Real Gun Facts: The Truth About Assault Rifles and High Cap Mags

By Sean Sheridan – RealGunFacts

As time goes by, I’m often amazed at how much things tend to stay the same. It may seem like a new subject but the debate over restricting semi-automatic rifles and magazines of certain capacities has actually been going on for quite a while. In fact, the term “assault weapon” has been in use as far back as the 1980s, and perhaps even earlier. Yet, chances are the first you’ve heard of this was likely in news reports immediately following a recent mass shooting.

The arguments for restricting such weapons are numerous and a lot of people have an opinion on the subject. The problem is, a lot of these opinions are formed based on what people hear in news commentary or TV shows whose writers are trying to make a statement. We’re going to take a look at some of these points and hopefully allow you to come to a more educated conclusion on your own. As always, I have my opinion and it certainly shows through in my writing, but I encourage you to take what you read here, follow the sources provided at the end of the article, and do your own research rather than taking my word for it.

Getting right into it, much of the attention toward “assault weapons”, like the AR-15, comes over the spectacle of highly publicized mass-shootings, or “active shooter events” depending on where you get your terminology. I’ve heard it said, specifically by a certain news commentator who made this subject his bread and butter, that the AR-15 is the preferred weapon of mass shooters. As it turns out, the AR-15 is almost never used in such events and, in fact, rifles of any type don’t appear to hold a majority in these cases, with the unfortunate exception of those at places of education. That, of course, is a subject all its own, and one I plan to write about in the future. But getting back to the topic at hand, there actually are available data that can provide an answer to this point of contention.

To get a picture of how often such weapons are present in mass-shootings, we can turn to two sources of information. The first comes from criminologist, Gary Kleck, who published a 2009 article in American Behavioral Scientist, Vol 52, No 10, titled Mass Shootings in Schools. From the title, it’s obvious the focus is specifically for events taking place in schools and leaves out any that don’t. Table 1 lists seven occurrences from 1997 to 1999. Not a single one of them involved an AR-15 or any other rifle bearing military resemblance.

Four involved the use of a rifle. Two of those were .22lr. The other two shootings utilized common hunting rifles, one a .30-.30 and a .44 magnum, and the other .30-06. One involved a 9mm carbine, which looks like a rifle but is typically a little shorter and uses standard handgun ammunition. If you include that one, it brings the count up to five, though carbines aren’t technically classified as rifles. As an interesting side note, one shooting perpetrated with no more than a .22 pistol resulted in a higher death toll than the one in which the .30-.30 hunting rifle was used, even though one less person was shot with the pistol than with the rifle.Moving to our second source, the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training at Texas State University studied the circumstances surrounding 84 “Active Shooter Events” over a ten year period and documented their findings in a paper titled United States Active Shooter Events from 2000 to 2012: Training and Equipment Implications. They found that a rifle was the most powerful weapon used in only 27% of ASEs. Shotguns were the most powerful weapon in a measly 9%. As fate would have it, and this should come as no surprise to those familiar with crime stats, the weapon most often found to be the most powerful used in active shooter events was the handgun, at a massive 60%. So, it’s pretty clear that so-called assault weapons, especially those of the AR-15 variety, are by no means the preferred weapon of mass shooters.

But, while they may not be the most used, surely they’re the most deadly. After all, the worst mass shooting in history was perpetrated with some form of the AR-15, right? Actually, no, if what we’re measuring is the number killed. That title goes to the massacre at Virginia Tech, which was committed using two handguns and killed 32 people. According to the official report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, titled “Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech”, the pistols in question were a 9mm and yet another .22. Obviously, one does not need a scary looking rifle to do evil of exceptional scope.

So, if it’s not the rifle, it has been posited that magazines of certain capacities are the real problem. When suggesting bans on magazines with capacities over various arbitrary amounts, it’s often suggested that the time it would take to reload would give nearby, potential victims a chance to tackle the shooter and end the event. Could this actually happen? Sure. Has it happened in the past? Yep. Does it happen often? Not even close. Only 15% of ASEs in the ALERRT study ended with nearby people physically subduing the shooter and it’s unclear how many of those were actually the result of a pause in shooting due to the weapon running out of ammunition.

