After I finished playing with the FBI's data, I started to wonder if the ban was not to stop the kind of day-to-day gun crime, but to prevent the mass shooting, High profile, high fatality events like the recent school shooting, or the Aurora movie theater shooting, or any similar event.
So, I pulled the data from that collection, and could find absolutely no correlation between rifle involvement in a mass shooting and the number of fatalities. Our worst shooting, with (going from memory here) 33 fatalities was the Virginia tech masacre. It involved absolutely no rifles, or shotguns, just the lowly handgun. I'll have to double check all the numbers tomorrow, but if I believe that in the 10 most dealy mass shootings in our history, of the 22 or so weapons used, only 4 or 5 of the were rifles. To my number crunching, rifle usage was pretty inconsequential in the number of fatalities -- which I'll admit was pretty damn unintuitive. But that's what the data shows, so given all that information, it's tough for me to figure out a reason for the administration pushing for the ban.
I made a detailed visualization of it @ http://www.caerusgeo.com/surveys/299/public
Here's a fun statistic though, since you're in the process of number crunching -- every mass shooting in the US since 1950 (except for perhaps that Gabby Gifford shooting in Arizona) has occurred in a 'gun free zone', where the shooters had the highest probability of completing their shooting sprees with the least fear of being stopped.
Of those, most telling (to me at least) is the Aurora, CO shooting, because while Colorado is generally a fairly well armed state, the shooter bypassed six other theaters that were closer to his home, including the largest theater, where he could have done the most damage, in lieu of taking his gun into the one nearby theater that specifically disallowed guns from being carried inside.
From my understanding the mall in Clackamas is a posted "gun free zone," but the posted signs don't actually carry any legal weight.
But aren't we walking a fairly narrow line here? In order for this to be a meaningful distinction, we have to assume that mass shooters a) plan their attacks, b) are smart enough to choose gun free zones, and c) are dumb enough not to know that a gun free zone isn't necessarily free from guns?
Calling mass shooters stupid is, I think, a naive assertion. They're obviously flawed, but not necessarily in a way that makes them less effective at planning or committing violence.
And while 'c' is potentially valid, I think that what you'd find is that, as most citizens tend to fall into the 'law abiding' category, where there are signs posted disallowing guns, you'd find that most citizens won't carry them. So even if the 'gun free zone' is not found to be 100% devoid of guns, you are almost certain to find it less armed than if signs weren't posted.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?398679-62-Mass-S... is I think my final point here; it's a sympathetic gun rights advocate who went to the trouble of tracking and linking local ordinances where possible. He's only proven the case in about half the incidents. I know John Lott claims he researched all of them. If you happen to know where his supporting documentation is I'd be sincerely interested.
I might be looking at a full on amendment here, or there may have been more statistical jiggery pokery that somehow excludes findings incongruent with the expected results. Either way, I'll do more research and get back. Thanks for the correction -- while the link you posted isn't necessarily conclusive, it did spur me to freshen my data sets at the very least.
If we looked at drunk driving incidents, and from those, were somehow able to determine that the Honda Civic was used in a higher percentage of them than other cars, it would be a mistake to conclude that Honda Civics were in some way more appealing to drunk drivers, or that they more easily facilitated drunk driving, while excluding overall ownership on the whole.
Further, much of the legislation being considered (at least in Feinstein's bill) is akin to saying "Okay, the Honda Civic is used by drunk drivers. The Honda Civic has 17" tires and cup holders. Let's ban cup holders and 17" tires. No, let's ban all cars that have some combination of 17" tires and cup holders."
The other points I'd like to make that I feel are somewhat relevant is that you should very much read up on DC v Heller, which is the most recent Supreme Court decision on the matter (except for Heller II) that specifies weapons "in common use" as a protected class of weapon from government bans.
I would go further to suggest that I honestly believe (though I cannot substantiate) that the AR15 is able to be categorized as 'evil' because of its use in some of these high profile, but otherwise unlikely mass shootings, but what I really think is that they're most likely being used because they are just so popular. The AR15 is the most popular rifle being sold in the United States, and has been since 1994.