Maryland is a mess. Because its largest voting bases are “not in my back yard” liberals and urban welfare recipients, its response is always more crappy legislation. This time? An assault weapons ban to curtail urban violence. As the Baltimore Sun reports, a 4th circuit court upheld the dopey ban:
A Federal appeals court upheld Maryland’s ban on assault rifles, concluding that the powerful military-style guns outlawed by the measure are not entitled to protection under the Second Amendment.
The 10-4 ruling, issued by the entire Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, reverses a decision by a smaller panel of judges from the court last year that called the law’s constitutionality into question.
The bill was steered through the Maryland Senate in 2013 by then-Sen. Brian E. Frosh in the wake of the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Since elected as the state’s attorney general, he has defended the law in court.
Frosh, a Democrat, called the dual role gratifying and said he was very happy with the ruling.
Writing at the Washington Examiner, David Freddoso examines the silliness of the ban:
If you live under the illusion that Maryland had to pass an “assault weapons ban” because law enforcement is being overwhelmed by gangs toting AK-47s and AR-15s around Baltimore, let me educate you. In 2015, there were exactly three murders committed with rifles in the entire state of Maryland. That is not a misprint — you could literally count them on one hand. Five times as many Marylanders were beaten to death that year.
And those three rifle killings were by all types of rifles, not necessarily by the “scary-looking” (to use the technical term) types defined under the state’s 2013 law as an “assault weapon.” For all we know, there might have been zero “assault weapon” killings in Maryland in 2015, but the FBI doesn’t specifically track that number.
In case you think this is because Maryland’s ban on certain kinds of rifles has been effective, look to the last 10 years of data. Rifles (again, all rifles) have been used in a grand total of 34 Maryland homicides, or just over three per year. That’s slightly above 1 percent of 3,072 murders in the state during that period. And some fraction of that 1 percent — possibly a small fraction — accounts for all “assault weapon” rifle killings in Maryland.
The data have long been screaming out to us that “assault weapons” aren’t a thing; that to ban them is at best a waste of time and energy, and at worst it infringes rights without any corresponding benefit in deterring crime. In the nine months of 2013 preceding the effective date of Maryland’s current “assault weapon” ban, there was not a single murder in the state with any type of rifle. But the self-styled “party of science” persists in chasing unicorns.
So to recap: Virtually no one in Maryland is murdered with these sorts of guns. Maryland’s solution, therefore, amounts to making a bunch of gun shy liberals feel good while illegal guns flood into Baltimore and Prince Georges counties. No remedy for that. Just make law abiding gun owners who enjoy a light, customizable AR-15.
Dumb.
AAN Staff
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