As a matter of fact, we don’t have to look too far to find an instance where this wasn’t the case. One very notable event was one we already looked at, the massacre at Virginia Tech. I highlight this tragedy not simply to say here’s one where that didn’t happen, but rather to show how many times unarmed response to reloading time was not a viable option just in this one act alone. Over the course of the event, the shooter expended no fewer than 174 rounds. Extrapolating from the number of magazines of each type listed in the report, it can be determined that the shooter changed magazines roughly 17 times. If ever there was a possibility for the scenario suggested by magazine ban advocates to play out, this would have been it.

Another example would be the Century 16 shooting in Aurora Colorado. The shooter in this case brought three weapons with him and left a fourth in his car. One of the weapons was the infamous AR-15 with an aftermarket, 100rd drum magazine. That weapon, as it turns out, jammed and the shooter was forced to switch weapons. In fact, he switched weapons twice, completely negating the time it’s suggested he would have needed to take in order to stop and reload.

The concept of switching weapons being faster than reloading wouldn’t make much difference if it wasn’t common for mass shooters to bring more than one weapon, so to get an idea of how regularly they tend to do so, we can look back at Kleck’s Table 1 and the ALERRT study we previously discussed. Five out of seven shootings listed by Kleck involved shooters carrying multiple weapons, two involving pairs of shooters working as a team. 41% of shooters listed in the TSU study were also armed with multiple weapons.

Still, restricting magazine sizes might be worth considering if inconveniencing mass shooters every once in a while would be the only effect. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t. Bad guys aren’t the only ones who use guns, after all, and therefore aren’t the only ones affected by gun restrictions. Having an ample supply of defensive ammunition in dire situations can make a significant difference for the good guy protecting his or her life or family. Most dyed in the wool gun rights activists are familiar with the story of a work-at-home mom who defended herself and her twin daughters in their home from a violent intruder, shooting him five times in the face and chest and missing him once. At that point, she was out of ammunition, while the intruder was still alive and mobile. She used the bluff that she’d shoot him again if he got up to get herself and her children out of the house and to the safety of her neighbor’s house. The intruder, got up and left, driving several blocks before crashing into a tree, getting out of his car, and collapsing several steps away. He’s still alive, by the way.

Another such story comes from Detroit, where three thugs attempted an armed home invasion while a mother and her children were in the house. The mother grabbed her semi-auto carbine and warned the intruders that she had a gun. They said they didn’t believe her so she opened fire. When she stopped shooting, the thugs assumed she was out of ammunition and started to go back in. It was only after she began shooting again that they finally left. Had she not had enough ammunition that night, the incident would have ended very differently.

And while it’s rare, sitting at a mere 4% of ASEs, mass shooters do invest in body armor from time to time, as the Aurora shooter did. If you’re defending yourself against someone so intent on killing you that they carry multiple weapons and armor-suit up, having too little ammunition to stay in the fight could prove to be fatal.

Expounding on the concept of what constitutes an “assault weapon”, it’s sometimes remarked that it’s the increased rate-of-fire that semiautomatic firearms possess that makes them so dangerous. The suggestion has been made that if the shooters had only had revolvers or weapons that would need to be manually cycled, like bolt, lever, or pump action firearms, they wouldn’t have been able to kill as many people. There are a few examples that negate this argument, not the least of which being that revolvers are operated in the same exact way that semi-autos are… because they are, in fact, semiautomatic, meaning they fire once with each pull of the trigger and are automatically ready to fire another round without any additional action on the part of the user. According to Kleck, double-action revolvers have been shown to be capable of firing up to six rounds in two seconds. And from the information we’ve already covered, carrying multiple revolvers and simply changing weapons when one runs out of ammunition is a trivial thing to mass shooters.

