GUNS/BARMS

[Matey]

Gun ban end fails to affect sales, crime

Deborah Sontag
New York Times
Apr. 24, 2005 12:00 AM

Despite predictions that the streets would be awash in military-style guns, the expiration in September of the decade-long ban on assault-style weapons has not set off a sustained surge in the weapons' sales, gun makers and sellers say.

It also has not caused any noticeable increase in gun crime in the past seven months, according to several metropolitan police departments.

The uneventful expiration did not surprise gun owners, nor it did not surprise some advocates of gun control. Rather, it underscored what many of them had said all along: that the ban was porous.


"The whole time that the American public thought there was an assault weapons ban, there never really was one," said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group.

When the ban took effect in 1994, it exempted more than 1.5 million assault-style weapons already in private hands. Over the next 10 years, at least 1.17 million more of the weapons were produced - legitimately - by manufacturers that availed themselves of loopholes in the law, according to the Violence Policy Center.

Some manufacturers continued selling the rifles to civilians by "sporterizing" the military-style weapons, sawing off bayonet lugs, securing stocks so they were not collapsible and adding muzzle brakes. But the changes did not alter the guns' essence; they were still semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0424assault24.html