Where to find stats on assault rifle related deaths in the US...?

Status
Not open for further replies.
looking for stats related to assault weapon related deaths? I know the CDC and FBI had some at one time but all I’m finding is very dated materials. Anyone know where to find some up to date stuff?
For 2017, looks like less than 4% of 10,982 deaths.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

"In 2017, handguns were involved in the majority (64%) of the 10,982 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available, according to the FBI.

Rifles – the category that includes many guns that are sometimes referred to as “assault weapons”– were involved in 4%.

Shotguns were involved in 2%.

The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (30%) involved firearms that were classified as 'other guns or type not stated.'"

And FYI,

"FBI collects data on 'active shooter incidents,' which it defines as 'one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.' Using the FBI’s definition, 85 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2018.

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people – excluding the shooter – are shot or killed. Using this definition, 373 people died in these incidents in 2018."

And BTW,

"The gun murder and gun suicide rates in the U.S. are both lower today than in the mid-1970s.

There were 4.6 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2017, far below the 7.2 per 100,000 people recorded in 1974. And the rate of gun suicides – 6.9 per 100,000 people in 2017 – remained below the 7.7 per 100,000 measured in 1977."
 
Last edited:
Some of my relatives are fond of saying the NRA has suppressed any and all research on assault weapon deaths and mass shootings in general.....:confused:

Don’t know what to think of that.
 
You can also see rifles' (and other weapon types') use in justifiable homicide.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u....17/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-15.xls

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u....17/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-14.xls

What's interesting about these is that shotguns and rifles are used in about equal measure (pretty rarely) in justifiable civilian homicides, but rifles have now far, far surpassed shotguns for law enforcement justifiable homicide. The cruiser shotgun is just about a thing of the past... it's almost all patrol rifles now.
 
Ok, found some by Pew. According to them there were 440 deaths associated with so called rifles last year. Not sure how many of those rifles were so called assault rifles but let’s just say that they were all assault rifles. It seems pretty crazy to me that we are trying to turn a country upside down over .000000126% if deaths related to these things. That’s not even a fraction of a fraction of 1% in a country of 350 million people!!!!!! Write your reps, point this out.
 
Some of my relatives are fond of saying the NRA has suppressed any and all research on assault weapon deaths and mass shootings in general.....:confused:

Yes, it's an absurd claim with one tiny kernel of truth.

The NRA and other people concerned about gun rights did get language passed to prevent the CDC from doing advocacy in favor of gun control. The CDC then backed off of most "guns as public health problem" or "guns as disease vector" approaches. The CDC continues to collect and publish data on gun injuries. The FBI continues to collect and publish data on gun-involved crime. The National Institute of Justice continues to publish research about gun crime, and even sometimes does things on the efficacy of gun control (they usually don't find that it has very much... shocking, I know). Private and semi-private organizations do a ton of research and publication.

The notion that we have no gun control research is just a farce. What we don't have (much of) is people with public health training attempting to use public health methodologies to study guns-as-pathogens and then use the baked-in assumptions to argue for gun control... on the federal government's dime. You can still get all of the guns-as-pathogens analysis you want from Johns Hopkins University or Harvard's health school.
 
Last edited:
Well, you'll need to start with a better definition. FBI keeps pretty good statistics, but there won't be any data for actually honest-to-goodness assault weapons.

Far too few people own select-fire intermediate caliber shoulder-fired rifles (that's DoD's definition, and they invented the term), and those who do aren't murdering anyone with their very expensive NFA assault weapons.

In short, stop using the Totalitarian's deceptive language.
 
Ok, found some by Pew. According to them there were 440 deaths associated with so called rifles last year. Not sure how many of those rifles were so called assault rifles but let’s just say that they were all assault rifles. It seems pretty crazy to me that we are trying to turn a country upside down over .000000126% if deaths related to these things. That’s not even a fraction of a fraction of 1% in a country of 350 million people!!!!!! Write your reps, point this out.

This whole panic is revealing of how bad people are at dealing with large numbers (or very small numbers). Consider that we have, what, 40 million or so AR's, and, at most 400 homicides inflicted with them. Divide 400 by 40 million. You get .00001. In other words, without even accounting for the fact that there are fewer AR's involved in homicides than the number of AR-involved homicides, you see that at most .001% of AR's are used to kill someone each year.

That means people are claiming a device is "only designed to kill people" or is "only good for murder" when, quite literally, 99.99% of them are NOT used for this purpose.
 
Well all rifles are combined in the statistics that are kept and are always single digit percentages as far back as you can go.

