Mark Kelly: I Don't Know if First Assault Weapons Ban Worked

Appearing on FOX NEWS Sunday with Chris Wallace on Feb. 3, former Navy Capt. Mark Kelly said of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban: “I don’t know if it worked or not. I mean, I haven’t looked at all the statistics.”

In order words, Kelly has spent the past few weeks calling for an “assault weapons” ban, but he has no idea whether the first one did any good or not. 

This is why gun owners get nervous every time people start throwing the word “ban” around after a high visibility crime takes place. Kelly doesn’t even know whether the ban he’s pushing will work, yet he has given testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee on gun violence (Jan. 30), pushed for it on FOX NEWS, and launched his own gun control group to support it anyway.  

For the record, professors Chris Koper and Jeff Roth complied a report on the first “assault weapons” ban three years after its implementation and found it had no “meaningful effect” on crime. Ten years after the ban had been in place, one of their colleagues did another study and said he could not “clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s…drop in gun violence.”

But this won’t matter to Kelly, who’s already made it that in his mind, a ban that makes it “more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get assault weapons and high capacity magazines and guns in general…will save lives.”

Does Kelly really think criminals will abide by the ban?