It is often said that guns, particularly assault rifles, are designed for one thing, and one thing only: to kill lots of people.
Assault rifles in the United States are failing miserably in this purpose. There are tens of millions of assault rifles in America. Because the definition of an assault rifle has been rather fuzzy, the number can be said to be anywhere from 10 million to 30 million. Of those, the AR-15 type is fairly common with numbers between 5 and 10 million.
The FBI murder statistics do not differentiate between types of rifles. There are about 100 million rifles in the United States. In 2009, the last year in which numbers have been reported, there were 13,636 murders. Guns were used to murder 9,146 people. Hands and feet were used to murder 801 people. Blunt objects were used to murder 611 people. Rifles were used to murder 348 people, and that is all rifles, of which assault rifles are only a small fraction. Assault rifles are used so infrequently in homicides that many police departments almost never see them; in 2009, there were nine states that did not have a single murder committed with any rifle.
So why is the left so intent on banning rifles that are the most suitable for militia use (clearly protected by the U.S. Constitution), when they are used so rarely in murder? Banning baseball bats would make more sense, yet would be nearly as senseless.
It is this disassociation from facts and reality that lead many ordinary people to believe that when their government works to disarm them, it is up to no good.
Dean Weingarten
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