The gun people have on them and can conceal is the one available when something happens either criminally or legally. So the bulk of all shootings of other human beings are handguns.
For this same reason handguns were the primary and original target of anti-gun groups, were included in the NFA originally and why there is restrictions on making long guns small enough to fill the void, and if antis were not preoccupied and focused on the subset of firearms they are now likely to return as the thing they wish to ban.
Those that really believe in gun control and reducing the harm posed by firearms through reducing or eliminating their numbers would logicly concentrate on hand guns then.
Before the current focus on assault rifles (and assault weapon is a growing amorphous term that expands and begins to include many firearms that the average person never associated with the term) handguns were the focus going back decades. With Saturday Night Special laws, and other laws intending to greatly restrict them, require extra permits or methods of compliance, or creating requirements intended to increase the minimum cost to something that put them out of the hands of poorer citizens.

The reason for the focus on rifles is they still represent power and pose a larger danger to authorities in body armor during direct confrontation and have some relevance on the modern battlefield. The intent of the 2nd.
Handguns rely on being unseen and used suddenly and unexpectedly to present much danger, which still means they get the ban later.

Handguns and shotguns can be involved in just as deadly of incidents against the average unarmored civilian. Several of our mass shootings involved handguns or shotguns, Virginia tech was a 9mm handgun for example.
But you have to ban what poses a danger to those that would be tasked with disarmament before forced disarmament of other things on a widescale becomes practical. If even a single digit percent of US citizens killed just one person tasked with disarmament you would run out of people willing to be law enforcement.

For an example though I am in no way endorsing or supporting them:
The Taliban have essentially won our longest war in history by constantly killing the law enforcement they view as puppets of a foreign power, though they use truck bombs or offensively going after them at home or their family as much or more than guns in direct conflict to do it. Without the support of the population they do not accomplish a lot even backed by the most powerful nation in the world, and backed by more foreign money than their entire GDP (and quite a bit of their GDP is based on that funding too.) Costing the US over 45 billion a year https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...on-afghan-war-costing-us-45-billion-per-year/
Trump said they would have to kill 10 million people to win, which is probably a lot of the males of fighting age in the nation, showing just how little of the population supports the US backed security forces.
Restrictions on rifles has nothing to do with statistics, but with power. Civilians having firearms on par with security forces makes them dangerous to security forces. This means the security forces must gain the support of the population to operate effectively.
Civilians having firearms easily defeated makes them primarily only a threat to other civilians which still easily kill eachother with what is legal but allows them to be readily crushed when confronted by authorities, even when the authorities are greatly outnumbered. That allows the authorities to prevail whether they have the support of the civilian population or not. So it does not protect the civilian population from most harm to restrict them, but empowers security forces to do what they want irregardless of what the civilian population wishes.
If you can get people to comply with giving up that which gives them the most power with high compliance and requiring few resources and limited danger then the more challenging task of taking what they are more reluctant to give up later becomes easier because only one side has effective firepower at that point.
 
Last edited:
This whole panic is revealing of how bad people are at dealing with large numbers (or very small numbers). Consider that we have, what, 40 million or so AR's, and, at most 400 homicides inflicted with them. Divide 400 by 40 million. You get .00001. In other words, without even accounting for the fact that there are fewer AR's involved in homicides than the number of AR-involved homicides, you see that at most .001% of AR's are used to kill someone each year.

That means people are claiming a device is "only designed to kill people" or is "only good for murder" when, quite literally, 99.99% of them are NOT used for this purpose.
That's due to what the antis and media want the public to focus on.

We haven't heard much of MS-13. Why? Did they stop committing crime? ;):D Hardly. With 10,000 members in 40 states, MS-13 hasn't stopped committing crime but that's not the focus of the antis and the media - https://www.foxnews.com/us/ms13-gang-members-illegal-immigrants-maryland-stabbing-deadly-ice

And how about all the murders, rapes and robberies that were prevented by law abiding gun owners? I mean, there are hundreds of millions of guns in the country and we don't hear about their defensive use? Strange. Or is it the case of antis/media not choosing to focus on that fact? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use
 
This whole panic is revealing of how bad people are at dealing with large numbers (or very small numbers). Consider that we have, what, 40 million or so AR's, and, at most 400 homicides inflicted with them. Divide 400 by 40 million. You get .00001. In other words, without even accounting for the fact that there are fewer AR's involved in homicides than the number of AR-involved homicides, you see that at most .001% of AR's are used to kill someone each year.

That means people are claiming a device is "only designed to kill people" or is "only good for murder" when, quite literally, 99.99% of them are NOT used for this purpose.

"Assault Rifles" are involved in the shootings that rack up the body count, make the national news and thus become low-hanging fruit for gun bans. The fact that banning the guns will have no noticeable effect on violence / gun violence / murder rate doesn't really matter to gun-grabbers. They think we need to do something and banning "assault weapons" is the easy target and will make them feel good for a couple minutes. The fact that it'll enrage gun owners is a side benefit in their mind. Once it's determined the assault rifle ban has no effect on crime they can move onto banning other semi-auto guns and so forth.
 
