A Bar Chart: AR15s, legal versus mis-used
AR-15 Abuse in Mass Shootings: A Bar Graph
Much has been made of AR-pattern rifles, about how they're only good for slaughtering mass amounts of innocent people, and have no other use. There are, at best guess, approximately 15 million firearms based on the Armalite Rifle design in private hands in the US. That's one specific design, mind. If one were to try to catalog all the possible firearms that could be demonized as so-called “Assault Weapons”, it would run to millions more. This is a comparison of AR15 and similar rifles, between those which have been abused in mass shootings, and which haven't.
An article in Politifact (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/feb/14/what-we-know-about-mass-shootings/) discusses recent mass shootings. Per the article there have been around 10 AR-15 pattern rifles used in mass shootings at Aurora, CO; Roseburg, OR; San Bernadino, CA; Newtown, CT; Orlando, FL; Sutherland Springs, TX; and Parkland, FL. In addition, there's the rather large but not-all-counted pile of rifles in the shooter's hotel room in Las Vegas, NV.
On to the bar graph. Let's make an individual AR-type rifle visible, in this graph. We'll go with 1 rifle = 1/16” x 1/2”:
That means that one square inch would be 32 rifles, which should cover the known quantities plus the Vegas shooter's:
A square foot, then, would be 32x144 = 4,608 rifles. For the next comparison, I'll have to reduce the scale to fit the page. We'll reduce 50%, so we have a half-inch square on a 6-inch square. Blue is rifles that haven't been misused:
So, here we have 4608 rifles. The ones that have been misused are the red corner, and the blue is a start on the ones that are sitting around in gun safes, truck gun racks, under beds, wall racks, and gun cases. Ones that are being used for target shooting, home defense, varmint shooting (think “recreational pesticide”), and, yes, hunting. That said, we're going to need a lot more plain blue squares for our bar chart:
Let's go up to 46,080 rifles:
You can still see that red bit.
Now, let's look at how many square feet of bar chart we'll need for all the AR-type rifles out there.
How many? Let's divide 15,000,000 by 4608: 3255.2 or so. Let's go with 3255. We've run out of paper, so let's go with geography. Here's a runway at Dulles, with all those blue sheets of paper laid out end-to-end. We're about 355 feet short of the takeoff distance for a C-130:
EDIT: I realized that people aren't getting it, that with the chunk of runway laid out, the ones being abused are still one square inch of that runway. So, here, one PIXEL = one AR15. The ones being abused are red. They're in the center. You'll probably have to click the image to load the full-size original.
When people talk about bans, and Australian-style confiscations, most of them don't appear to be thinking about how many people own these firearms legally, and never do anything wrong with them. Oh-- and one OTHER bit -- this is AR-15s, only. There are dozens of other designs of firearms out there, that fit the definition of so-called "Assault Weapons". Each of those designs represents thousands, or in the case of the more popular ones, millions, more firearms that are in circulation, legally owned, and are NOT being misused.
Food for thought.
[DW Original]