Don’t Expect the Persistent Mismatch Between Perception and Reality to Affect Gun Policy or Politics

Semi-automatic long guns, such as the AR-15, have been a hot topic of political rhetoric for decades now. And for those same decades, those same firearms have remained statistically under-represented in violent crime, while remaining wildly mischaracterized in policy debates and lawmaking.

NRA-ILA undoubtedly sounds like a broken record reiterating, again and again, this non-wavering fact, especially in the face of introduced and re-introduced “assault weapons” bans and reliable demonization of semi-automatic long guns by the media. However, NRA-ILA’s repeated emphasis reflects a critical and consistent assertion of fact, which is that rifles, of all types, account for a very small fraction of homicides nationwide, as once again confirmed by the most recent available data.

Last week, Pew Research Center published their updated research on “[w]hat the data says [sic] about gun deaths in the U.S.” The relevant statistics were collected and synthesized from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other sources.

Under the subtitle of: “Which types of firearms are most commonly used in gun murders in the U.S.?” the FBI found that in 2024:

Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” were involved in 3% of these deaths.
Shotguns were involved in 1%.

An important distinction should be noted that of the 3%, semi-automatic firearms such as AR-15s are an even smaller subset of the general term “rifles.” The same goes for “shotguns” that gun control advocates [mis]characterize as “assault weapons;” they are a smaller fraction of the 1%.

There has long been a detrimental mismatch between perception, proportion, and actual data that has distorted firearm policy discussions. Not only has it drawn attention away from clear factors most strongly associated with violent crime, but it has also continued to be a disservice to efforts to craft evidence-based policies meant to keep citizens safe.

Even during the actual ten-year federal “assault weapon” ban signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, two federally funded studies said the exact same thing as we repeat today; then, as now, so-called “assault weapons” were and are rarely used to commit violent crime. A study conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 1997 acknowledged, “At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders.”

A subsequent study done in 2004, also by DOJ, came to a similar conclusion, determining that “AWs [assault weapons] and LCMs [large capacity magazines] were used in only a minority of gun crimes prior to the 1994 federal ban,”  and, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

The current circulation and ownership numbers of AR-15s and similar rifles are debated and predictably underreported by the media but may reach over thirty million, according to National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) research. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense, hunting, competitions, and target shooting.

Of course, whenever one of these 30 million guns happens to be used in a highly publicized crime, consumers of mass media will be told that the platform represents a “weapon of war” and the “choice of mass shooters.” In fact, it is neither. The AR-15s available at your local gun shop are not designed for automatic fire, as are military rifles, and they are not even the preeminent firearm used in mass shootings, where handguns still predominate.

High profile incidents will continue to receive intense media coverage creating impressions that AR-15s and similar firearms are somehow a primary driver of everyday violent crime. They simply are not, but media cannot be trusted to “zoom out” to understand proper context and truthfully report. This failure continues to skew not just gun control priorities but also public safety outcomes.

These latest data summaries on gun deaths have more to say on firearm-related mortality than just what sorts of firearms are involved. Indeed, the issue of death by gunfire, including homicide and suicide, is of complex sociological origins that deserve a much more robust analysis than the focus group tested talking points of firearm prohibitionists.

But one fact remains simple and unchanged in the face of the endure and growing popularity of semi-automatic long guns like the AR-15: when it comes to firearm-related homicide, they represent a minuscule fraction of crime guns.