That's due to what the antis and media want the public to focus on.

No doubt, but the media's obsession is both taking advantage of and being driven by a particular "fault" in human intuition - we tend to characterize risk in low-resolution terms. Something is either "safe" or "not safe." Or maybe, for those with an especially high level of sophistication, "perfectly safe," "pretty safe," "kinda risky," and "not safe." We don't really have a good way, without doing the math, of differentiating between a 1% risk and a .001% risk. Much less a .001% risk and a .01% or .0001% risk.... even though those are things that are ten times riskier or safer than the comparison.

There's a ton of research on this in the cognitive psych/behavioral econ areas. It's very well established... and yet most people don't know it, much less consider how it might be influencing their own decision making and fears.
 
"Assault Rifles" are involved in the shootings that rack up the body count, make the national news and thus become low-hanging fruit for gun bans. The fact that banning the guns will have no noticeable effect on violence / gun violence / murder rate doesn't really matter to gun-grabbers. They think we need to do something and banning "assault weapons" is the easy target and will make them feel good for a couple minutes. The fact that it'll enrage gun owners is a side benefit in their mind. Once it's determined the assault rifle ban has no effect on crime they can move onto banning other semi-auto guns and so forth.

Well of course we know that's the case for the motivated anti-gun advocates.

I'm talking about the vast majority of the country with no strong predisposition who are now being whipped into an anti-gun furor. I have many friends and relations who are good people and generally smart... but who, based on limited information and high levels of fear and low levels of data, are currently inclined to accept this as a "something" to be done.

Neither the once-purportedly-objective journalists nor even the gun rights advocates do a good job - or really any job at all - of presenting the kind of "scale" data we're talking about here. Instead, the former pump sensationalism and the latter respond with bumper sticker platitudes.
 
I'm talking about the vast majority of the country with no strong predisposition who are now being whipped into an anti-gun furor. I have many friends and relations who are good people and generally smart... but who, based on limited information and high levels of fear and low levels of data, are currently inclined to accept this as a "something" to be done.
So tell them this to make things clear.

Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke said, "Hell Yes, We're Going to Take Your AR-15s"

Substitute AR-15s with "Bill of Rights" (as attack on any amendment is attack on the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution) and we have,

"Hell Yes, We're Going to Take Your [Bill of Rights]"

When I explain this to people that if antis are successful with taking away one amendment, they could take other amendments away, their face turns white and they go ... Oh no ... Hell no!

Of course, justice Gorsuch had this to say about taking things away from the Constitution/Bill of Rights and I have a feeling the Supreme Court will vehemently "enforce" any attempt to take away from the Bill of Rights - https://www.thehighroad.org/index.p...on-the-second-amendment.856201/#post-11231970

""I am an originalist ... We have a written constitution that our founder wrote down ... They made a charter among 'We the people' ... This is what we agreed to as to what the government's powers are and what they are not ... What our rights are. Originalists ... honor what's written there. Honor those words ... Don't make stuff up and don't take things away. That's the idea"

"Bill of Rights and liberty ... Bill of Right is a set of promises on paper ... What makes a promise worth the words on paper is the enforcement mechanisms behind it ... Our Bill of Rights is excellent.

... Judges are the backstop to ensure rights and liberties, that is our job"

Spread the word and thank you Mr. O'Rourke for your honest words. :thumbup:
 
Last edited:
If that's as far as your conversations go, you have far more compliant listeners than me. That conversation goes down a long and twisting path that invariably cover the "militia" clause and what "reasonable restrictions" means, and whether "fire in a crowded theater" is equivalent to various proposed gun control laws.

Which is great, those are important conversations. But if you're winning converts with a pithy one-liner, then you're either more charming than me or have more malleable friends. Or it could be both!

Of course, being a bit of a contrarian, it's possible that my friends are disproportionately contrarian themselves.
 
Believe me, I have been working and talking to liberals/progressives/feminists/LGBTQ for 24 years of state government service and most of my growing years living/working in Los Angeles.

