Since I'm tired of this argument and since you won't listen to someone you think is a conservative lunatic gun-monger or whatever, here's the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...t-weapons-in-one-post/?utm_term=.b0e5ae46c37c
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What did the 1994 ban actually do? For the 10 years that the ban was in effect, it was illegal to manufacture the assault weapons described above for use by private citizens. The law also set a limit on high-capacity magazines — these could now carry no more than 10 bullets.
There was, however, an important exception. Any assault weapon or magazine that was manufactured
before the law went into effect in 1994 was perfectly legal to own or resell. That was a huge exception: At the time, there were roughly 1.5 million assault weapons and more than 24 million high-capacity magazines in private hands.
Did the 1994 law have loopholes? Yes, lots. Even after the ban took effect, it was not difficult for someone to get their hands on an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine.
A 2004 University of Pennsylvania
study commissioned by the National Institute of Justice explained why. For starters, only 18 firearm models were explicitly banned. But it was easy for gun manufacturers to modify weapons slightly so that they didn't fall under the ban. One example: the Colt AR-15 that James Holmes used to shoot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., last summer
would have been outlawed. Yet it would have been perfectly legal for Holmes to have purchased a very similar Colt Match Target rifle, which
didn't fall under the ban.
Meanwhile, here were already more than 24 million large-capacity magazines in existence before the federal ban took effect in 1994. Indeed, as soon as Congress began working on the law, manufacturers
boosted production of weapons and magazines in anticipation of higher prices. Dangerous weapons were still plentiful.
Did the law have an effect on crime or gun violence? While gun violence did fall in the 1990s, this was likely due to other factors. Here's the UPenn
study again: "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."
One reason is that assault weapons were never a huge factor in gun violence to begin with. They were used in only 2 percent to 8 percent of gun crimes. Large-capacity magazines were more important — used in as many as a quarter of gun crimes. But, again, the 1994 law left more than 24 million magazines untouched, so the impact was blunted.
Did the law have an effect on mass shootings? That's possible, though not certain. As this chart from Princeton's Sam Wang
shows, the number of people killed in mass shootings did go down in the years the ban was in effect (save for a surge in 1999, a year that included Columbine):
Because mass shootings are relatively rare, it's difficult to tell whether this was just a random blip or caused by the ban. Still, the number of mass shootings per year has doubled since the ban expired. That's suggestive, at least."
So basically the best you can say is it's "suggestive." But there are plenty of reasons to believe that with the continued shift toward violence in our culture, that's plenty of explanation for why those shootings would have risen so dramatically during that time period.
