The Dubious and Doomed ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban That the House Approved Today May Cost Democrats This Fall

The House of Representatives today approved H.R 1808, which would ban the production and sale of “assault weapons,” including semi-automatic rifles with features such as pistol grips, folding or adjustable stocks, barrel shrouds, and threaded barrels. It also would ban a long list of specific models by name.

The bill, which passed the House by a vote of 217 to 213, has no chance in the evenly divided Senate, where support from at least 10 Republicans would be required to overcome a filibuster. House approval of H.R. 1808 is therefore a symbolic act aimed at energizing Democrats and encouraging them to vote in this fall’s elections. But several House Democrats, whose objections nearly derailed today’s vote, worried that it would hurt their party’s candidates more than it would help them.

That fear seems rational given what happened after Congress approved similar legislation in 1994: Democrats lost control of the House and Senate. Recent polling data provide further reason to think that the House vote to revive the ban, which expired in 2004, could be politically perilous.

“There was uncertainty that an assault weapons ban has the votes in a chamber where Democrats have only a razor-thin four-member majority,” The Washington Post noted on Wednesday. “Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), who recently lost his primary bid to a liberal Democrat, has publicly said he would vote against the ban. Other front-line members representing rural districts also expressed hesitancy in backing it.”

Schrader argued that approving H.R. 1808 would cost Democrats in November. “This is a bill that destroyed the Democrats in ’94,” he told Politico earlier this month. “Do we really have a death wish list as Democrats?”

Vic Fazio, a former chair of the House Democratic Caucus who represented two California districts from 1979 to 1999, agrees with Schrader’s take on what happened in 1994. By folding the “assault weapon” ban into the 1994 crime bill, Fazio told The Daily Beast in 2019, “we put a lot of folks on the line…In really strong gun states, it was seen as poison.”

In addition to Schrader, who was a firm no, at least three other House Democrats seemed to have doubts about H.R. 1808. Reps. Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.) and Mike Thompson (D–Calif.) declined to say whether they would vote for it. According to Politico, even Rep. Jim Cooper (D–Tenn.), who was listed as a cosponsor of the bill, said “he wanted to see the language,” which did not bode well.

“Last time, we didn’t necessarily define ‘semi-automatic [assault weapon]’ very well,” Cooper told Politico. Nor does the new, supposedly improved version.

Like H.R. 1808, the 1994 ban covered a bunch of listed models, along with “copies” of them. Also like H.R. 1808, it included a more general definition of prohibited rifles, which hinged on the presence or absence of five features: a folding or telescoping stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a grenade launcher, or a “flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor.” Any two of those transformed a legal rifle into a prohibited “assault weapon.”

Under H.R. 1808, one prohibited feature is enough to make a semi-automatic rifle intolerable, and the list is somewhat different. The much-ridiculed reference to bayonet mounts is gone, for example, replaced by barrel shrouds. But the basic approach is the same. So if there was a problem with the 1994 definition of “assault weapons,” there is also a problem with the 2022 definition.

The problem, as Joe Biden explained before he was elected president, was that gun manufacturers could comply with the 1994 law by “making minor modifications to their products” that left them “just as deadly.” Removing the prohibited features did not affect the essential properties of semi-automatic rifles, which still fired the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity.

Biden nevertheless is proud of backing the 1994 ban, which he contradictorily (and implausibly) claims reduced mass-shooting deaths. He thinks fiddling with the language can correct the essential weakness of that law,