Countless doesn’t seem totally accurate. Last I checked the FBI census a few years back showed 318 deaths over a year due to long guns in the United States. That includes shotgun, rifle, and scary “assault” weapons.
Handguns on the other hand kill 100x-200x the same amount of people. Seems like if gun control proponents wanted to reduce harm, they’d focus on handguns first.
I’m not sure why you need to split your focus on handguns versus long guns. I bet most gun deaths are caused by right-handed people too, but that doesn’t mean we should focus on gun laws for right-handed people first.
Because that's what politicians do. Tons of talk about banning "weapons of war" that are rarely used to kill anyone, meanwhile handguns are used for murder/suicide much more often, but they rarely make the news because they aren't scary looking, and because the majority of crimes with them are committed by minorities, so Democrats don't want more restrictions on them.
And before anyone says it, no, that last part is not some right-wing racist conspiracy. A couple of years ago in Maryland, the governor wanted harsher punishments for people using handguns to commit crimes because of how bad gun violence is in Baltimore, and the state Democrats said it was a racist policy because it would mostly affect minorities. They didn't want to seem soft on gun violence though, so they banned bump stocks, which have never been used to commit a crime in Maryland, and which the ATF says are trivial to reproduce using belt loops and rubber bands.
No idea since homicide by drowning is notoriously hard to prove[0], but the median pool is more likely to drown someone than the median "assault weapon" is to kill someone.
~10 million swimming pools in the US vs. ~20 million "assault weapons," and there are fewer murders annually with long guns of all types (of which "assault weapons" are a small subset) than there are pool drownings. Also pools disproportionately kill kids, while most victims of gun violence ate adults.
Handguns on the other hand kill 100x-200x the same amount of people. Seems like if gun control proponents wanted to reduce harm, they’d focus on handguns first.