Study Argues ‘Assualt Weapons’ Result in Deadlier Mass Shootings

The war against so-called assault weapons might never be fully resolved. While the Supreme Court will hear the Veramontes case and likely strike down the assault weapon ban as we know it, we also know that anti-gunners will never go quietly into that good night. It’s possibly the only thing to respect about some of them, if we’re being honest, and only barely. There’s no shame in backing down when you’re wrong, after all.

But that doesn’t mean that so-called researchers won’t try to justify it.

This time, we’ve got a study in Nature that claims so-called assault weapons result in more fatalities and injuries in mass public shootings.

Firearm violence is a leading cause of premature death worldwide, and mass public shootings sit at the far tail of severity. Research has linked higher casualty counts to assault weapons, but the category enters those studies as a single yes/no indicator, so the weapon characteristics behind the association remain unidentified. We analyzed 197 US mass public shootings from 1966 through 2025 (202 perpetrators, 433 firearms, 288 fired) recorded in The Violence Project Mass Shooter Database, splitting the assault weapon category into weapon platforms, cartridge energy classes, and magazine capacity. Assault weapon use held between 17 and 20% of incidents per decade from the 1970s through the 2000s, then rose to 36% in the 2010s and 60% in the incomplete 2020s, with the shift concentrated after 2015. In adjusted negative binomial models, assault weapon use was associated with 55% more fatalities and roughly four times as many injuries; excluding the 2017 Las Vegas shooting cut the injury estimate to 2.3. The AR-15 was the only platform associated with both outcomes, but an additive model of platform and cartridge is rejected in favor of an interaction (likelihood ratio P < .05 for both outcomes, with and without the Las Vegas outlier), and neither component carries the association alone. Excluding Las Vegas and adjusting for magazine capacity, incidents in which an AR-15 fired a rifle-class cartridge had 1.6 times the fatalities and 2.4 times the injuries of the reference category, while rifle-class cartridges fired from other platforms showed none. Large-capacity magazines were independently associated with both outcomes, at 1.4 for fatalities and 1.8 for injuries, and the magazine estimate for fatalities moved little across every model we fit. What the binary classification records as one exposure is a compound of platform, ammunition, and magazine capacity, and the components do not behave alike.

Interesting, except that, as per usual, there are problems.

I’ve downloaded the report and gone over it, and damned if I can find a section describing their methodology. Here I thought that was kind of required of a study, but apparently not if you’re bashing guns.

Second, there are some definitional issues.

For example, when they classify firearms, they write, “AK/Soviet (AK-47, AK-74, SKS, and Saiga variants derived from the Kalashnikov long-stroke piston design),” which is interesting on a number of levels. First, the SKS wasn’t derived from the AK-style of rifles. It couldn’t be because it was designed first.

Second, the SKS has a standard capacity of 10, except for those that have been modified with crappy “detachable” magazines or things like the SKS-D, which does take AK magazines. The vast majority of them in circulation are 10-round, fixed-magazine rifles. Those don’t fall into the same category as an AK by most legal definitions of so-called assault weapons in the United States.

While I can’t say there are a lot of mass killings in the US where the SKS was used, the inclusion of it is…interesting.

It wasn’t the only bizarre category of “assault weapon,” either. The authors write their third category as “Other Tactical (TEC-9, MAC-10/11, Uzi, and pistol-caliber carbines derived from submachine gun or tactical designs).” Y’all know as well as I do that at least some of these are pistols. The TEC-9 and MAC-10/11 are both handguns. They don’t belong in the same category as pistol-caliber carbines “derived from submachine gun or tactical designs.”

And that last part is dumb on its own because 9mm is just as deadly out of a “tactical design” gun as out of one designed to look like a cowboy’s gun.

Oh, and finally, we have this:

Exposure definition

An incident counted as involving an assault weapon only if at least one was confirmed as fired in the shooting, not merely present. Firearms coded “present but not used” were brought or accessible during the event but not discharged. Four incidents have no firearm affirmatively coded as fired and are therefore excluded from platformspecific models; they are retained in the binary assault weapon model and in all descriptive analyses. Because the 2017 Las Vegas shooting accounts for more than half of all assault weapon injuries in the sample, every lethality analysis is reported with and without it.

Leaving aside Las Vegas, note that they counted everything if such a weapon was fired. It doesn’t matter if it jammed after the first round and two dozen people were killed with a revolver; it was still counted just the same as if it had been a Las Vegas copycat.

So honestly, this might make some headlines, get pushed by anti-gunners, but it’s yet another example of how so-called gun research is absolute garbage.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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