FBI's Latest Report Reveals Dem-Hated AR-15s Used in Less Than 3% of All Gun Homicides
Well, it’s that time of year again. No, not just autumn — or, as it’s better known, pumpkin spice latte season. It’s that time of year when the FBI releases its yearly crime statistics and we can laugh about how uproariously wrong liberals are about gun crime.
The big issue in 2019, of course, is the AR-15 and related rifles.
As we know, if former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke gets near the presidency, hell, yes he’s going to take your AR-15. Hell no, he’s not going to get near the presidency, but you get the feeling he’s not alone in wanting to seize your guns among the Democrat contenders.
This is rather funny, because in 2018, AR-15s — the most popular sporting rifles in the country — were responsible for well less than 3 percent of all homicides.
And even with the Second Amendment still going strong, the number of people killed with guns dropped, as did the total number of murders.
The FBI figures for 2018 are a “statistical compilation of offense, arrest, and police employee data reported by law enforcement agencies voluntarily participating in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program,” according to a Monday news release.
Conservative Review noted that rifles accounted for 2.1 percent of homicides and 2.9 percent of gun homicides. That’s a fairly minuscule amount when you consider what killed more people than rifles.
Rifles were definitively implicated in the murders of 297 people, although “Firearms, type not stated” accounted for 2,963 homicides.
But let’s stick to the murders we know were committed by rifles in 2018. What are some things that we know were responsible for more murders than this class of guns?
“Knives or cutting instruments,” for starters. They were responsible for 1,515 deaths — over five times more than were killed by rifles.
“Blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.)” also managed to clock in above rifles with 443 deaths.
All right, sure. But certainly your own hands couldn’t be more deadly than rifles, right?
Well, no. They were actually more deadly than both rifles and blunt objects: “Personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.)” clocked in with 672 deaths.
And keep in mind, we’re talking about all rifles here — not just the “assault rifles” that look really scary.
By the way, this isn’t a new trend. What I’ve described to you, more or less, is how these things have broken down over the past few years. Yes, fists have always been more deadly than rifles of any stripe. Same thing with hammers and other blunt objects — or, should we say, “assault hardware”?
Even among guns, rifles are far behind handguns in terms of their use in murder. Handguns, which no candidate is talking about banning or seizing, were responsible for 6,603 killings.
That’s over 22 times more than rifles — and this isn’t even to mention AR-15-style weapons.
But isn’t the AR-15 “a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield?” That’s what Beto — earnest, honest Beto, a man clearly above using mass shootings to reboot his flailing campaign — told us.
He said that when you were shot with an AR-15, “the high-impact, high-velocity round when it hits your body shreds everything inside of your body because it was designed to do that.” Surely that makes it extra-deadly, correct? Not if these statistics are to be believed.
Ah, but the AR-15 and its derivatives are using in mass shootings, so they clearly must confer some advantage there, right? Not really. Especially in close quarters, there’s no necessary advantage that such a rifle would give a shooter. So why pick it?
Simple: For psychopaths, the AR-15 has become part of the outfit, if just because it gets far more media attention. It’s the 21-karat headline, the guarantee that every chyron on every cable news station will announce that you used it.
For liberals, these rifles look scary. Never mind that similar rifles with different exterior aesthetics aren’t usually classed as “assault weapons” simply because one looks more minatory than the other.
And then there’s the one thing the government doesn’t like to talk about: The fact that the AR-15 puts citizens on more equal footing with their government.
So, for yet another year, the AR-15 is less deadly than our hands — and a lot less deadly than handguns.
Fortunately, leftists can’t ban and seize your hands. They could do that to your handguns, though, and you can wager that’s where this is going.
When gun-grabbers realize that an AR-15 “buyback” would prevent fewer than 300 murders and that mass shooters would surely move on to handguns, what would happen next? They would ban and seize handguns — perhaps slowly at first, but that’s where this is eventually going, whether those on the left realize this or not.
I would assume they do. After all, they’ve seen the statistics.
They also know that if you countenance an AR-15 “buyback” for safety’s sake, you’ll certainly countenance the next one and the one after that.
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