More Deadly or Deadly More Often?
Why People Get Confused About the Danger of Pistols vs Assault Rifles.
Reading Time: 8-10 min
Because of the way people typically handle potentially lethal hazards as "always lethal" (see the Scalable Lethality section for more on this concept), we are in the habit of treating all guns as always a deadly threat, and that is good - it keeps people acting safer around guns.
But we can be a bit reflexive about this, and start to assume and act as if that means they are all equally lethal, which is not good.
Also, many times we just subsume the risk aspect of hazard, the way the amount of harm can vary from little to deadly, into the overall risk assessment of a danger (the chance of harm happening at all). This is convenient, but can mean we lose track of the probabilities of severity of injury part of the equation, treating it as the same as the chance of harm at all. This can grossly over or underestimate how important that variability of harm can be. Either ignoring that variability, or misjudging it can seriously skew the perception of danger, sometimes very badly, but it is really easy to do, particularly if you are being actively misled about this stuff.
All guns can kill you, but all are not equally likely to do so, or do so the same way at different times - and this matters more than we may appreciate. An assault rifle is in fact far more dangerous than other guns in terms of both hazard and risk, but we miss this because the risks are often used to mislead. The trick is in a bit of bait-and-switch around the way people use the word "more”.
This is a popular bit of gun lobby bullshit, and going through this will illustrate nicely how we using the hazard and risk model can clear up our own thinking about assault rifles and also dismantle even more of the gaslighting tools at the same time.
More Lethal or Lethal More?
Assault rifles are proven to be very deadly, but as gun people can be quick point out: so have pistols, and they are used more often. So when asked which is "more deadly" a lot of gun people will say that pistols are the more dangerous or lethal weapon - because they kill more people. That’s the simplistic bait-and switch, but it’s true as far as it goes.
However, this is messing with us by juggling the probabilities on several different levels here, and some of that is less obvious and pretty sneaky - and in this case sneaky means more people can and do die than need to. Let's break it out a bit, which we can do with three questions about risk and hazard.
The Risk: Pistol vs Assault Rifle
1. What are the bare chances of being shot by either weapon?
That’s the easy one - but here are two that are less obvious:
2. What are your chances of being shot by either weapon, once someone is trying to shoot you?
3. What are those same chances, if you are in an active shooter situation in particular?
These are the odds of being ever shot at, period; of being shot once you are already caught up in a violent situation; and then very specifically: how that differs in mass shooting scenario, which is where assault rifles are most deadly.
As well we have the hazard aspects of the danger to consider,, and that gives us two more questions:
The Hazard (but a bit of Risk!): Pistol vs Assault Rifle
4. Which weapon is capable of inflicting the greater harm, if you are in fact shot?
5. Which increases the likelihood of more grievous injury or death, if you are in fact shot?
Now, with those as a focus we can look some of the facts about mass shootings to find some answers.
What Do the Numbers Say?
To answer #1, based on stats across North America, the bare risk of being shot with a pistol is certainly much higher than being shot with an assault rifle - if including all gun crime. But "all gun crime" includes suicides, smaller-scale interpersonal violence, mass shootings, and gun use related to criminal activity. Right off the bat the odds of being shot ever (with anything) drop dramatically if you are not suicidal. About 2/3 of all firearm deaths are suicides.
The gun lobby's favourite is "gang violence" - that's where they always want us to focus our efforts on reducing gun homicides. For sure, you can drop your risk of ever being shot by choosing to not be a a drug dealing gang member, but as gang-related homicides are less than 10% of gun homicides (about 13% in the US though), your safety just isn't that big.
Far and away you are better of to just not live with guns, or people that have them. Living with guns triples your chances of suicide (and vastly increase the odds of successful suicide vs attempted suicide) and 73% of all gun murders are committed by friends, family, spouses, and ex-partners.
But yes, with all that said: due to the higher prevalence of pistol use in all gun crime, and -- importantly-- with nothing else considered, they are the higher risk so can be called the higher danger in that narrow sense. However, that is where the truth ends and the bullshit starts.
What if we consider things more carefully?
"All gun crime" is too broad - is it also true that pistols are used more often in random and mass shootings? As it happens, yes they are.
More Often =/= More Deadly
In fact, with mass shootings — "active shooter" or killing-spree situations that are unrelated to the commission of a crime like a bank robbery or drug dealing — pistols are also still used more, in fact a lot more:
Between 2009 and 2018 pistols were used in 81% of US mass shootings, versus 17-20% for assault rifles.
That's a big difference.
This means that if you happen to be caught in a mass shooting situation the odds are 4:1 that someone will be shooting at you with a pistol and not an assault rifle. It may not sound great, but that is actually good news, when in that bad situation.
That is because there is quite a difference between being shot at and shot with. This is where the sleight of hand starts for reals.
How big a difference?
Big. While used in 81% of the mass shootings, pistols accounted for less than 18% of the total injuries. Assault rifles accounted for more than 80% of total injuries, and one third of all deaths.
