Assault: a violent physical or verbal attack. Weapon: something used to injure, defeat or destroy. By these two Merriam-Webster definitions, an assault weapon should be defined as anything used to physically harm someone, but is instead used to refer to a subset of guns that most people can’t agree on.

With the recent school shootings, this term has become commonplace, and during the recent March For Our Lives event, people called for all types of bans or restrictions on these weapons. But what would they define an assault weapon as?

Campus Reform, a conservative news outlet, asked people if they could define what an assault weapon is.

“If you’re asking me, any gun that isn’t a pistol should be banned,” one protester said.

This is ironic considering that according to the Washington Post the most common weapon used in mass shootings is a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.

This shows how grossly misinformed people are and how they are still choosing to march in a campaign in which the goal is to take away rights. People aren’t just misinformed about guns used in murders but the actual amount of deaths as well.

“The same amount of people die by assault weapons as they do by car crashes in a given year,” another protester said.

This is categorically false. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on average there are about 36,252 deaths due to gun violence per year.

And according to the CDC, only 3 percent of those homicides are committed with rifles, approximately 370 in 2016. But the amount of deaths caused by car crashes sits at approximately 37,000 per year, according to the Nation Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

This by itself shows people aren’t interested in stopping deaths; they are just interested in taking a nonexistent moral high ground. The CDC data shows that when guns are severely restricted, gun-deaths typically increase, and banning them outright doesn’t change the homicide rate; it just changes the tools used.

Chicago has some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, but according to the Chicago Tribune, the homicide rate there is around 30 homicides per 100,000 people, Detroit’s is a little under 50 per 100,000, Baltimore is a little above 50 per 100,000 and St. Louis has about 60 per 100,000.

These cities all highly regulate guns, but continue to have incredibly high homicide rates.

Despite this, people still advocate that gun laws will work and that restricting Second Amendment rights will benefit the majority by resulting in fewer deaths. But when hypothetical situations are mentioned that clearly show a gun would be beneficial to have, the response is still no; all guns should be banned.

One protester was given the hypothetical scenario, “Suppose an attacker comes into your house with a gun. Wouldn’t you be at a disadvantage?”

“Indeed, but that’s just, I guess, the bad luck of my life,” the protester said.

They would sooner say that if someone came into their house with a gun, they would rather be shot than have a gun to defend themselves. This invalidates the entire argument that banning guns would save lives because they just showed they don’t actually care about life. They don’t even care that it’s a gun that is being used to end life. Proponents of gun control care that the United States allows people to purchase guns for no reason other than they don’t like guns.

This isn’t to say that gun-related homicides aren’t bad. They are; all deaths are bad, but the majority of homicides are caused by handguns. Next are knives, third are personal weapons, which would be hands, fists, feet, etc. and fourth would be blunt objects such as clubs, hammers and bats.

So should knives be banned? We can’t stop people from having bodies, so I guess those murders will take place no matter what. How about banning every blunt object that can be used as a weapon?

Guns can serve a useful purpose. They can be used for hunting; they can be used for self-defense because, as stated earlier, people will use a lot more than just guns to kill.

The problem is that this is a political issue. One side views guns as a tool while the other looks at them as weapons that can only cause pain, but anything can be abused and misused to cause suffering. No one wants more school shootings, and if the shouting match ever ends and people sit down to talk about the real issues at hand, there won’t need to be any more.