Resolved: Assault weapons should be banned for civilian ownership.

With that, I will attempt to effectively answer the cross-examination questions posed. 1)To answer this question, I entreat my opponent to consider the following scenario: a mass-shooter walks into, say, a crowded movie theatre, with people placed compactly together as he stated in the question. Say the shooter possesses five magazines, each with a capacity of ten rounds, as my opponent would like to limit magazine capacity to. There are fifty people in the theatre, not including the shooter. That means that if the shooter uses more than one round on even a single person, as would be the case if he was firing inaccurately, at least one person would be guaranteed to survive. Rather simply, the shooter would run out of bullets. On the other hand, if he was firing accurately, giving him time to aim down sights, he would be able to maximize fatalities given that a police response would more than likely take longer than exhausting ammunition supplies. In short, accuracy increases lethality towards UNARMED civilians, whereas hip-firing is designed to save a soldier"s life when he is under attack from dozens of ARMED opponents and thus does not have the time to aim. 2)As explained above, accuracy maximizes killing capacity, whereas inaccuracy simply leads to additional ammunition being expended. 3)There are two issues with the statistic presented here: firstly, it only takes into account "mass" shootings, and secondly, it is highly misleading. To address the first issue, I will start by accepting Mother Jones"s definition of a mass shooting as described in my opponent"s source. The trouble with "mass shootings" is that despite near-constant media attention given to them, those particular incidents, while tragic, only compose a fraction of murders in America. As for the second issue, as I have already stated, total murders committed with rifles of any type, not just assault weapons, account for under 2% of all murders. Even Mother Jones"s statistics, which only include data from mass shootings, confirm that a plurality of mass shooters use semiautomatic handguns, not assault weapons as currently defined by any law or for the purpose of this debate, to commit their heinous acts. I believe that my opponent confuses handguns for assault rifles, as the only source he reported stated that handguns account for 71 of the 143 weapons used in mass shootings. Of mass shooters" weapons, only 20 of those 143 were defined by Mother Jones as "assault weapons. " Only about a third of them even used "high-capacity" magazines. Thus the statistic cited by my opponent is incorrect. On the other hand, according to all the sources I reviewed, "assault weapons" accounted for a minority of weapons used in mass shootings. While it may or may not be accurate that assault weapons lead to more fatalities in a given mass shooting, the same will be true of any rifle, since the bullet itself is usually larger than common handgun ammunition. This lethality is not unique to assault rifles; all rifles will be deadlier than a handgun round-for-round. Highly-publicized mass shootings tend to use assault rifles, in my opinion, for the "fear factor;" that is, to an untrained eye, an AR-15 appears to be far more frightening than a .30-06, even though the latter has a bigger bullet with more powder behind it. Any terrorist"s goal is to create fear, and if a certain type of rifle is more effective at doing so, he will use it even though it might be less deadly than his grandfather"s old hunting rifle.