Breitbart recently fact-checked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who claimed that a ten-year ban on so-called assault weapons reduced the number of mass shootings during that time period. According to the media outlet, KJP’s statement is false.
On Tuesday, the embattled press secretary attempted to re-route the topic of Biden’s document crisis to a more White House-friendly one – how a ban on certain guns had had a positive effect on mass shootings between 1994 and 2004. She began by talking about the rash of shootings taking place in California in the past few days.
Ironically, California has some of the most stringent gun control laws on its legislative books, including a ban similar to the one Jean-Pierre referenced in her comments on Tuesday.
The press secretary took an opportunity to push for another federal ban on “assault” weapons. She also pointed to then-Senator Joe Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s work on the 1994 ban, crediting them with “mass shootings actually (going) down.”
Breitbart News researched KJP’s claim only to find that data from the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice refuted the White House spokesperson’s claim. According to a statement by University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, the ban could not be “clearly credited” with any significant lessening of gun violence in the country. Koper wrote the report near the end of the ten-year ban, adding that “there has been no discernible reduction . . . in gun violence” due to the ban.
Koper actually said that any effect the weapons ban might have had on gun violence in America would be “small at best.”
Breitbart also pointed to data from 2013 which showed that weapons generally classified as such were tied to “less than .012 percent of” deaths in 2011. Handguns have been utilized in the commission of multiple violent crimes, including a recent shooting in Monterey Park (California) and in Half Moon (another recent California shooting incident).
Frankly, Jean-Pierre’s claim that the weapons ban brought on a reduction in violence is proven false due to multiple pieces of data, including the NIJ report written by Koper.
