Not true in the least. Are you not familiar with the venerable blunderbuss? Or portable pintle-mounted “swivel guns” that fired a pound of lead balls like a reloadable Claymore?
And that was in an era when relative to the available medical care, a wound—any wound—was far more deadly. Any lunatic could have mowed down the church picnic in 1680 with a blunderbuss. They didn’t. What changed was not firearms, but culture.
Not talking about being able to fire a single-shot weapon into a crowd. While this could be done at any time since the introduction of firearms, the perp would then immediately be beaten to death by the survivors of his attack, long before he could possibly reload. Guys used to compensate for this somewhat with multiple pistols, and double barrel pistols, but this strategy too obviously has severe limitations.
I agree that the culture has changed, resulting in more people, for whatever reason, with the desire to commit mass murder.
However, there is a huge difference in killing effect between a weapon that fires two rounds per minute, vs. one that fires 40 or 60 rounds per minute for basically unlimited minutes as long as ammo holds out.
How conservatives can say they need the rapid fire capability of an AR-15 in case they need to defend themselves against multiple attackers, while at the same time denying that this capability is equally useful for those who want to murder a lot of people quickly is beyond me.
I’m not in favor of additional restrictions on guns, but there are costs to everything. And that mass murder becomes easier is one of the costs of a society with relatively easy access to rapid-fire, easily reloaded weapons.