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The original commenter is trafficking in deception, otherwise known as lies, damned lies, and statistics. The FBI does not publish crime data by model of rifle, and so Mr. or Ms. NRA Spin is probably just parroting what someone else said and never looked it up. The FBI's Uniform Crime Report does track homicides by weapon, and that data conclusively demonstrates that an American is more likely to be murdered with a gun than with any other weapon, including fists. I've uploaded a PDF of that table from the UCR as an attachment to this article, so you can see the numbers yourself. What the 2011 report (the most recent year with complete data) shows is that 8,583 people in the U.S. were murdered with a firearm, out of the 12,664 homicides that year, which is fully 2/3 (and precisely 67.77%) of all homicides. What the deceiving commenter references without bothering to give you the benefit of the full data on (which is actually quite brief, literally a few lines on a single page) is that of those 8,583 homicides by gun, 323 were from rifles, and he or she selectively omits that 6,220 were from handguns and the remainder were from other types of guns, like shotguns. Assault-style weapons can be both long guns and hand guns and models of both types can be used with different quantities of ammunition clips. It is the case that 728 people were murdered in 2011 by bare hands including pushing people, but that's a far cry from the 8,583 from guns. Selectively comparing rifles to fists without revealing total homicides by guns is deceptive stuff.
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