It is good to send thoughts and prayers to the families and victims of the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic Church shooting on Aug. 27, as we should for the all the victims of shootings. On Sept. 28, the shooter at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Flint, Michigan, used an assault rifle in killing four and wounding eight victims.

We need action in addition to prayers to reduce the lethality of these types of attacks. The mother of 9-year-old Vivian St. Clair, who survived multiple bullet wounds at the Annunciation shooting, put it bluntly: “Who the hell is going to do something? Who’s going to make meaningful change and take tangible steps to break the cycle?”

It is way past time to renew the 1994 federal assault weapons ban.

The Annunciation church shooting took place during a Mass attended by the students and faculty of its Catholic school. The gunman shot through the church windows with a rifle. Two children died and 21 people were injured, including 18 children. The gunfire lasted only minutes, and 116 rifle rounds and three shotgun shell casings were recovered from the scene.

Buried in the news of this horrific school shooting, just a day before the Annunciation attack, another mass shooting also occurred in Minneapolis, behind a high school, injuring six and killing one on Aug. 26.

Have we become numb to the mass shootings killing hundreds and injuring thousands that have occurred over the past 20 years at concerts, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, churches, synagogues? School shootings have become particularly heinous and frequent.

Evidence shows some positive effects from the 1994 assault weapons ban

Mass shootings are defined as involving four or more victims – injured or killed – in a public place. The numbers are staggering. The American College of Surgeons tabulated 2,056 school shootings, increasing from 20 incidents in 1970 to 251 in 2021.

A National Institutes of Health analysis corroborated that school shootings have risen to their highest frequency in recent decades.

Other researchers have noted that mass shootings have consequences reaching far beyond those who are injured or killed. An example is the 2017 Las Vegas music festival shooting, when a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle fired from a hotel and killed 60 people while wounding hundreds. There were 22,000 people at the outdoor concert, plus onlookers at surrounding hotels, all subjected to a warfare-type post-traumatic stress disorder event.

Most mass shootings escape media attention because they occur in parking lots, yards, porches and residential locations. A large proportion is done with semiautomatic pistols and multiple bullet clips. However, assault-style rifles, with gun magazines that usually can hold 30 to 100 rounds, are many times as lethal because their muzzle velocities are several times that of a handgun. The higher velocity causes more severe wounds.

From 2015 to 2022, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, mass shootings where an assault weapon was used resulted in nearly six times as many people shot and more than twice as many killed as compared with mass shootings that did not involve an assault weapon.

The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was limited to certain types of semiautomatic weapons, such as AR-15s, and banned sales after passage of the act with a grandfather clause for those who already owned these types of weapons. It also banned manufacture of large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices (magazines and clips).

At that time, gun control was more bipartisan. Former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan urged passage of the bill in a letter to the U.S. House, noting that a 1993 CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found that 77% of the public supported a ban on the manufacture, sale and possession of semiautomatic assault guns.

The proposal passed with the bipartisan support of 46 Republican House members and seven GOP senators, which allowed it to defeat a filibuster, 61-38.

The bill had a 10-year sunset provision; the assault weapon ban section expired in 2004.

There is dispute on how effective the ban was during its 10 years in effect.

A 2014 study by Mark Gius at Quinnipiac University found that fatalities and injuries due to mass shooting were statistically lower during the period the assault weapon ban was in effect because assault weapons are used more frequently during mass shootings. This occurred even though millions of assault weapons and large capacity magazines manufactured before the ban had been exempted and were in circulation.

A 2024 study from JMIR Public Health and Surveillance found that, when the federal ban was in place, there was a downward trend in mass shootings in which the perpetrator brought an assault weapon. It also found no difference in trends in mass shootings where the perpetrator did not bring an assault weapon. In other words, the ban didn’t decrease the number of mass assaults but did decrease the firepower and the number of casualties.

Assault weapon bans can be effective and survive judicial scrutiny

About 16 million Americans own an AR-15 rifle. We need a federal assault weapons ban because only 10 states currently have such a ban and it is easy to go to a neighboring state without a ban to obtain one.

The U.S. Supreme Court has not affirmatively upheld an assault weapon ban. However, this June it declined to hear challenges to a Maryland assault weapon ban on firearms like the AR-15. It thus let stand a federal appeals court that upheld Maryland’s assault weapon ban.

The fact that the court did not rule on the Second Amendment implications of the federal assault weapons ban when it was in effect gives me hope that it would allow bans like the Illinois assault weapon regulation that is working its way to the highest court. Regardless, a federal ban would limit better access to these semiautomatic weapons.

The House has passed a new version of the ban in recent years only to see its passage stopped in the Senate. I don’t see that changing, but it should.

There are many reasons for the frequency of mass shootings, such as changes in domestic violence rates, psychiatric illness, firearm availability and its surge in sales. These should be addressed, but at a minimum we should do what we can to reduce the deadliness of mass shooters by reducing the number of shots they can fire in a short period of time. This would be a commonsense partial solution to a terrible problem of public safety.

Dr. Greg Ganske is a retired reconstructive surgeon who cared for women with breast cancer, children with cleft lips, farmers with hand injuries, and burn and trauma patients. He served in the U.S. Congress as a Republican representing Iowa from 1995 to 2003. This column originally appeared in the Des Moines Register.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: I'm a Republican. It's time to renew the federal assault weapons ban. | Opinion

Reporting by Greg Ganske / Des Moines Register

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