One of my hobbies is riding singletrack on my old GT iDrive.
My point is that the scope of rifle misuse is vastly exaggerated by those who want to coerce their neighbors into living by their philosophical/religious beliefs on the topic, and being honest about the magnitude of rifle misuse would undermine your case. So instead we get rhetoric about "weapons of mass destruction" and "epidemics of violence" and even (in this very forum) intimations that a bloody fight for confiscation would be justifiable.
Many states have *zero* rifle homicides in any given year. The vast majority of states are in the single digits. Massachusetts, which just outlawed the most popular civilian rifles by executive fiat, averaged less than 1 rifle murder per year in the last 8 years for which we have data.
Murder, by State, Types of Weapons, 2015
[font face="courier new"]Total murders...................... 13,455
Handguns............................ 6,447 (47.9%)
Firearms (type unknown)............. 2,648 (19.7%)
Clubs, rope, fire, etc.............. 1,671 (12.4%)
Knives and other cutting weapons.... 1,544 (11.5%)
Hands, fists, feet.................... 624 (4.6%)
Shotguns.............................. 269 (2.0%)
Rifles................................ 252 (1.9%) [/font]
To put that into perspective, bicycles accounted for 722 deaths in 2014, the most recent year for which I could find stats.
If you don't think bicycle deaths are an "epidemic" that requires coercive solutions and prohibition (never mind, say, swimming pool deaths, or knife deaths, both of which kill an order of magnitude more people than semiauto rifles do), yet you use that level of rhetoric about non-automatic, small-caliber civilian rifles and threaten coercive action against their owners, then you are being disingenuous.
To quote the gun-control lobby, back when rifle murder was *twice* the problem it is now:
"O)ur organization, Handgun Control, Inc. does not propose further controls on rifles and shotguns. Rifles and shotguns are not the problem; they are not concealable."
--Nelson T. "Pete" Shields, Guns Don't Die--People Do, Priam Press, 1981, pp. 47-48).
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read