(breitbart) – President Joe Biden spoke in Buffalo Tuesday and pushed for an “assault weapons” ban in the wake of Saturday’s shooting, which killed ten people.
Biden said, “We can keep assault weapons off our streets. We’ve done it before. I did it when we passed the crime bill last time. And violence went down. Shooting went down.”
Biden was referencing the 1994 federal “assault weapons” ban when he talked about having banned such firearms before. That ban was in place from 1994 to 2004, and contrary to Biden’s claims of reduced violence, the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a report showing the negligible impact of the ban — negligible at best. Breitbart News pointed out that The Washington Times in 2004 quoted the soon-to-be-released NIJ report, authored by University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper: “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”
The NIJ report continued, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
The report put matters into perspective by pointing out that “assault weapons” were “rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”
Bloomberg correspondent Jordan Fabian tweeted Tuesday that Biden admitted his push for control is an uphill battle:
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