This means that, once the shooting starts, and when it comes to the risk of actually being shot, versus shot at, you can basically flip those numbers. When the killer is using an assault rifle instead of a pistol you are far more likely to be actually shot.
Some studies of mass shootings will do things like exclude the Las Vegas Shooting as a statistical outlier (which is dubious, as it is also a prime example of how supremely dangerous assault rifles really can be), but even studies that actually exclude that event still confirm assault rifles are 2-3X time more injurious and deadly than pistols, when used in mass shootings.
However, if we do include that shooting and if one includes the more recent mass shootings, it is far worse. It is 5-6X more likely that you would be shot or killed if the killer is using an assault rifle versus any other guns. That is not speculative. That is literally how many more victims they have left over the last decade or so.
That happens to line up perfectly with what the army concluded in their own testing of assault rifles versus other weapons too, back when developing the AR15 precursor to the M16 assault rifle:
"Taking into account the greater lethality of the AR-15 rifle and improvements in accuracy and rate of fire in this weapon since 1959, in overall squad kill potential the AR-15 rifle is up to 5 times as effective as the M-14 rifle.” (emphasis mine)
— Report of the Special Subcommittee on the M-16 Rifle Program of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives
This also just aligns with common-sense understanding of general marksmanship. Shooting with rifles is just more accurate than pistols, all else being equal, which means we could just expect that shooters will hit what they are aiming at more when using a rifle. Assault rifles are designed and highly optimized to make acquiring and holding targets fast and easy, especially while shooting rapidly. This means we should just expect that shooters will hit what they are aiming at more often when using a rifle.
So What Does All That Add Up To?
The result is that, before any shooting starts, the odds of being shot by at with a pistol are higher, but if a shooting starts things are very different. In an active shooting the risk of being shot, and of dying as result, are higher, and potentially much higher, if the shooter is using an assault rifle. This is true in a mass shooting situation - but there is no reason to think it would be different in smaller scale interpersonal violence, for example the murder of an intimate partner or family member that initiate 54% of all mass shootings.
Assault rifles are just flat-out more deadly than pistols, but it is easy to see how the probability/risk thing can be manipulated to confuse people about this.
That should clear up our question #1, #2, and #3. Now we can start to flesh out the answers to #4, and #5 too, and put another nail in the coffin of the " a gun is a gun is a gun" bullshit at the same time.
Higher Hazards Are Always a Factor:
The statistical record of injury and death resulting from mass shooting speaks very clearly about the increased hazard, as well as risk with assault rifles. There is also independent evidence that confirms what even a lick of common sense, or basic high-school physics would lead you to expect as well: larger and higher-velocity bullets have more energy and are far more likely to cause greater injury and death. In fact, the risk of death may be as much as 40% higher with more powerful guns. That is with all else controlled for, and irrespective of where in the body someone is shot.
This too is no surprise, as a more lethal cartridge was a core functional component of the assault rifle design plan. It was created to be more deadly than smaller and lower-powered pistol and submachine gun calibre rounds. The juggling of size/power/shooting characteristics is a well-documented phenomenon on the history of guns, but generally speaking the drive has been to make bullets larger and faster to kill people more reliably.
To be sure, there are points when you get into "distinctions without difference”, and it is not hard to think up a situation where the any gun that passed a minimum threshold would be sufficiently deadly to kill with great reliability, but all cherry-picking and bullshit aside: ensuring that lethal reliability is precisely why there are larger calibre or more powerful weapons. And it works.
Research the history of just about any gun or ammunition combination. It is painfully clear - but the story of the 5.56mm NATO round and the AR15 assault rifle makes this point for us nicely. From the Gun Digest article about their history:
We don't even have to go into the horrific battlefield wounds inflicted during the R&D phase during the Vietnam War. The effectiveness of the new “little” bullets from the AR15 and M16 shocked the firers and medics both. The pictures of those were so nasty they apparently stayed classified into the 1980's. Enough said?
Wrap-Up
Pistols, especially semi-automatic handguns, are definitely very, very dangerous - but they are not more deadly. They are used more frequently, so over time and including all gun crime — which includes a large number of incidents of domestic homicide and suicides — they kill more civilians, but they do not have the killing potential or equal the real dangers of an assault rifle. That is what we see happening in mass shootings all the time: assault rifles are 6X more likely to kill and injure people.
Do not let the gun lobby gaslight or confuse you into underestimating just how dangerous assault weapons really are.
Whatever you think about smaller-scale individual violence, it is undeniable that "any ‘ol gun would do” could not be less true when it comes to mass murder. The reasons why are very telling, and not at all obvious to many people, which is also how the gun lobby gaslights us about them, but with a simple model of hazard, and risk it is easy to show how the various elements of these guns come together to form their danger. The Scalable Lethality article covers that in greater detail and will leave you better prepared to see through all that bullshit.
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