One week ago, President Barack Obama announced 23 executive actions on gun control. The president also called for Congress to pass a new assault weapons ban.

A subsequent White House press release said these measures are “the single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings.”

Politicians and media outlets alike have injected fear into our society about these “assault weapons,” implying they are the biggest threat to our safety. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

According to FBI data, only 2.6 percent of all murders in the U.S. are committed using a rifle of some kind. In 2011, there were 6,220 homicides with handguns and only 323 with rifles.

Of all 142 types of weapons used in mass shootings in the last 30 years, only 35 can be classified as assault weapons.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein used a study by the National Institute of Justice to prove that the last assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, reduced gun deaths. Ironically, in that same study, the authors wrote, “the evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).”

It is clear “assault weapons” are far from the threat to the American public they are being hyped up to be, and banning them would have no real effect. So why is the president so eager to ban our access to these “assault weapons”?

The term “assault weapon” is an invention of pro-gun control politicians that demonizes semi-automatic rifles with certain, purely cosmetic characteristics. These cosmetic characteristics do not cause the rifles to operate any differently or fire any faster than a typical semi-automatic hunting rifle.

The president has taken this scare tactic a step further, calling these semi-automatic rifles “military-style assault weapons” in his press conference last week. Of course, much of the mainstream media has followed suit. The truth is, no modern military in the world uses the civilian version of these weapons.

But these “assault weapons” are the closest the American public can get to legally owning a firearm our military does use. They would be the best option Americans have to defend themselves from organized threat, such as an invading army or a tyrannical government.

That being said, a government that would go to such lengths to irrationally manipulate fear in regard to such weapons is troubling, to say the least.

Sadly, this is not the first instance in which the government and the media have over-sensationalized the threats facing our nation. The result was the same: the willing surrender of our constitutional rights.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, terrorism – al Qaeda in particular – was characterized as an existential threat to the United States. The suggestion that attacks would continue to happen on even larger scales was enough to allow an end to our privacy with the Patriot Act, start a never-ending war in Afghanistan and establish the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

A behemoth of a bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has cost us nearly a trillion dollars a year on average, and essentially monitors the activities of the American people.

While terrorist attacks like those on Sept. 11 proved to be more of an isolated incident than a real threat, the government and media’s insistence on the contrary has been the justification of every unconstitutional act committed by our government since.

Today, Obama is riding the wave of “assault weapons” fear, much like George Bush did with terrorism after Sept. 11, despite its irrationality. The plea of “we must do something” is once again turning into “let me do anything.”

Nick Smith is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can been reached at nxsmith@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @Nick_X_Smith.

Published on January 23, 2013 at 2:02 am