By you not answering my question you’re confirming that, regardless of how unlikely the scenario, there are uses for automatic weapons outside of a warzone.
Aside from my hypothetical scenario there’s other, albeit rare, situations where someone could have benefited from a dangerous weapon. Do you recall the motorcyclists gang assaulting an innocent driver on the West Side Highway a number of years ago? Do you think the Holocaust might have turned out differently if Yidden were armed with automatic weapons back then?
Without doing any research I’m going to agree with you that the number of people who saved themselves from automatic weapons is dwarfed by the number of people killed by automatic weapons.
I still, respectfully, disagree with you that banning automatic weapons is the right way to go.
As unlike as you think my scenario is that you refer to it as “ridiculous” an even more unlikely scenario is that all guns in the USA just disappear by tomorrow. If the US does go ahead and ban all guns- do you honestly think that those who have illegal guns will go ahead and surrender them?
Let’s say they do go ahead with the ban and forcibly confiscate all guns from registered owners- do you think the country would be safer or more dangerous as now the criminals won’t be afraid that the person they’re carjacking or burglarizing is armed? Do you honestly think the death rate would go down?
Even if the government would somehow confiscate every single fire arm and the country would be gun free- do you think that would stop mass murderers? These attacks are carefully planned out- they’re not, in general, caused by someone who woke up on the wrong side of his bed, found an automatic weapon and decided to shoot up a school. They’ll resort to truck ramming attacks or something similar.
How about social media companies change their algorithms from searching for people with conservative views to searching for people with mental health issues making threatening posts. If these people are adequately looked into and put away where they can’t harm others I think the mass killings would drop significantly.