The Ceasefire team is back at it again; I guess when your only tool is a hammer, you see a lot of problems that look like nails. Despite the fact that an overwhelming percentage of gun crimes are committed with handguns, they’re beating the Assault Weapons Ban drum again. This is probably a reaction to the poor results they’re getting in Annapolis and in DC; their bills aren’t getting anywhere, CCW permitting laws are the norm now, Sarah Brady’s press conferences are deserted, and law enforcement–both rank and file and top brass–have abandoned them. Nothing like going back to the old standards that are guaranteed to have the soccer moms spilling their lattes all over their Excursions on the way to drop little Jonny at school.

They claim that assault rifles have been traced to MD crimes “once every 48 hours” from 1998-2001. That’s a pretty cryptic claim, don’t you think? How many times is the same rifle traced to different crimes? How many times is that tracing a different weapon to the same crime? They don’t provide any explication of their methodology, nor a relevant footnote for that claim (the only footnote blathers on about the evils of the ATF and Congress). Anyway, assuming they’re right (and since they don’t show their work or provide any actual representation of their analysis, you have to wonder what they’re hiding), that’s maybe 180 crimes a year if they’re finding one every other day. A real drop in the bucket given that MD averaged about 40,000 violent crimes a year in that 1998-2001 period. Not saying 180 crimes a year is something to sneeze at, but let’s keep that in perspective shall we?

Tracing a gun to a crime can mean a lot of things. What do you think the odds are they’re including guns not properly recorded for sale, a la the BATF and Brady Campaign’s vendetta against Valley Gun? Every time Sandy Abrams lost one of the four federally required forms for selling a firearm, they counted a crime when making the case he’s a merchant of death. I guess…technically one had been committed, but the point remains–they make no effort at describing how many of the crimes were actually examples of criminals hosing down the streets with assault rifles. They want you to believe that each of the 789 assault rifles traced back to a crime represents a violent criminal blasting away with an AK47. But they provide no actual evidence of that. In fact, they don’t provide any analysis or metric at all for how they arrived at that figure.

They just deposit that 789 number on the second page of the report, without any explanation in a footnote, without any detailed analysis of how they conjured up that number, and without any description of the breakdown of those crimes. I don’t have any such breakdown of MD gun crimes myself, my Google efforts seem to be coming up short in finding a breakdown of just which types crimes were committed with which types of guns in the relevant period. If the Ceasefire folks want to provide me the raw data they used, I’d be happy to check their work (remember in highschool, how in calculus and physics and chemistry and biology and so forth, you had to show your work? Guess the Ceasefire folks were sick that day). In any event, their mission here is to leave impressionable legislators and their nervous constituents with the idea that assault weapons are overrepresented in violent gun crimes and that their use represents a public health crisis of some description.

Let’s cut to the tape and go over some of the stats we do have. The Ceasefire crowd doesn’t actually get into how many people were actually murdered via rifle. From the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report:

We see that in 2004 (the year the ban expired, remember, they are using data from during the Clinton era AWB), only two people were murdered in MD by rifles (no indication if they even were assault rifles, or just hunting rifles). That’s three tenths of one percent of the 520 total MD murders for that year! Sounds like a real epidemic, eh? And it’s fifteen times fewer people than were murdered by fists and feet. Maybe it’s time to outlaw karate class and boots too, eh?

I know what you’re thinking, what about a year during the same time period they’re using?

Ok, let’s consider the FBI’s data from say…2001, when the 1994 AWB was still active.

We see in this table that nationwide, rifles make up less than 5% of all firearm murders for 2001 (and years prior as far back as you care to look). They didn’t break it down by state, but there’s no reason to think that MD deviates from the norm very much. There were only 389 total rifle deaths that year, nationwide. Since Ceasefire is claiming about 180 rifle crimes a year in MD, it’s pretty clear that they can’t all be murders.

So what kinds of crimes are they including? Robberies? Shootings that aren’t fatal? Brandishing? Simple possession? We don’t have any way of knowing as they didn’t bother to tell us. But the rate of people who survive handgun shootings is much higher than those who survive shotgun and rifle shootings, for obvious reasons. The ratio of people killed by handgun vs. rifle vs. shotgun should give a fairly accurate rendition of how often each type of weapon is used–if anything, handgun use is underrepresented in the murder figures, as people are more likely to survive being shot by handguns.

But we can look at the FBI figures and see that rifles kill fewer people that shotguns. Rifles kill fewer people than hands, fists, feet, etc.

If anything, assault weapons are under-represented in violent crime.

Assuming Ceasefire’s findings represent a trend–and I’m sure they’d want to argue that they do–the FBI has shown us that in 2004 only two people were killed by rifle shot here in MD. Their numbers would indicate (and I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here by about 20, just for round numbers) that there were about 200 assault weapons crimes in MD that year. What were the other 198? It seems pretty clear that whatever metric they’re using includes a lot of different types of crime besides shootings and murder.

Until they answer that question, until they actually describe the crimes they’re reporting, and until they give us an idea of what percentage of total gun crime (since they don’t explain their metric, we have no way of calculating this) that 789 crimes represents, their numbers are meaningless. Even if they’re right that 789 such offenses occured, what percentage of the total gun crime picture does that represent? How many of those offenses were violent crimes, shootings, robberies, murders, etc? How many are simple paperwork infractions? We don’t know because Ceasefire didn’t show their work. Using the same metric they used, I’ll wager that that 789 figure represents a pretty small percentage of total gun crime. Heck the DOJ report on the 1994 AWB that Ceasefire cites readily admits that assault weapons were only used in about 1% of gun crimes. Ceasefire’s given us little reason to think MD deviates from that trend in any meaningful way. Their methodology is seriously flawed.

They’re simply engaging in unfounded scare tactics, pure and simple. Don’t think so? Why then are they arguing that on the one hand semiauto rifles are evil because they’re actually more deadly and more accurate than full auto fire, but on the other hand they object to assault rifles because they “have characteristics that aid firing from the hip” in a wanton fashion, spraying the street down? Which is it? Whatever they think will scare you the most at that moment, I guess.

I invite Ceasefire to present their data for analysis. You guys up to the challenge? Will you publish a retraction when I demonstrate that you’re fudging the numbers?

UPDATE: Phil Lee has some data on 2000 (during the period Ceasefire’s talking about).

According to the FBI, Maryland reported 41,663 violent crimes in 2000 (see the FBI data

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_00/xl/00tbl05.xls )

which is 228.3 violent crimes per 48 hours. If each of the crimes involving these semiautomatic firearms was a violent one, that means, CeaseFire Md and Del. Quinter would be interested in less than 0.5% ((789/(4*365)*2)/228.3 assuming the level of violent crime averaged 41,663) of the violent crimes committed (the ones using the semiautomatic rifles and shotguns) and not interested in more than 99.5% of the violent crimes committed in Maryland.

UPDATED UPDATE: Check out Uncle’s pingback below; you’ll note that not every gun trace is indicative of an actual crime of any sort. In fact, as many as 90% of gun traces aren’t related to crimes at all, according to the BATF. Everytime the cops come across a gun, even if there’s no violent crime committed, they do a trace to check on the firearm’s history.

Ceasefire is really pushing their luck here, assuming you’re not going to be smart enough to notice.