Reply #174: Sorry, you've been spun. All rifles COMBINED account for <3% of homicides.

[benEzra]

You seem to be so deep into meaningless technicalities That you're completely out of touch with reality on the streets.

Spend some time in a city like LA and you'll see for yourself the mayhem that's being caused by automatic and semi-automatic assault weapons.

Sorry, you've been spun. According to the FBI, all rifles COMBINED account for less than 3% of homicides. That's less than half as many as are carried out using fists and feet, and a small fraction of the number committed with knives. In California, the figure is 3.3% of homicides involving ANY type of rifle.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_20.html">Murder, by State and Type of Weapon (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 2005, Table 20)

Some groups have tried to play up rifle crime as if it were common, but the fact is, it's not. Rifles are simply not concealable enough to routinely carry on the person, and as a result are rarely involved in crimes.

BTW, automatic assault weapons have been very tightly controlled for 73 years (possession without Federal authorization is a 10-year felony), and all semiautomatic with a trace of modern styling have been banned in California for a decade. You've been spun quite a bit, I think.

We're not talking hunting or sporting rifles here.

Yes, you are. The rifles Sarah Brady calls "assault weapons" are some of the most popular civilian sporting rifles in America. To take two examples, the AR-15 DOMINATES a lot of target competition in this country, and the SKS is the most popular centerfire rifle in America, with IIRC at least seven million in civilian hands.

You know that only 1 in 5 gun owners hunts, right? 80% of us are NOT hunters, which means that any bans on small-caliber nonhunting-style rifles are a non-starter in most of the country. That was the miscalculation the DLC made in 1994.