As the Crime Prevention Research Center has often pointed out, television crime shows seem to think criminals constantly use machine guns to commit crime. Unfortunately, CBS’s FBI International TV show is no different (Season 3, Episode 1, February 13, 2024). This episode shows an assassin firing a machine gun to murder a witness behind the bombing of the FBI’s Budapest, Hungary headquarters..
In real life, criminals generally use machine guns so rarely that a 2016 survey of prison inmates only broke down the numbers for uses in crime of handguns (11.2%), rifles (0.8%), and shotguns (1.1%). There are few rifles, and the survey did not even mention fully automatic weapons. A similar finding is available from the FBI UCR report, where 2.6% of all murders involve rifles of any type and 0.3% of all murders involve unspecified “other guns.” There is a reason for that. Since 1934, there was only one possible known use of a civilian using a machine gun in a murder. And even before 1934, they were very rare. Machine gun attacks in Europe are also rare, though there have been attacks such as the Paris concert massacre in 2015 where machine guns were used. But we don’t know the exact total.
Examples of similar television shows can be found here.
CBS’s FBI International (Season 3, Episode 1, February 13, 2024)
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