about assault weapons since the federal ban sunset in 2004, all rifles together account for a small share of murders. Moreover, even that share has fallen over time. The percentage of firearm murders with rifles was 4.8 percent before the ban starting in September 1994, 4.9 percent from 1995 to 2004 when the ban was in effect, and just 3.6 percent after that (3.9 percent if you look at just the first 10 years after the ban ended). The FBI data shows that only 2 percent of murders involve any rifle..
The vast majority of handguns and rifles sold in the United States are semi-automatic. In 2018, the U.S. made almost 3.9 million semi-automatic handguns, compared to fewer than 700,000 revolvers. So, about 85 percent of all handguns made were semi-automatic. A similar percentage holds for rifles.
Lamont’s push to undo the grandfather provision will not only make Connecticut residents less safe but will further cost the state needless legal spending for a case it very likely will lose.
Holly Sullivan is the president of the Connecticut Citizen Defense League. John R. Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