Kleck goes on to say the Columbine killers had injured or killed 37 people in about 49 minutes, equating that to an average of 80 seconds each. He suggested that even if they had fired ten times as many rounds as there were victims, rapid fire weapons would not have been necessary to inflict the amount of harm that they did. As much as I respect Mr. Kleck, I didn’t feel comfortable taking his word for it on this, so I decided to look into the timeline myself.

On occasion, one can find complete police reports on the website of respective departments. Other times, they’re published in their entirety on the website of a local news agency. In this case, I located the report in an archive on the Rocky Mountain News site. I then cross-referenced the included timeline with the one published in a report prepared by the Columbine Review Commission on behalf of then Governor Bill Owens. By my calculations, 33 victims were shot in 35 minutes. That averages out to about 63 seconds per person. Even if the shooters fired 20 rounds per person, that would average 3 seconds per shot. And that doesn’t even take into account that there were two shooters, effectively doubling their firing rate. In total, 37 of the 188 rounds expended by the two were fired from one double barreled and one pump action shotgun. Neither weapon, obviously, was semi-automatic.

Of course, none of this is to say that semi-autos can’t be used to do horrible things. They certainly can. What’s evident from what we’ve discussed to this point is that these things aren’t necessary for evil people with evil intentions to do evil things of great magnitude. See the Boston Marathon bombing as an example. No firearms necessary.

But with all that said, mass murder is a fairly unusual event. A massively higher number of people are murdered each year in standard homicides than in mass shootings of any type. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), out of 12,765 total homicides in 2012, only 1,448 or 11.4% involved multiple victims. In addition, 275 of those involved multiple victims and multiple attackers, which sounds a lot like gang violence to me. So if restricting semi-auto rifles and magazines of certain sizes won’t affect the outcomes of mass shootings, what about average, everyday homicides?

We can actually look at both limiting magazine sizes and the supposed increased firing rate of semi-autos over revolvers in regard to standard homicide with the same study. Published in 2003 in the BMJ journal, Injury Prevention, and titled “Impact of Handgun Types on Gun Assault Outcomes,” this relevant article examines the circumstances of 343 handgun homicides and aggravated assaults in Jersey City, NJ from January 1992 to November 1996. Admittedly, by the authors in fact, the study is exceptionally limited in scope and applicability, but it does provide a decent frame of reference when trying to get an idea of the difference between these two types of weapons. It should also be kept in mind that the study deals exclusively with handguns.

Notable among the findings, 63-70% of semi-auto shootings resulted in three or fewer shots fired. The average number of shots fired for semi-autos was 3.23 to 3.68, whereas the same average for revolvers was 2.3 to 2.58. That’s not a whole lot of difference. What’s really interesting is, even with fewer shots fired on average, shootings involving revolvers ended in a fatality 25% of the time, as opposed to 15.79% for their magazine-fed counterparts.

Getting back to rifles, table 8 of the UCR’s Expanded Homicide Data shows a total of 8,855 gun homicides for the year 2012. Out of those, only 322 were committed with rifles. That, of course, includes rifles that are not AR-15s and even rifles that are not semi-automatic. It’s impossible to know just how many of each type of rifle was used but it’s fair to say that so-called “assault weapons” were not used in every single one of them. But let’s go with that entire number anyway.

Rifle homicides accounted for 3.6% of homicides committed with firearms and only 2.5% of all homicides total. Looking back at the previous four years, rifle murders never made up more than 4.1%. This disparity in usage is certainly not due to any lack of availability. According to “Firearms Commerce in the United States, Annual Statistical Update 2012”, a publication made available by the BATFE, more than a quarter of all firearms manufactured in, imported to, and not exported from the United States each year are rifles. Just over half are handguns. Yet, handguns make up, at minimum, 72% of all firearm homicides, and probably more if you take into account the number of murders for which a firearm type is not specified.

