Yeah, I guess that's pretty obvious, but not what I was driving at -- or rather -- groping for.
I guess what I'm asking is whether as a class, semi-automatic weapons are more deadly than hand guns. That is, is a person intent on a killing spree really more likely to kill more people with an assault rifle than a hand gun? Common sense would say yes, but is that really true? I'm not sure how such a study would be defined.
There seem to be two questions:
1) are assault rifles (semi-auto mod) more deadly than hand guns?
2) does this extra deadliness translate into more kills per spree?
The first question seems easy to answer: yes, an assault rifle has more hitting power and range and can have a much larger magazine. but how reliable is it in the hands of a novice? Seemingly the assault rifle isn't particularly good in that respect since it seems to have jammed on at least two novice mass-shooters lately.
Perhaps novice lunatics are deluded in choosing the assault rifle.
Does this possibly illusory extra killing power translate into more kills per spree? Possibly not. What is interesting is that novice lunatics seem to prefer to use them because they provide a kind of fantasy detachment from the actual killing maybe.
The second question should be easy to answer, but it also has an illusion built into it -- the real extra safety the assault rifle gives its user -- which allows for sprees of greater duration. For example, the Beltway Sniper could not have escaped as easily from the scenes of his attacks if he had been using a hand gun -- he would have to have been much closer.