Reply #362: Gee, wipe the egg off your face. [View All]

[Mike L]

University of Dayton Law Review
Symposium, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,
vol. 20, no. 2, 1995: 557.

EXCERPT from section k:

On June 20, 1993, the New York Times, long a vigorous advocate of assault weapons bans, reported that the two-year-old New Jersey ban has had little effect on crime. The report, by Iver Peterson, noted that "Although New Jersey's pioneering ban on military-style assault rifles was sold to the state as a crime-fighting measure, its impact on violence in the state, two years after it took effect, has been negligible, both sides agree, and debate over its impact is colored more by opinion than by fact." The Times reported that until the ban was imposed, the police were not required to keep statistics on the number of crimes involving assault rifles. In the years since, the statistics show them to be a tiny fraction of the total.

Even though Governor James Florio claimed that there were once 300,000 of these firearms in the state--guns they claimed had only one purpose, for killing people--and later revised the figure down to 40,000, only about 2,000 have been registered or otherwise rendered inoperable. This means that there are still tens of thousands of the targeted guns still in private hands, yet they account for .026 of 1 percent of guns used in crime.

Frederick DeVesa, first assistant attorney general, told the Times: "We're ready to concede that there is not a really high percentage of crimes committed with assault firearms." And then he added, "And we're going to make sure that number does not grow."

Joseph Constance, deputy chief of police in Trenton's capital city force, termed the assault weapons issue "pure nonsense, political pap." Constance, who has always opposed the state's ban, said: "Assault rifles have never been an issue in law enforcement. I have been on this job for twenty-five years and I haven't seen a drug dealer carry one. They are not used in crimes, they are not used against police officers."

The Times quoted Dominick Polifrone, head of the New Jersey bureau of ATF, as saying, "I've never encountered an assault rifle. The guns we have been dealing with are mostly 9-millimeter handguns, .38-caliber pistols and 25-millimeter handguns, because they're easier to conceal."

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