The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (FAWB) would have prevented as many as 38 mass shootings that have taken place since the law lapsed in 2005, a new study estimates. Enacted by Congress in 1994, the ban prohibited the sale and manufacture of certain military-style semiautomatic weapons in the United States—including notoriously deadly weapons like AK-47s, AR-15s, TEC-9s and "Street Sweeper" shotguns with high-capacity revolving cylinders. There have been multiple attempts to renew the ban, but none have succeeded.
While the ban was in place, would-be mass shooters denied access to an assault weapon did not turn to other types of firearms to carry out a massacre, researchers found. "These results suggest that the FAWB discouraged potential perpetrators from committing a mass shooting with an assault weapon, and, furthermore, that these potential perpetrators did not simply carry out attacks with other types of weapons," said lead researcher Alexander Lundberg, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University School of Medicine, in Chicago. For the study, researchers looked for events in which at least four people were killed by a firearm.
A total of 184 such mass shootings have occurred between 1966 and 2022. The researchers then looked at trends before, during and after the assault weapon ban, to estimate the number of mass shootings that relied on such firearms. While it was active, the assault weapon ban prevented up to five public mass shootings, res.