Minnesota’s so-called assault-weapons ban was sold as a public-safety silver bullet, yet new data show the law has done little to dent violent crime while it has stripped law-abiding citizens of common defensive firearms. The study’s authors rightly note that criminals simply ignore the statute, but they stop short of naming the deeper flaw: the ban was never designed to disarm predators; it was engineered to disarm the very people who might otherwise stop them. By focusing on cosmetic features rather than on violent actors, Minnesota joined a growing list of states whose gun-control experiments trade measurable deterrence for political theater.

For the 2A community the lesson is straightforward—shall-issue carry, constitutional-carry expansions, and aggressive prosecution of prohibited persons remain the only policies with a track record of driving down violent crime. Minnesota’s experience also underscores why magazine-capacity limits and feature bans are constitutionally suspect: they place the heaviest compliance burden on the law-abiding while leaving black-market channels untouched. As more states weigh similar restrictions ahead of the 2024 cycle, the Minnesota numbers serve as a real-time warning that incremental infringements rarely produce incremental safety; they simply normalize the idea that rights can be rationed by legislative whim.