All the things you listed require close distance, physical contact, possibility of attacker responding, and almost literally: blood on your hands. Any range weapon provides distance, more "comfort", and a higher degree of safety for the attacker.
If we can reduce that disconnect from what people are doing, then why not?
/s
>P.S. one last thing - pro-gun-ban people completely disregard gun shooting as a means for hunting and as a fun activity at range. Many weapons, including mentioned AR-15 (civilian version of popular M16) will never be shot outside shooting range. Why use higher caliber guns instead of some puny .22? Because it's more fun!
From my understanding, removing these guns will save lives, at least one. Why is having fun more important than peoples lives?
I genuinely do not understand. Things like Marihuana only `hurt` the user for the most part where guns, if they hurt someone, is almost always not the user.
That said, I think our data is clear enough. As soon as we took the guns out of the streets, violence started to increase in a much bigger rate, and we are now almost in a civil war situation. Looks like the US stereotypical idea of a good men with a gun being the best deterrence to a bad men with a gun bears some truth.
if you want to stop some crazy people killing with these "assault guns" (why not called home defense guns?), you should focus on removing given dangerous individual from society, and not trying remove their access to weapons. Anything can be used to kill, including scissors, saw, pipe, baseball, knife or just good old pure hands. with current logic, all these things should get outlawed too. No statistics in hand, but I am damn sure the amount of people killed by legally purchased "assault rifles" compared to say hit & run with cars is neglible. with similar logic I say ban cars! (and it would do so much good in other ways...)
P.S. one last thing - pro-gun-ban people completely disregard gun shooting as a means for hunting and as a fun activity at range. Many weapons, including mentioned AR-15 (civilian version of popular M16) will never be shot outside shooting range. Why use higher caliber guns instead of some puny .22? Because it's more fun!
Ah wait, we're talking maybe to same people that banned almost harmless marihuana and happily kept tobacco and alcohol roaming free on markets...
DISCLAIMER: I never owned any handgun that would require any form of registration, yet before having strong statements about what should/shouldn't be banned, I at least educate myself. Gun ban laws are, apart for some corner cases, just pure crowd idiocy and hypocrisy.