I find this debate basically silly. The people who own person-killing machines aren't typically the ones doing the person killing. That is done by hand guns almost exclusively. If we want to talk about safety, we should be talking about ways of ensuring that would-be criminals don't end up with hand guns. Really this "debate" is mostly about how we don't like things that look big and scary and mean. I've personally known six people who have been shot, four as criminal acts (two of whom died), two by suicide. All of the crimes, and one of the suicides were hand guns. The other suicide was a shotgun, also not on the assault weapon list. This doesn't include the 10 or so people I know who have been robbed at gun point, also all by hand guns. The only people I know who own high powered rifles are responsible sportsmen.