Sorry I’m seeing your reply after writing a veritable essay to someone else above you. :)
But the primary reasons are weight and self defense.
A traditional hunting rifle has a stronger caliber, but is around 2 pounds heavier and has a lower capacity.
In terms of self defense, you want a lighter weight and a higher capacity. Makes it easier to carry, easier to control, and easier to defend yourself against multiple intruders, something which, unfortunately, has happened multiple times:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/home-invader-fatally-shot-florida-pregnant-woman-ar-15-n1076026
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-man-uses-ar-15-kill-three-teen-home-intruders-n739541
Quick! While you’re doing numbers, compare the number of times a gun didn’t “solve” that problem vs the number of times a gun was misused and someone died. False-negative vs false-positive. It’s just numbers and not relevant, but see how it goes.
All we can go by are the overall numbers and how often guns are used illegally, either for suicide or offense, and it’s actually surprisingly small.
There are over 474,000,000 guns in the United States, of all types.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/
On average, every year, there are 25,000 suicides by gun. 6 out of every 10 gun deaths.
https://www.everytown.org/issues/gun-suicide/
25,000 / 474,000,000 = 0.005274%
So if 25,000 is 6/10 that means the other 4/10 is somewhere around 16,666. (25,000 / 6, *4).
Of those, a further 800 to 900 are people shot and killed by police.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
Each death is, individually, a tragedy, but when you’re talking 474 million guns and 330 million people, it’s not a statistically significant number (0.003516% of guns and 0.005050% of people). There are a lot of stupid people out there and IQ is not a barrier to gun ownership.
If the guns themselves were the sole problem, the number of deaths would be in the millions, not the low thousands.
Defensive gun use numbers are hotly contested, but low-end estimates are in the hundreds of thousands of instances per year in the US source 1, source 2. Those numbers include times when simply pulling a gun was enough to stop a situation from escalating into a overt violence. Obviously people that oppose 2A civil rights wish to downplay defensive firearm use as a way to prevent violence, and people that support 2A civil rights want to champion those numbers. Per my second source, it is disputed that those instances of defensive gun use ‘saved lives’–many of them might have been used to e.g. scare off burglars–but there’s it’s harder to dispute that defensive gun use is quite high. It should also be obvious that it’s impossible to know whether a life would have been lost or not without defensive gun use; there’s no reasonable way to know if, for instance, a home invasion robbery would have turned into a murder if you were unarmed.
