First, he's absolutely correct about treating a rifle (or smooth bore for the pedantic) correctly.
Second, I think they've been tweaking the statistics a little. It would be very difficult for a marksman to kill 17 people with a daisy BB gun. When I was a kid everybody had one and BB gun fights were normal*. Being the Yankee in Virginia, I got my ass peppered on a regular basis until my dad got me a Benjamin pump gun**. That one had a bolt action and you could pump it multiple times. Seven pumps would but a BB through half an inch of pine. I shot a couple of the little bastards in the belly and the BB gun fights became significantly less popular. Still, nobody was seriously harmed, much less killed. They did more damage to me shooting me with an arrow than those silly Daisies.

* yes, I know that that was improper use of a weapon, but it was their turf and I was playing by local rules. In those days, I was expected to hold my own, but not cause permanent damage. The local assholes were not constrained by the same rules.

** I still have it. My father kept it when I moved out and just gave it back to me when he downsized his house a couple years ago. Fifty something years old and curiously enough the skunks that used to rule the back yard have left for other environs...