More Gun Control? The FBI Just Released Its List of Things Deadlier Than ‘Assault Rifles’

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Everyday there’s a murder in the United States. And everyday, the U.S. public gets hit with another demand for more “gun control.”

The FBI just released its 2014 list of crime statistics, and there are some data findings that conflict with the calls for more firearms regulations.

The Uniform Crime Reports “2014 crime in the United States” breaks down murder by state, and includes the U.S. territories of the Virgin Islands and Guam.

It shows that there were 11,961 murders in 2014 (there were 31 total in the U.S. territories). And 8,124 of those were committed by firearms.

This is how those numbers look in perspective:

Notice that total murders and firearms murders have dropped again.

More salient for the “gun control” conversation, however, is the focus on so-called “assault rifles.” It turns out that murders by all rifles (as reported by the FBI), including homicides by those semi-automatic rifles that some refer to as “assault rifles,” were only 248 of those murders.

Further contextualizing this statistic is that the total number of murders committed by people’s hands and feet came to 660 – more than double the homicides committed by all rifles.

More precisely, there were 142% more murders by hands and feet in 2014 than by all rifles combined.

That means these:

And these:

Are deadlier than “assault rifles” in the United States.