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Today marks 20 years since the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired and nine days since Apalachee High School joined the ranks of mass shootings carried out by an assault weapon. Sadly, the list is anything but exclusive, with places including Las Vegas, Pulse Nightclub, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Sutherland Springs, El Paso, Robb Elementary School, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Aurora, and Dayton forever scarred by this deadly weapon.
AR-15s are used to murder humans, responsible for devastating families, tearing apart communities, and fueling America’s gun violence epidemic. Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who wrote the book “Rampage Nation,” found the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37% and that the number of people dying because of mass shootings fell by 43% compared with the 10-year period before the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. When President Bush allowed the ban to expire in 2004, mass shootings increased by 183% and deaths increased by 239%.
Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University, and his team studied mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017 and found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 70% of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect.
It could not be clearer that reinstating a National Assault Ban on the weapon of choice for killing humans means saving lives. These weapons are not symbols of freedom—they are instruments of murder and have no place in our society. Be TRULY pro-life. Pass S. 25 / HR 698 the Assault Weapons Ban Act now.
