Assault Rifles Aren’t the Weapon of Choice for ‘Active Shooters’
A new study shows that other firearms, including handguns and shotguns, are used three times as often.
A large amount of coverage of gun violence in America focuses on when semi-automatic weapons are used, particularly when brought to bear in mass killings, given their capacity to quickly inflict grievous harm. The intensity of that media klieg light, however, may be disproportionate to how often those firearms are actually used in these bouts of sudden violence, which have been given a name: “active shooter events.”
A study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that semi-automatic assault rifles were used in only about 25 percent of such U.S. incidents from 2000 to 2017. The rest of the time, firearms including handguns, rifles and shotguns were the weapon of choice.