I essentially focus on things we all agree on and go from there:
  • Crime exists in every city/town all across the country - Fact
  • Police response is not immediate to help homeowners when the door is being kicked in - Fact
  • Homeowners have right to self defense and to protect the lives of their families/significant other - Fact
  • Most efficient tool for self defense against violent attack is firearms - My opinion which most people agree with
  • Gun ownership for self defense is a "rights issue" - Fact
  • We fight like we train - My opinion which most people agree with
And we talk about defense shooting techniques to include point shooting with demonstration using their index fingers and a laser pointer demo (They are impressed that the laser held along the index finger can accurately and consistently point within an inch of objects anywhere in the office) and I invite them to go shooting - https://www.thehighroad.org/index.p...-help-me-speed-up.824618/page-4#post-10902245

When they start talking about other aspects of the Second Amendment, I ask them what they are going to do if someone is kicking their door down because a gang member got the wrong house and they want their drug money, NOW! And we go back to discussing defensive shooting techniques and they ask if they could join me on our next range trip.
 
Last edited:
Another issue is just about anyone can offensively walk up to a law enforcement officer and kill them with a handgun, or even run them over, before they even know to defend themselves, and could then take their serivce rifle and be armed with that. Fortunately most law enforcement don't face lethal threats until they confront them or pursue them, giving them an advantage.
But anything you leave in the hands of the normal law enforcement in the civilian community become available to anyone willing to commit murder. You don't really remove them from society unless you also remove them from law enforcement. A lone cop with a rifle is just a sitting duck for anyone that wants it.

The UK tried to eliminate armed cops called firearms officers mixed with the population, only sending out firearms officers with backup that could cover eachother.
Yet seems to have given up on that. They are an island where controlling things is far easier and it still didn't work.
So anything you keep in the hands of law enforcement is only a step from being in the hands of predatory civilians. Bonnie and Clyde and most of the big criminals of their day stole their primary arms from law enforcement and the national guard. No civilian arm restrictions would have even kept them disarmed.

A final thing is by having arms and even mass shootings a focus of the simple minded that decide to harm the population you cause them to focus on methods of attack that can be stopped. A guy with a gun can be stopped from the moment they mark themselves as a hostile threat. It is a lot harder to stop the bomb you didn't know was there until it exploded. Or the mass poisoning (Jim Jones followers for example were not all committing voluntary suicide https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide.) I would prefer if loons pursued being mass shooters. The guy that shot up the Las Vegas event would have killed more people if he had crashed the airplane he owned into the crowded standing room only event instead of opening fire on it with over a dozen rifles. He was going to die either way. I would venture the people primarily stopped by making guns harder to acquire are merely the simple minded, the very impulsive, or the teens and young adults. The dedicated plotters that plan ways to harm are actually less dangerous if they focus on using a gun to do harm.
 
Last edited:
Less than 4% of gun deaths are committed with a semi-auto rifle (probably closer to 1%).

100% of mass shootings are committed by someone with obsessive ideation about committing a mass shooting. And a host of other well-known mass shooter profile indicators. It’s the ideation that is the prevalent common factor.
 
There aren't any national statistic. Look at the FBI Uniform Crime report for Rifles. You'll see that rifles are less lethal than hands and feet, clubs, or blades. Handguns are involved in more deaths than any category. Considering that "assault weapons" are a subset of rifles then they're even less involved with homicided. That's the best available.
State statistics may parse finer.
 
we are trying to turn a country upside down over .000000126% if deaths related to these things. That’s not even a fraction of a fraction of 1% in a country of 350 million people!!!!!! Write your reps, point this out.
Well at least don't forget on that same write/call, that others have called that same Reps number about their dead loved ones. No Thanksgiving this year. Even the graves will not be covered with grass yet. I go ahead & bring it up...an advocate for anti-2A, however, will NOT bring up my rights. I sympathize, but not with the solution they present; which will NOT solve anything.

And how about all the murders, rapes and robberies that were prevented by law abiding gun owners? I mean, there are...
I bring this up also, good job!

Yes yes, Ok I'll mention the addition of a SUNSET CLAUSE for all new laws again:cool:
 
-Last that I had heard, there has only been one murder committed with a select-fire assault weapon, and possibly a second that was not confirmed.

On September 15th, 1988, Patrolman Roger Waller of the Dayton, OH police department, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 caliber submachine gun to kill a police informant. Waller plead guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. (Yes, actually it's an SMG and not really an assault rifle, Still... .)

There is a second incident (also in Ohio) in 1992 where a lawfully-owned automatic weapon may or may not have been used in a homicide.

A third death by assault weapon is confirmed, but it was apparently a suicide.

Other assault weapon killings are possible but unconfirmed, as no weapon (automatic or otherwise) was found.

All other assault weapon killings were performed by agents of the United States Government.
 
Last edited:
Less than 4% of gun deaths are committed with a semi-auto rifle (probably closer to 1%).

100% of mass shootings are committed by someone with obsessive ideation about committing a mass shooting. And a host of other well-known mass shooter profile indicators. It’s the ideation that is the prevalent common factor.

Its not even 1%! Did you read the post? It’s .000000126%!!!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top