Posting on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Swalwell wrote, “Ban assault weapons. Buy them ALL back. Choose our kids over their killers.”
His writing was likely in reference to Saturdays’ racist attack at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida. The deceased suspect was armed with an AR-15-style rifle as well as a pistol, meaning the attack could still have been carried out without the “assault weapon.”
This kneejerk reactions flies in the face of the facts concerning murders in the U.S. Data clearly shows that rifles are rather uncommonly used in violent attacks.
In fact, FBI figures prove that knives and other cutting instruments killed more Americans in 2021 than rifles. Even further, more people that same year were murdered with fists and feet than were killed with rifles.
Also worthy of note is the FBI’s “rifle” category is hardly limited to the semiautomatic variety. All sorts of long guns, including pump action, lever action, single shot, bolt action and those wrongly labeled “assault weapons” fall into this broad classification. Still, the number of crimes they are involved in is far less than activists want the public to think.
There is simply not the plague of rifle murders that Second Amendment opponents would have you believe.
Finally, the AK/AR-style weapons are very commonly owned by the American shooting public. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there are more of these weapons in the people’s hands than there are Ford F-Series trucks on the highways.
They are everywhere, and a national buyback program would never remove them from circulation.
Swalwell was merely muttering the pipe dream of those who want to eradicate the Second amendment, nothing more.
