Political Crossfire Forums

First off, please note the title of this thread, it is about civilian variant assault rifles
This is much closer to an actual firearms classification that the super loose assault "weapon"

Assault rifle: a selective fire (read, full auto) fires a medium power round (read, less powerful than a full rifle, more powerful than a pistol) and falls within a certain length and weight requirement (which is needlessly technical for this discussion)

Civilian variant assault rifle: a firearm which uses the same action as the above, is visually similar, uses similar or the same ammunition and accessories, but fires semi-auto and CANNOT be easily converted back to full auto.

Why should civilians be able to own these, knowing some will slip into the hands of criminals?
Because criminals rarely use them.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cr ... rtbl08.xls
Note here that homicides are actually dropping, 15k in 2006 to 13k in 2010

Back to guns.
Using 2010 numbers, which are the most recent. Firearms accounted for 8,775 out of 12,996 homicides
Of these firearm homicides:
6009 were committed with pistols (68.5%)
358 were committed with rifles (4.1%)
373 were committed with shotguns (4.25%)
96 were committed with other firearms (1.1%)
1,939 were committed with an unstated firearm. (22.1%)

It would be easy for me to declare victory, but for abundance of caution I will move the "unstated firearms" category into the others, assuming their ratios were the same as the known firearms were (feel free to check my math)
I hate making adjustments like this to data,

Adjusted numbers, still of 8,775 firearm homicides
7713 Handguns (87.89%)
460 Rifles (5.24%)
479 Shotguns (5.46%)
123 Other (1.4%)

So rifles, which all assault rifles are a part of but which are not the entirety of rifles, account for 460 deaths, while blunt weapons like clubs account for 540, and knives or cutting objects account for 1700 homicides.
Even if we assume that half of the unstated firearms were rifles they still account for less than cutting objects.


So why ban assault rifles when they are rarely used in crime?

Shit man, 460, that's still a lot of deaths. The only thing on the list that shouldn't be banned is explosives. Only 4 people died of explosives.

Sure, if you want to go that far, let's say human beings are the cause. Now we'll just need to figure out what is the goal. My is to preserve the lives of existing human beings so banning human beings don't make much sense. It makes much more sense to ban the things that human beings use to cause the most homocides.

If we want to focus specifically on assault weapons, let's hear your reason to why criminals don't use assault weapons as much.

Criminals choose handguns for concealment, rifles are too long to carry in your waistband.

For criminal purposes handgun lethality is enough, within a city its reduced range is rarely a factor, the "arms race" is a fiction fed by GCA's and cops as a way to ban guns or get more funding/gear.
When handguns are heavily controlled criminals switch to knives or smuggle guns.



Handguns are currently protected by the 2nd amendment under the right to self defense.