Clearly, if availability determined a weapon’s use in crime, rifles would make up considerably more than a measly 4%. But that’s not even the end of that argument. That same ATF report goes on to show that even fewer shotguns are manufactured or imported into the US each year than rifles. Yet, for three out of the five years from 2008 to 2012, there were more shotgun homicides than rifle homicides. For the two years in which rifles took the lead, it was only by 1 in 2010 and 19 in 2012. Obviously, there are some factors beyond mere availability at work here.

As always, and as I mentioned earlier in this post, there are always at least two sides to an issue. Another angle to be looked at is defense of self and family. To get an idea of how often rifles are used to protect against crime, we’ll have to look at several different sources of information and put them together in a meaningful way. The first comes from table 15 of the Expanded Homicide Data, which shows the number of justifiable homicides by private citizens per year. The table lists 258 such events for 2012, 20 of which, or 7.8%, involved rifles. This is a deceptive number for a couple of reasons, which is why we need other sources to clarify things.

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Building on this concept, it’s important to note that not all events listed as criminal homicides end up being ruled that way through court proceedings. I’ve previously pointed to a study by Time magazine that found at least 12% of gun homicides reported nationally over a single week were eventually ruled as justifiable. The important thing about this figure is that these cases don’t get updated in the UCR, so the number of justifiable homicides you see listed is almost certainly lower than it really is. If we adjust for this, we get an estimate of 1,063 justifiable gun homicides for 2012, 103 of which involved rifles. Obviously, this is just an estimate, so take this with a certain level of flexibility.

The final piece of this puzzle comes from the reality that not all successful defensive uses of firearms result in a fatality, as the two mothers I spoke about earlier can attest to. In fact, not all such uses result in any shots fired. But that’s another story. Unfortunately, in all my research, I have yet to find a defensive gun use (DGU) study that broke down the types of firearms used. So, this next part is going to take some creative math. In “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun”, by Gary Kleck and Mark Gertz, the authors examined the results of several surveys from which estimates of the frequency of DGUS per year can be made. In one of my earlier articles, I drew numbers from two such surveys to get estimates at the low end and the high end.

Just to keep things interesting, we’re going to look at the lower estimate, which is extrapolated from a poll conducted by The Tarrance Group in 1994. The number drawn from this poll suggests defensive uses of guns occur roughly 764,000 times per year. Since justifiable rifle homicides made up 7.8% of all justifiable homicides for 2012, we’ll use that to get an idea of how many DGUs involved the use of rifles. 7.8% of 764,000 is 59,592.

To balance that out, we can use table 22 from the FBI’s “Crime in the United States” violent crime section to get a total of 143,119 aggravated assaults with firearms for the year 2012. Add to that the 8,855 gun homicides and we get a total of 151,974 violent gun crimes. And even though the percentage of gun homicides committed with rifles for 2012 was 3.6%, I’m going to use the highest percentage for the five years I looked at to really stack the odds against defensive uses. That number is 4.1%, bringing our estimated number of violent rifle crimes to a whopping 6,230. That’s not a very large number in comparison to 59,592.

To stack the odds even further, the lowest percentage of justifiable rifle homicides for the five years was 3.4%. If we switch that out for our 7.8%, we get a lower figure for defensive rifle uses of 25,976. Even in that case, there appear to be roughly 10,000 more defensive uses of rifles per year than violent uses. And keep in mind that aggravated assault includes incidents where the aggressor simply threatened someone with a gun, even if no shots were fired and no one was injured.

So, to bring a close to an article I thought was going to be short and sweet, from the evidence examined herein, it appears that legislation restricting the sale and ownership of semi-automatic rifles and handguns, and magazines of certain widely utilized capacities would bring very little, if any, benefit. What little positive effects could be derived from such actions would be more than equally counterbalanced by detriment to law abiding citizens protecting their lives and families. So, keep that in mind the next time some news commentator comes on TV and tells you we need to ban “assault weapons!” There’s obviously more to the story.

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