We need to be real about the people who want to ban assault weapons, specifically the AR-15, while ignoring handguns.
On average, about 500 Americans are murdered with rifles of any kind every year. More than 12,000 Americans are murdered with handguns every year.
At it's core, the arguments for banning the AR-15 needs to come back to, "If we banned this specific weapon, this either wouldn't have happened or it wouldn't have been as bad."
Well, if that argument were true, which it's not, it's logically incoherent and probably downright immoral to crusade for banning the weapon that kills a couple hundred, mostly white people per year, while ignoring the guns that kill several thousand, mostly not white people per year.
It also doesn't work because, before Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history was committed with two handguns. Moreover, the Vegas shooting was the man bites dog story to end all man bites dog stories. It's not common for a person with the money that Paddock had to snap like that and be able to afford a luxury room on the strip and $50,000 worth of weapons.
On that note, this is a perfect example of people focusing on the man bites dog stories. The overwhelming majority of the gun violence problem in this country happens in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (which are all heavily Democrat with strict gun laws) with handguns. The high profile cases of gun violence are the mass shootings because, despite the increase in occurrence, are still rare.
I had just moved to DC when the Navy Yard shooting happened. I remember it vividly because my roommate at the time worked at the Navy Yard. Fortunately, he wasn't there. The first report from CNN was that the shooter used an AR-15 shotgun, which is a gun that doesn't exist and never has. The shooter used a shotgun and a couple of handguns. The point here is that the crusaders against assault weapons tend to know so little about guns that they could read the CNN report of an AR-15 shotgun being used and think nothing of it and march in the streets to call for a ban of a weapon that wasn't used.
Basically, if you're taking the Piers Morgan approach to gun control, which is the aggressive prioritization of the restriction of assault weapons, you definitely don't know guns, you definitely haven't done your research, you're definitely looking at the man bites dog stories over the actual data, and, if you actually have looked at all of that and still prioritize the banning of the AR-15, you're probably a little bit racist.