The Crime Prevention Research Center has worked with the Peace Officers Research Association of California and the California Association of Highway Patrolmen on an Amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court looking at “Whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.” All the other briefs filed in the case are available here. The academic research discussed in the brief is extensively based on our work at the CPRC. It is important that we are again working with the California police officer associations as it gives our research more credibility with the Supreme Court. We worked with them before in the Wolford case that dealt with Hawaii’s gun-free zones.
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SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT (Very Partial, please download here)
There is no credible evidence that “assault-weapon” bans meaningfully reduce gun homicide or crime overall. Because so few states have enacted such bans, and all only recently, their impacts are hard to measure directly. But nothing in the research suggests state bans will outperform the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (“federal ban”), which had no discernible effect on gun violence and was allowed to sunset. This record matters not because efficacy is the constitutional test, for the historical inquiry governs, but because it rebuts Cook County’s central factual premise. Cook County defends these bans as vital safety measures and pronounces that protecting common arms will invite violence.
Assault-weapon bans reach a category of firearm rarely used in murder.
Contrary to what gun-control advocates would pre- dict, the federal ban decade did not see the lowest share of deaths from assault weapons, the decade after did.
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