Originally Posted by
Quest
Context....
“Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.”
— Former President Bill Clinton, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 9, 2013
A colleague spotted this eye-popping statistic by the former president and wondered if it was correct.
Clinton signed the assault weapons ban into law in 1994, but it expired after 10 years and was not renewed. Even supporters have said it was riddled with loopholes, limiting its effectiveness. But the rash of mass shootings in recent years, including the Newtown, Conn., tragedy, have provided new impetus for a renewed ban.
So let’s dig into the data and see what we find....
...We ran this data past a spokesman for Clinton, but he declined to comment or offer an explanation for where the former president got his facts. That always makes us suspicious.
Still, as our colleague Brad Plumer has noted, a different definition of mass shooting might yield a different picture. Mother Jones magazine tabulated its own data over the past three decades and came up with these figures:
Shootings before, during and after assault ban
1982-1994: 19
1995-2004: 16
2005-2012: 27
This gets us a little closer to Clinton’s claim — it suggests that more than 40 percent of mass shootings in the past 30 years have taken place since the assault weapon ban ended. But that’s still not the same thing as he said – “half of all of them in the history of the country.”
Moreover, the reasons behind a spike or decline in gun violence are often much more complex than a single factor, such as the expiration of a law. In general, overall crime rates, including homicides, have declined in recent years because of a variety of factors.
In the highly charged debate over guns, it is important for politicians on both sides to get their facts straight. In this case, the available data show that Clinton was way off base in his assertion, making an exaggerated claim – which his office would not even defend.
Given the fuzziness of the data and questions about definitions, we are going to cut Clinton a bit of slack. But such uncertainty in the data means politicians need to be very careful in making claims about gun violence.