I see a lot of overly simplistic and intellectual lazy anti-gun memes floating around as a way to score political points amidst this tragedy. As African-Americans, especially, we should approach this issue in a politically unbiased manner to pinpoint the major factors and causes with a thorough appraisal of them all given that this affects us the most.
Firstly, there's reports that give a much more in depth analysis of violent crime, such as in the US vs the UK, which is very restrictive on guns, that some tout as a gun free haven, actually has a higher violent crime rate than the US, believe it or not.
The homicide rate is higher in the US, but when you look at homicide stats broken down by different settlement environment types, you find that the bulk of our homicides come small pockets of large metropolitan areas.
Homicides tend to correlate much closer with income, education, resources, family structure, and development environment than with gun liberties. Thus why the bulk of our homicides come from small pockets of large metropolitan areas.
Of the firearm homicides, only %3.4 were caused by rifles(not just assault rifles).
Down with anti-intellectualism!
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, in 2016, only %3.4 of the firearm murders and %2.5 of the total murders were done with rifles(knives, blunt objects and hands/feet account for more murders). Assault rifles are but one subset of the rifle group.
Expanded Homicide Data Table 4
Statistical facts vs political rhetoric.