In his State of the Union address last night, President Joe Biden repeated his desire for a new assault weapon ban. "In 10 years that ban was law, mass shootings went down," he insisted. "After we let it expire in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled." He is referring to a long-sunsetted ban on certain varieties of semiautomatic rifles in effect from 1994 to 2004. As usual with talk of "assault weapons," the definitions of what weapons he's targeting are both vague and pointless. Biden himself has admitted that weapons of the same level of potential danger to others when misused by criminals will remain legal under any conceivable Democratic plan to institute a ban on new sales of them moving forward. (His plan also involves requiring those who already legally own such weapons— however the government defines them—to register them, which experience shows will also be pointless except in creating a huge class of "criminals" who have never harmed anyone.)
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