Because He’s Not Unpopular Enough, Obama Seeks To Renew Gun Ban

Update: Whoops, this article is from a year ago. A reader emailed it to me and I posted on it without checking the article date. My bad.
Apparently not satisfied with his already less-than-stellar approval ratings and the blood bath his Democrats are already facing at the polls this midterm election season, Obama has decided to re-open the can of worms that is the assault weapons ban.
The last time this was tried? 1994. Which was also when the last Republican majority in Congress was swept into power.

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.
“As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.
Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.
“I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.” Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.

Eric Holder references Obama’s having campaigned on a renewal of the assault weapons ban, but it’s worth noting that Obama disappeared his support for the ban from his website back during the campaign. Meaning, I guess, that he campaigned on it…but just didn’t want you to know he was campaigning on it.
Of course, before he was the nominee he called for a permanent assault weapons ban, and shortly after he was elected he renewed that call. So Obama is for assault weapons bans…as long as he’s not too close to an election.
Oh, and by the way, the claim that American assault weapons are causing problems in Mexico is a complete and utter falsehood.
Regardless, a new assault weapons ban isn’t just stupid because it’s radioactive politically and Democrats will pay for any concerted effort to pass it at the polls but also because it’s bad policy. We’re told that we need to ban assault weapons to help control crime, but the 1994 assault weapon ban passed under President Clinton (which many suggest helped Republicans dominate elections that year) didn’t actually reduce crime. Clinton’s own Justice Department concluded that the impact of the ban on crime rates “has been uncertain.” More specifically, in a study of the first six years of the ban’s time as law the Justice Department again concluded, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence.”
What’s more, after the ban was lifted in 2004, gun crimes plummeted:

…the FBI announced that the number of murders nationwide fell by 3.6% last year, the first drop since 1999. The trend was consistent; murders kept on declining after the assault weapons ban ended.
Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own assault weapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. (States with bans averaged a 2.4% decline in murders; in three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4%.)
And the drop was not just limited to murder. Overall, violent crime also declined…according to the FBI, and the complete statistics carry another surprise for gun control advocates. Guns are used in murder and robbery more frequently then in rapes and aggravated assaults, but after the assault weapons ban ended, the number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of rapes and aggravated assaults.

At the very least the conclusion here has to be that there’s no correlation between the assault weapons ban and lower crime rates. At the most, we can suggest that the assault weapons ban actually fosters higher crime rates by inhibiting a citizen’s ability to arm and defend himself/herself.