On January 17, 1989, Patrick Edward Purdy, armed with an AKS rifle—a semiautomatic variant of the military AK–47—returned to his childhood elementary school in Stockton, California, and opened fire, killing 5 children and wounding 30 others. Purdy, a drifter, squeezed off more than 100 rounds in 1 minute before turning the weapon on himself.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, this tragedy and other similar acts of seemingly senseless violence, coupled with escalating turf and drug wars waged by urban gangs, sparked a national debate over whether legislation was needed to end, or at least restrict, the market for imported and domestic “assault weapons.” Beginning in 1989, a few States enacted their own assault weapons bans, but it was not until 1994 that a Federal law was enacted.
On September 13, 1994, Title XI of the Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994—known as the Crime Control Act of 1994—took effect. Subtitle A (the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act) of the act banned the manufacture, transfer, and possession of certain semiautomatic firearms designated as assault weapons and “large capacity” ammunition magazines. The legislation required the Attorney General to deliver to Congress within 30 months an evaluation of the effects of the ban. To meet this requirement, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded research from October 1995 to December 1996 to evaluate the impact of Subtitle A. This Research in Brief summarizes the results of that evaluation.
A number of factors—including the fact that the banned weapons and magazines were rarely used to commit murders in this country, the limited availability of data on the weapons, other components of the Crime Control Act of 1994, and State and local initiatives implemented at the same time—posed challenges in discerning the effects of the ban. The ban appears to have had clear short-term effects on the gun market, some of which were unintended consequences: production of the banned weapons increased before the law took effect, and prices fell afterward. This suggests that the weapons became more available generally, but they must have become less accessible to criminals because there was at least a short-term decrease in criminal use of the banned weapons.