Between January 2009 and July 2015, mass shootings involving assault rifles in the U.S. resulted in 47 percent more deaths than shootings that didn’t involve high-capacity magazines, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. While there is no one solution to the problem of mass shootings, one has to wonder—would they decrease if assault rifles weren’t so easily accessible? Here are a few numbers to consider…
37 women’s lives would be saved each year.
The Details: Although 55 percent of Americans now support a ban on assault weapons—semiautomatic rifles with one or more “military-style” features—only 248 people were murdered by any kind of rifle in 2014. Since about 15 percent of all firearm homicide victims are women, that 37 is an estimate. This number—and the rest in this section—could be higher because, due to a nearly 20-year Congressional restriction on federally funded gun-violence research, there’s little national data available. Multiple attempts to overturn the ban have failed.