May 19, 1994
MEMORANDUM
FROM:  PHB
SUBJECT:  FEINSTEIN'S RESEARCH ON "ASSAULT WEAPONS"

"Our purpose is to show how widespread, how serious this is."   
"This" is the criminal misuse of so-called "assault weapons."  
And the way Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) chose to demonstrate 
it was to use a computer to search newspaper files in cities over 
a six month period.  She used the information to persuade a 
plurality of her colleagues that there was such widespread misuse 
of the guns that they should be banned.  

What were those persuasive findings?  She found that ten cities 
had two or more incidents (robberies, homicides, etc.) reported 
in the newspapers.  (There may, of course, have been a few which 
the anti-gun news media chose not to report.  It was not reported 
how many city newspapers were surveyed; presumably the rest 
recorded one or no incidents involving so-called "assault 
weapons.")  Five of the ten cities already had "assault weapons" 
bans in place (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, 
D.C., and Paterson, N.J.). 

Those ten cities had a total population of 17.8 million.  
Projecting the six-month findings to an annual rate per 100,000 -
- the standard way the FBI reports crime -- yields an "assault 
weapon" misuse rate of 0.3 per 100,000 in the cities with the 
most misuse, when the most recent crime data show the gun-related 
violent crime rate in big cities overall to be about 645.

Projecting the data from the cities with the most misuse would 
suggest well under 1,000 "assault weapons" crimes at a time when 
the number of violent crimes reported to police was approaching 
the two million mark, and a preliminary report from the National 
Crime Victimization Survey would put the number of violent 
crimes, including those not reported to police, at close to seven 
million.





     Bill Chandler, Sen. Feinstein's press secretary, quoted in 
Buffalo News, May 4, 1994.  Other crime data are from the FBI 
Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, 1992, and 
Michael Rand, "Guns and Crime," Bureau of Justice Statistics, 
1994.