2016 Postmortem

Rifle murders have steadily decreased over time, and are now hovering around 250 per year out of 13,500 murders annually.

Rifle Homicides, 2005-2015
2005: 442
2006: 436
2007: 450
2008: 375
2009: 348
2010: 358
2011: 323
2012: 302
2013: 285
2014: 248
2015: 252
(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports 2005-2015, Table 20, Collated)

Most states report either zero or single-digit rifle murders in any given year. Modern-looking rifles likely account for about half of that, say 125 to 140 annually. To put that into perspective, 722 people were died in 2014 riding bicycles, 1500 were killed with knives, and 50,000 to 100,000 died due to alcohol. Which makes it doubly ludicrous that the gun control lobby's top legislative priority for a quarter-century has been rifle-ban legislation.

As to "mass shootings", that depends on how they are defined. A shootout between gang members that sends four people to the hospital is a "mass shooting" according to the "mass shooting tracker"; by that definition, the NYPD engages in "mass shootings" with some regularity, and they also occur regularly in Australia and around the world, both by LE and by criminals. The FBI's definition is a lot more realistic, but produces less sensational numbers.

I'm not convinced that the gun control lobby even cares about mass shootings except as a PR tool, because the measures they propose---legislating rifle handgrip shape, criminalizing ergonomic rifle/shotgun stocks, criminalizing post-1860s magazine capacities---do not address mass shootings in the slightest. Requiring all rifle stocks to look like this:



will save exactly zero lives, but will turn tens of millions of peaceable citizens into felons. The fact that we can barely have a civil discussion about *that* fact without people trying to derail the thread says a lot about the debate as it currently stands.