A Brief History
On January 13, 2022, the National Shooting Sports Foundation warned American firearms enthusiasts of an online scam targeting those looking to buy a new firearm. Firearms are big business in the United States, with nearly 400 million guns owned by private citizens.
Digging Deeper
In a set of statistics that might just surprise you, the most popular single type of rifle in the US is the M-16/AR-15 family of weapons, with a total civilian ownership of between 20 million and 44 million, depending on the source. When other military looking types of guns are included in the erroneous but blanket description of “assault weapons,” such as the AK-47 family of guns, M-1 carbines and the like, a staggering number of such weapons reside in private American homes. About 2.7 million such firearms are sold to American citizens each year.
And yet, of the murders committed by firearms annually in the US, only about 2% are committed by using a rifle of any type, making the percentage of so called “assault weapons” used in murders well under 2%, and probably less than 1% of all firearm murders. More Americans are beaten to death by hands than by AR-15’s! Are you surprised?
Question for students (and subscribers): What do you think of the AR-15 family of weapons? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Baumgarten, Ken. Arguing About Guns: The All-American Debate. Independently published, 2019.
Halbrook, Stephen. The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms. Ivan R. Dee/ Independent Institute, 2012.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Miguel Dextre of Shot Show 2010 Las Vegas USA – Arms Exhibition, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
