UPDATE: Sunday, Mar 26, 2023 · 3:41:52 PM +00:00
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liberaldad2
Correction: As pointed out by one commenter, it is still legal to own machine guns in the US, as long as the proper application and registration process is followed. The process has been very successful at eliminating machine-gun-related deaths in the US.
I hadn’t seen this mentioned today and I thought it was significant, so I thought I’d post.
Last night on “The Last Word” on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell directly accused George W Bush and the Republican Congress of being fully responsible for the deaths of 21 people at Robb Elementary School in the Uvalde, TX school massacre on May 24, 2022.
Recent stories about the police response have emphasized that the police knew the Uvalde shooter had an AR-15 assault rifle and so they were reluctant to enter the classroom. O’Donnell commented that their fears were well justified, given the extraordinary damage that the AR can do to the human body. As a result of their hesitation, it took more than an hour before police stormed into the occupied classroom and killed the shooter. The deaths of the students and teachers could have been mitigated or avoided if the shooter had not had such a powerful weapon and the police had been able to enter sooner.
O’Donnell noted that the assault weapon ban passed by Congress in 1994 prohibited ownership of the AR-15. Mass shootings immediately declined in the US after that date, presumably because of the restrictions on gun ownership. Then in 2004, after an intense lobbying effort by the NRA, Bush and the Republican Congress allowed the assault weapon ban to expire. The first occurrence of an assault weapon in a mass shooting was in 2007. Before that date, there had never been an assault rifle used in a mass shooting. Since that date, assault rifles have been used in 67 percent of mass shootings (per O’Donnell).
[Note: I am quoting O’Donnell from memory — he may have been referring specifically to school shootings.]
O’Donnell therefore concluded that the assault weapon ban was very effective in saving lives. Had it not been for the inaction of Bush and the Congress in 2004, many or most of the Uvalde deaths could have been avoided.
As a historical footnote, he also pointed out that because of the use of machine guns in many gang-related murders in the US in the 1930s, Congress passed a ban on private ownership of machine guns in 1934. The vote in the Senate was unanimous.