Statistics never support comments generally made on weapons.
A good example is that you can outlaw automatic rifles, and then filter out all the shootings/murders over the past thirty years. The end result is a very small and marginal group of people who would be alive today if you had outlawed the automatic rifles in 1970...as compared against the bulk of deaths reported nation-wide.
Another example is that you can look at Iowa over the past four decades (three million population only recently achieved). You have a state where 45 murders occur on an average per year. Of that...only around 47 percent of the yearly murders are by gun. The rest are listed either by knife or “other”. You go over to Pennsylvania, where there are roughly 650 murders a year, and almost 70 percent relate back to guns. The true issue is urban “warfare” which is a magnet in metropolitan areas, but you never hear the media discuss that matter.
Just say it. Black populations commit murder at rates 6X-8X that of white populations. Hispanics are in the 2X-4X range, if memory serves. Whites in the USA commit murder at rates similar to Northern European countries.
Until we are willing to talk about this plainly, and deal with the cultural issues involved, we will never be able to solve the problem. That we tiptoe around this at Free Republic shows how far we are from that point.