You’ve probably heard Joe Biden bragging how he “beat the NRA” and got “assault weapons” banned when he was a Senator. As part of his brag, Biden often says that mass shootings went down during the ban and rose dramatically when it expired. It’s something he repeated today and it’s a complete load of crap.
Biden held an event on Monday at the White House to celebrate the passage of a gun control bill that, in reality, is nothing more than another bloated spending bill. It will not do one thing to reduce gun-related crime but it does cost taxpayers billions we don’t have.
It’s such a do-nothing bill that even gun control activist, Manuel Oliver whose son was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., heckled the illegitimate president:
A protester interrupts President Biden during his remarks touting the passage of new gun safety legislation https://t.co/oHh0xhF16D pic.twitter.com/vFexztEjPW
— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 11, 2022
At the end of his speech, Biden renewed his call to ban so-called assault weapons:
“Assault weapons need to be banned. They were banned. I led the fight in 1994. And then under pressure from the NRA and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004. In that 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down. When the law expired in 2004, and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled. They’re the facts,” said Biden.
The fact is, the ban wasn’t lifted under pressure for the NRA, the law was passed to ban these weapons for 10 years and when that ten years was up, they were no longer banned.
That however isn’t the biggest lie here. Biden says that mass shootings went down during the ban and then went back up after it expired. Take a look at this graph of mass shootings since 1982 and tell me what you see:
This graph, by the way, only lists actual mass shootings in which a single gunman kills 3 or more people in a continuous event. There are no non-fatal shootings, multiple-gunmen gang shootings, or BB gun attacks like the liberal media counts as mass shootings.
The first thing we notice is that in the decade before the Clinton-era AWB, there were 17 mass shootings in the United States. In the decade the AWB was in effect, from 1994-2004 there were 17 mass shootings in the United States. That means prior to and during the AWB there was an average of 1.7 mass shootings per year or in other words, no charge. Mass shootings didn’t go down.
If you look at the 7 years after the AWB expired, it’s about the same as it always has been. There was no explosion of mass shootings following the expiration of the AWB. Mass shootings certainly didn’t “triple” the year after the ban expired, like Biden claims.
In fact, mass shootings didn’t really take off until Barack Obama’s second term as White House occupier, which Joe Biden was the vp. Maybe it’s a coincidence or perhaps it was part of Obama’s gun control agenda. Either way, it’s undeniable that the modern age of mass shootings came in under the Obama/Biden administration.
While it’s completely false to say that the AWB did anything to reduce the numbers of mass shootings, it’s 100% accurate to say mass shootings went up when Obama and Biden were running the show.
The weird thing is that it only took me 3 seconds on Google to find this information and expose Biden’s big lie. I wonder why the liberal media doesn’t have the same web-searching capabilities as I do.
