Oh, here we go with the AR-15 hot takes. It’s a scary gun for liberals, we know. It’s a killing machine. It’s responsible for killing scores of Americans. It should be banned. We all know the talking points and yet, the data doesn’t support the liberal narrative. I know you’re not shocked by this, but let’s rehash this once again. Mass shootings are rare. School shootings are rare. Gun violence has gone down. And there’s one other weapon that kills more people than rifles every year.
Before we dive into the FBI’s numbers, don’t forget that the liberal media’s own narrative on mass shootings got shredded with this latest Boulder, Colorado mass shooting. Ten people were killed, including a police officer. NBC News said that there have been over 100 such incidents in the past 20 years in their report trying to overexaggerate the frequency of mass shootings but said there were over 300 in 2018 alone. Which is it? Someone’s lying—no shock. Liberals also ate pavement when they thought the shooter was a white guy. Wrong. It was a Syrian refugee named Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa. And now, another narrative is about to be set aflame—again—centers of rifle deaths in America. Knives kill more Americans than rifles. Rifles have never been the main firearm used to commit gun violence here. period. That’s been constant for years based on FBI crime statistics (via Daily Caller):
The FBI’s most recent data from 2019 shows that while firearms account for the vast majority of homicides overall — 10,258 — the number of homicides committed using a rifle (364) is much smaller.
Handguns were listed as the primary weapon in 6,368 cases, and shotguns accounted for another 200. There were 45 cases that named “other gun” as the weapon, and 3,281 cases in which the type of firearm was not specified. Assuming the unspecified cases follow the same ratio as the reported firearm types, the number of cases in which a rifle was used would increase by approximately 120 — bringing that total number to 484.
In addition, 600 people were killed in 2019 with what the FBI refers to as “personal weapons,” meaning hands, fists or feet. Knives or other “cutting tools” accounted for another 1,476 homicides — about three times the number killed by rifles.
So, should we ban knives? No. that’s stupid. The same logic applies to gun bans, which is also unconstitutional. We have a right to own firearms. Period. That’s the end of the debate here. And the fact that knives kill three times as many more Americans than rifles end this debate about the so-called carnage that’s doled out by the AR-15. Bodies are not being stacked like sandbags because of them. This isn’t the streets of Stalingrad, though liberals try so hard to make that so.