What We Can Learn From the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban

Coming up on today’s show:

• The last time Congress passed significant gun control legislation was in 1994, when President Clinton signed into law the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act.” The Takeaway looks back at the tenuous legislative process that ultimately lead to the bill’s passage with Dr. Patrick Griffin, then legislative affairs director for President Clinton and Dennis DeConcini, a retired U.S. Senator from Arizona.

• How effective would an assault weapons ban be in 2018?  And what can we learn from the assault weapons ban of 1994? Professor Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, weighs in. 

• At least 110 girls are believed to have been abducted by the terror group Boko Haram in the town of Dapchi in Northern Nigeria, late last week. This comes nearly four years after the kidnapping of 276 girls from a school in Chibok. We get analysis and the latest on the situation from Dionne Searcey, West Africa bureau chief for the New York Times.

• The ongoing war in Syria has hit the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, where more than 390,000 civilians have been trapped after intense bombing strikes by Russia-backed government troops. Today, a ceasefire imposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin went into effect, for a period of five hours a day. Raf Sanchez, Middle East reporter for The Daily Telegraph, discusses the ceasefire and the crisis in Syria. 

• David Ganek says he lost his company after a raid by federal prosecutors was based on a flawed search warrant affidavit. Last fall he lost a lawsuit, too, intended to hold federal officials accountable. Andrew Cohen, senior editor at The Marshall Project, argues that Ganek’s ordeal “is an invitation to cops and prosecutors: You can omit important information from warrants without fear of jeopardizing your cases.”

• What happens when a very white city, in the whitest state in the country, gets an influx of thousands of refugees from Somalia? The city of Lewiston, Maine had one thing that could bring people together: Soccer. Amy Bass chronicles the story of the Lewiston High School boys soccer team in the new book, “One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game That Brought Together a Divided Town.”

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich