Evaluating the Evidence in the Federal district court’s New York gun law decision

Jan 4, 2014 | Featured

The CPRC presents an analysis of the federal district court’s decision at National Review Online. The beginning of the analysis starts this way:

New York’s new gun-control law, the so-called SAFE Act, largely survived its first federal-court challenge on this past Tuesday. The more than 1,140 New Yorkers it’s made felons will remain so. But even the testimony of the state’s own expert witness failed to show that the law will cut crime.

The judge in this case is William M. Skretny, chief federal judge for the Western District of New York. His decision upheld the state’s gun-registration requirements and ban on assault weapons, but he rejected the seven-round limit for magazines, deeming it arbitrary.

But Koper’s two studies on the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban don’t support his claims. The first study, with Jeff Roth for the National Institute of Justice, found that “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect [of the weapons ban].”

Seven years later, in 2004, Koper and Roth conducted a follow-up study with fellow criminologist Dan Woods, covering a much longer period after the law. They concluded, “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.”

To make the court ruling even stranger . . .

Lawyer David Hardy discusses CPRC’s analysis of the case here. Since the judge indicated that he had read Koper’s research, the analysis didn’t take the space in the piece to also criticize the plaintiffs for not raising these problems with the defense’s case.

johnrlott

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