Although AWs are used in a small percentage of gun crimes, some have argued
that AWs are more likely to be used in crime than other guns, i.e., that AWs are more
attractive to criminal than lawful gun users due to the weapons’ military-style features
and their particularly large ammunition magazines. Such arguments are based on data
implying that AWs are more common among crime guns than among the general stock of
civilian firearms. According to some estimates generated prior to the federal ban, AWs
accounted for less than one percent of firearms owned by civilians but up to 11% of guns
used in crime, based on firearms reported by police to ATF between 1986 and 1993 (e.g.,
see Cox Newspapers, 1989; Lennett, 1995). However, these estimates were problematic
in a number of respects. As discussed in Chapter 6, ATF statistics are not necessarily
representative of the types of guns most commonly recovered by police, and ATF
statistics from the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular tended to overstate the
prevalence of AWs among crime guns. Further, estimating the percentage of civilian
weapons that are AWs is difficult because gun production data are not reported by model,
and one must also make assumptions about the rate of attrition among the stock of
civilian firearms.