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I don't deny that an AR is better suited for some situations than, say, an 870 Wingmaster. That'd be plain ol' silly. What I am saying is that your right to own isn't (or shouldn't be) predicated on the popular idea of what's "needed." If you open that door for the antis, then it's only a matter of time before the public is stripped of every firearm, down to and including Daisy Red Riders.
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Modern life is predicated on making decisions in terms of costs and benefits. I hate to break it to you but there aren't alot of absolutes.
SCOTUS explicitly noted that their decision affirming the personal right to bear arms did not preclude regulations barring or severely restricting the ability of individuals from owning particular classes of firearms.
Indeed, we already do this. NFA institutes a different regime for owning particular classes.
So, the question that is going to be dealt with, is whether the easy availability of ARs and such (however any final legislation attempts to define it) has a cost, and is the cost worth the benefit. For all of those individuals that harbor SHTF fantasies of zombie wastelands, that's not a benefit that is going to weigh into the calculation. Neither is the idea that we might need to defend ourselves from marauding bands of BATF agents. We need to get our heads right and our feet on the ground and deal with reality.
In my own personal belief, and as someone who lived in Germany and Sweden for periods of time, I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that semi-automatic weapons, pistols or long guns, have a weak foundation for justifying broad ownership in the civilian population. This isn't an argument that I want to prevail, but I know good, decent, intelligent people that make very good arguments to this effect. They will argue, with very strong empirical evidence, that making killing tools less prevalent in the population, there will be less killing.
Our argument needs to engage them on similar empirical grounds and not 1) Simply denying that some guns are just better at killing than others and 2) that our right to bear arms is absolute. Both are demonstrably false. The first by design, and the second by current law.