Like Biden, Harris Lies About 'The Assault Weapon' Ban

Democrats lie about everything, and this is no exception.

Even before Democrat Party high-ups installed Kamala Harris as their substitute nominee for president with zero input from Democrat voters, the Marxist daughter of a Marxist college professor was parroting nominal president Joe Biden’s demand that Congress “renew” the federal “assault weapon ban” of 1994-2004.

Now that she’s the party’s installee, her Twitter account continues the lie.

It’s a lie because the ban that Democrats have supported the last 21 years has not proposed to “renew” the 1994 ban. Instead, it has proposed a much more severe ban.

The first such proposal was H.R. 2038, the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2003, introduced by then-Rep. Carolyn McCarthy. The current one is H.R. 698, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2023, introduced by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) with 208 co-sponsors, all Democrats.

The background

The first “assault weapon” bans in Congress were introduced in 1989—S. 386, by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, nominally a Democrat but in reality a communist from Ohio, and S. 747, by Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.). Metzenbaum’s bill would have given the Executive Branch the authority to ban semi-automatic firearms as “assault weapons” without approval by Congress.

In 1993, Metzenbaum set his sights a little lower, with his Semiautomatic Assault Weapon Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (S. 653). One of the bill’s provisions proposed to define firearms as “assault weapons” if they were semi-automatic, and, in the case of rifles and handguns, capable of using a detachable ammunition magazine, and—relevant to the Democrats’ “renew” lie—if they also had two or more features listed in the bill.

In the case of rifles, the features were a folding or adjustable-length stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor, and a grenade launcher, the latter included for hyperbole, since grenades are restricted as “destructive devices” under the National Firearms Act of 1934.

The same year, then-Sen. Biden introduced his massive Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act of 1993 (S. 1607). On November 9, 1993, Feinstein introduced Amendment 1152 to Amendment 1151 to the bill, an “assault weapon” ban along the lines of Metzenbaum’s S. 653, retaining its two-or-more-features language.

Feinstein’s description of her amendment begins on page 28265 of the Congressional Record for November 9. Note also, on page 28268, Metzenbaum said “I had hoped (Feinstein’s) amendment would be stronger than it is. It is not as far as I would like to go. But the fact is I think it will be a major step in achieving the objective that we have in mind.”

A 3-D chess psyop of a sort

Up to that point, Democrats and their media allies had falsely claimed (ad nauseam) that a rifle’s pistol grip was intended to facilitate “spray-firing from the hip,” that adjustable-length stocks made three-foot-long rifles concealable, and similar things about flash suppressors and the other features.

(Some lies die hard. Just last week, FBI Director Chris Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that the would-be assassin of President Donald Trump might have been able to walk around unnoticed at the rally site because his rifle had an adjustable-length stock which would have made it harder to observe. To the contrary, there are photographs of the criminal walking around the rally site without the rifle, and it has been reported that he stashed the rifle, prior to the rally, in or near the building from which he fired at President Trump.)

But I digress. As it happened, I wrote NRA’s “assault weapon” fact sheets from 1991 until I retired on the September 13, 2016, anniversary of the 1994 ban’s expiration. I figured out early on that whenever we published a new sheet, the main anti-gun activist group at the time, the Brady Campaign, read it and published one of their own, arguing with us. Therefore, to make them think we were worried about the focus on grips, stocks, and so on, I wrote sheets arguing with their claims about those things. I didn’t want them to realize that Metzenbaum’s and Feinstein’s two-or-more-features language would render a ban almost meaningless.

The ban becomes law

In 1991, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, an “assault weapon” ban was defeated in the House by 70 votes, with conservative Democrats (when there were a few) joining Republicans to vote it down. But in 1991, George H. W. Bush was president, and in 1993, Bill Clinton was, and he put pressure on Democrats to pass Feinstein’s ban.

The Senate approved Feinstein’s ban by two votes the day it was introduced (page 28299 of the Congressional Record, linked above). In April 1994, then-Rep. Charles Schumer introduced Feinstein’s ban as H.R. 4296. It also passed by two votes. The ban applied only to firearms manufactured after the ban’s effective date, September 13, 1994 (“assault weapons” already owned were exempt), and it included a provision terminating the ban after 10 years.

Because the ban applied to firearms only if they had two or more of the listed features, more than 730,000 AR-15s were manufactured and sold with only one feature during the 10 years the “ban” was in effect.

Here’s an AR-15 as manufactured before the ban.

Here’s an AR-15 as manufactured while the ban was in effect. The fact that it’s hard to see the difference underscores the point.

Another lie

Whether an anti-gun law is “effective”—regardless of what “effective” means—is irrelevant to whether it’s constitutional. As the Supreme Court said in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), “A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad.”

Nevertheless, Biden, Harris, and other Democrats claim that the 1994 ban was “effective.” That’s what anti-gunners said before the ban was imposed. But once they saw AR-15s still being manufactured and sold after it was imposed, they changed their tune. Also, tellingly, they started using the term “assault weapon” to apply to semi-automatic firearms regardless of the number of proscribed features with which they were equipped.

During a CBS 60 Minutes segment titled “What Assault Weapons Ban?” six months after the ban was imposed, reporter Lesley Stahl pointed out that “Assault weapons are still . . . . sold by the thousands.” And she dismissed as “a good applause line” Clinton’s claim that the ban reduced the number of “assault weapons.”

The Brady Campaign complained that “assault weapon manufacturers here and abroad have responded (to the ban) by cosmetically (sic) altering several of their best-selling weapons and putting them back on the market.”

A more openly radical anti-gun group, the Violence Policy Center, said the ban was “badly flawed,” “a ban in name only,” a “charade,” and a “fictional ban,” and “You can’t argue with a straight face that the ban has been effective.”

As Clinton might say, it depends on the meaning of “effective”

From a pro-Second Amendment perspective, the ban was effective in ways the Democrats didn’t expect. As Lesley Stahl said, the ban increased the number of “assault weapons” Americans were purchasing. And in the elections two months after the ban took effect, lots of Democrats who had voted for the ban were defeated and Republicans took control of the House and Senate.

And in the years since, the number of “assault weapons” owned by Americans has increased from a few million to well over 20 million. And as the number of the firearms increased, the nation’s murder rate decreased to an all-time low, and stayed at about that level until the Democrats’ 2020 Summer of Love riots. Democrats are lying about that too, claiming crime decreased during the nominal Biden administration, but that’s a story for another day.

In conclusion

The ban that Democrats want today does not use the old ban’s two-or-more-features test, and would therefore ban many more types of guns. Either ban would violate the Second Amendment pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision in Heller, that the right to arms extends to guns “in common use” (a flawed proposition), and its closer-to-correct decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen (2022), that restrictions that are outliers are unconstitutional. And, bottom line, Biden, Harris, and other Democrats are lying about it.

Copyright © Mark Overstreet 2024