Once again, our country has been rocked by mass shootings. Two men armed with assault rifles killed 18 people in two separate incidents.   This is nothing short of an ongoing tragedy that unfortunately has no solution in sight.

And once again, a great hue and cry has gone up demanding a ban on assault rifles and large capacity magazines.   The advocates for gun control argue that if more laws are passed, more lives will be saved.   The gun rights advocates counter that to do so would take away American’s freedom and Constitutional rights., and that any ban would only remove guns from law abiding citizens.

I’ve heard this argument so many times that I wanted to find out just how many people are actually killed by lunatics with assault rifles each year. 

According to the FBI and the CDC, from 2007 to 2017, 340 homicides per year were committed by people with rifles of all types; there appears to be no data which tracks assault rifle deaths specifically, but the number would be smaller than total rifle related deaths.   

In any given year in the U.S., for every person killed with a rifle, there are 15 killed with handguns, 4 killed with knives or sharp objects, 1.7 with hands or fists and 1.2 with blunt instruments.  And according to the New York Times, from 2007 to 2018, some “173 people per year have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s.”

Why is it that the Politicians are targeting assault rifles instead of handguns? Or knives and sharp objects? Or hands and fists? Or blunt objects?

A study by the Rockefeller Institute of Government found that mass shootings by killers armed with assault rifles resulted in an average of 5.2 deaths and 7.6 injuries per incident.  Granted, mass shootings involving rifles like the AR-15 can produce many victims at one time, but the distorted and graphic media coverage of these events has tricked the public into believing that assault rifles kill more people than any other type of weapon. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Again, every death is tragic, but assault rifles are NOT the national epidemic we have been led to believe.  If all assault rifles were to disappear overnight, the difference in the annual U.S. murder rate would be statistically insignificant, as reprehensible as it is to intimate or suggest that even one single murder is insignificant.

18 people died in back-to-back shootings in the last week, but 13 people were killed inside one SUV in a single traffic accident in Imperial County at the beginning of this month..   To put the numbers in perspective, in the United States about 37,000 people die every year in automobile accidents.  You are 100+ times more likely to die riding in your car then being shot by a lunatic with rifle.   Nobody is advocating to ban automobiles.

You are more likely to be killed as a pedestrian, riding a motorcycle, building a house, driving a truck, flying in an airplane, or working on a farm. It’s almost as dangerous just to take a bath.

 In the last several years, each of the following resulted in the approximate annual death toll listed:

 37,000+ car accidents;

6,000+ Pedestrians;

5,000+ Motorcyclists;

1,000+ Construction workers;

850+ Trucks drivers;

500+ Airplane deaths;

400+ Farmers;

340+ Rifle deaths;

300+ Bathers;

In an exhaustive treatise authored by William J. Krause, he states that mass shootings have a greater influence on lawmakers than other homicides even though they account for less than 1% of gun deaths in the United States. stating DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated that . . . from 1980 to 2011 . . . four or more victim homicide incidents accounted for 0.19% of all murders and nonnegligent manslaughter incidents and 0.87% of all victims who perished in those incidents, . . . found that there were at least 649 mass murders, resulting in the deaths of four or more victims, from 1976 to 1999, or an average of 27 per year, and 5.22 murder victims per incident.

The upshot of all of this is that, while reprehensible, mass murder by all types of guns is an anomaly. It is simply not the problem that the media and some politicians have made it out to be.