A DOJ study, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology, and titled An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003 concluded that the ban could not be credited with any decrease in firearm-related violence.
"We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury ... The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban."
To be fair they indicated that it might have been too early to get a true picture of the ban's effectiveness or lack of. Fortunately, Quinnipiac University did another study nearly a decade later (An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates), which could also could find no connection between dropping rates of gun-related violence and the law ("assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level").
I think the fact that rates continued to drop after the ban expired is also telling.
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