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Assault Guns Muscling in on Front Lines of Crime

NCJ Number
122156
Journal
State Peace Officers Volume: 38 Issue: 3 Dated: (1989) Pages: 10-13
Author(s)
J Stewart; A Alexander
Date Published
1989
Length
4 pages
Annotation
Although assault guns account for only one-half percent of all privately-owned firearms in the United States, in 1989, they were used in one of every ten crimes that resulted in a firearm trace.
Abstract
These findings confirm that criminals, especially drug gangs, are favoring semiautomatic guns patterned after military firearms. Two-thirds of the traced assault guns were produced domestically and would not be affected by U.S. policy to ban the importation of nearly 50 foreign-made assault guns. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Atlanta Journal Constitution studied over 42,000 gun trace requests, collating information on the location and nature of the crime, the gun manufacturer, weapon model, magazine capacity, and weapon serial number. The results indicated that assault gun use rose more than 78 percent in 1988 over 1987 and is continuing to rise, that just ten gun models account for 90 percent of crimes involving assault weapons, that assault gun usage is twice the national average in Miami where drug gangs are especially violent and gun laws particularly lax, that certain weapons figuring prominently in Congressional debate have not impacted significantly on the crime scene, and that semiautomatic pistols outnumber revolvers for the first time. Assault weapons have been the focus of Federal and State legislation since a California man killed five schoolchildren in January 1989. Gun law revisions are hampered by the difficulty in defining "assault weapons" and debates over the actual number of assault guns owned by Americans and involved in crimes.