Disclaimer: I use the phrase "asault-style" rifle meaning anything militaryesque or basically a semiauto rifles that will accept a detachable mag. Forget all the other technical jargon that's BS... the real factor that makes these rifles dangerous is the ability to fire powerful rounds quickly from detachable magazines (via large clips or quick reloads).
Lets guess that the AR15, being the more popular of the assault-style rifle, comprises more than half of the total assault-style rifles. You still have AKs, FALs, Ruger Minis, AR10s, HK things, ... the list goes on. So if there's 3.75M Ar15s, lets say there are 6,000,000 total "assault-style weapons".
You'd say, "That's only 2% of total firearms. That's a very small fraction." .. and you'd be right.
But if you said, "We can/should ban these because it's they are not prevalent and a fringe item."... you'd be wrong.
Think about this: There are literally over a hundred of kinds of "common" handguns. Probably nearly a several dozen kinds of common shotgun and several dozen kinds of common rifle. It's easy to see that with the multitude of guns to choose form that if a particular gun even approached a single percent of makeup of total firearms, it has begun to far outpace its statistical likelihood of occurrence given an even/uniform distribution. The fact that the article in the indicated AR15s alone surpass 1% of total firearms and assault-style weapons is telling of their uncommon ubiquity. If you assume only 6M assault style weapons, you are talking about only half a dozen models of guns or so comprising around 2% of the HUNDREDS of models of firearms out there... that is what we like to call a statistical outlier. Why the over-representation in population makeup? Because they are much more popular than other rifles.
This article, with logical observation of other "common" firearms only serves to show that the AR15 and related assault-style weapons are far more popular and common in occurrence than other particular rifles.
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