That guy was a scary motherfucker in the Winter War. I don't remember whether the Wikipedia article you linked mentions it, but I seem to recall that a reporter asked him once how he got to be such a good shot, and he said "Practice."

I phrased my query based on the fact that the moment I start trying to judge by anything other than ordinal position in the survey, myriad possibilities of roughly equal potential suitability come to mind. My first thought was that lower on the list is better, but (like you) I ran into a problem with the "other weapon" option being at the bottom, then I noticed that the "hunting rifle" option came later than the "assault rifle" option which seemed inconsistent with popular understandings of terms like "assault rifle", then I thought about the fact that gun control advocates rate "hunting rifles" as less dangerous than both "assault weapons" (which of course include technically termed assault rifles and handguns of all sorts including "pistols"), and next I realized. . . .

. . . so I just fell back on mentioning the first-blush ordinal guess (in case by "higher level" the querent meant more pacifistic ideas or something like that) and the "any other ordering" contrast to make my question simpler.

tl;dr summary: Yeah, I thought lower made more sense in some respects, but had second (and third, and more) thoughts as you did, so I just simplified the question.

A major incentive in the design of the combat rifle was a cost-benefit analysis in terms of the expenses involved in the training, equipping, and potential resource loss of soldiers. Better-trained soldiers outfitted with larger-cartridge battle rifles -- even when they are semi-auto only and not select fire rifles, like the M1 Garand -- are more individually effective, for instance, than assault rifles. On the other hand, fielding such more highly trained, effectively equipped soldiers is much more expensive and a greater loss to aggregate military power when they die in the field than the same of less highly-trained, more lightly equipped soldiers. That is, someone who can make full use of a battle rifle out to its ideal engagement range and issued such a rifle is significantly more effective in the field than someone whose skills do not extend past the ideal engagement range for an assault rifle issued such a rifle -- but the former is more expensive, both to deploy and to lose in combat, than warranted by the increase of individual effectiveness, if you treat the value of the soldier's life as nonexistent and only regard the soldier as being equivalent in value to equipment.

Of course, this thinking also tends to undervalue the often substantial value of the exceptional case of a single soldier who can account for a far higher number of lesser-trained, lesser-equipped enemy soldiers from longer ranges, because the capability to reliably perform under such circumstances is essentially prohibited by the strategic decision to issue assault rifles by default and only provide combat and marksmanship training out to around 350 meters to the general run of soldiers. It's the classical mistake of focusing on the statistical averages to the exclusion of considering the sometimes overriding value of the exceptional case.

The American Revolutionary War was essentially won by the exceptional cases, after all (discounting, for the moment, additional factors such as French assistance).

Okay, thanks.

I "voted" for the "I own an assault rifle" option. Given common ideas of what what constitutes a "hunting rifle" (though an AR-15 is one of the "varmint hunting" rifles of choice), I do not own a "hunting rifle", but I own at least one of every other category of weapon mentioned. There are at least two caveats that apply to my case, and one more that probably applies to the way you phrased things.

The first caveat for my specific case is that, technically, an assault rifle is defined as a select fire (has a switch or other way to toggle between firing "semi-auto", or one shot per trigger pull, and "full-auto" aka "automatic", or more than one shot per trigger pull) combat rifle that fires an intermediate or carbine cartridge. What I own is a semi-auto (that is, not select fire and not full-auto) AR-15 -- what mainstream media dimwits and politicians who hate scary black firearms often call an "assault weapon" -- which is not technically an assault rifle, though the US military's M16 is a family of assault rifle variants of the AR-15. All AR-15s, including the various M16 variants, fire 5.56x45mm or .223 Remington cartridges (the two cartridge types are close enough to identical than they are essentially interchangeable), an intermediate cartridge.

The second caveat for my specific case is that civilian AR-15s are among the most favored "varmint hunting" rifles available -- used for hunting medium-smallish animals often regarded as pests, such as coyotes and rabbits.

Putting both of these conditions together, I selected "assault rifle" because I thought you would probably mean a semi-auto AR-15 rifle with a high-capacity magazine to fall within that category, and probably consider "hunting rifle" to include things more like high-power bolt action rifles with wooden stocks. More on that next.

For the more general caveat about phrasing, a hunting rifle is in many cases going to qualify as "bigger" than an assault rifle by any technical standard. By definition (as already mentioned), an assault rifle is a select fire rifle, usually with a barrel 20 inches or shorter, that fires an intermediate or carbine cartridge. What most people think of as "hunting rifles" are often longer-barrel semi-auto or single-action rifles (bolt action being a common case) that fire a high-power cartridge, making them typically longer than assault rifles and chambered for a bigger cartridge than assault rifles (.30-06 and .308 Winchester being common examples of such high power cartridges, both with a military battle rifle origin -- .308 as the roughly identical 7.62x51mm cartridge). Because they are not as intensively designed for compactness and convenient carrying over long distances as assault rifles, such big game "hunting rifles" are often also heavier and, in some respects, bulkier than assault rifles, even ignoring barrel length. I rather suspect you would have intended the explicitly military-oriented design of assault rifles to qualify as being "higher level" than the "hunting rifle", though.

I could go on about the definitions of terms like "assault rifle", "combat rifle", and "battle rifle"; the history and common uses of the various cartridges and rifles mentioned; and other somewhat-related matters, but the things I already explained comprise the stuff I think directly relevant to this specific survey.

I know this is a lot more than called for by the specific informal survey here, but I thought it might be worthwhile to explain some of my hesitations over answering the survey, how I arrived at the choice I did, and (by application of the information contained in my babbling) how to make such a question more precise in the future.

I'm looking at this list, and I do not know how to identify what you consider the "highest level". If I had to judge by position, it would seem that "I own a combat knife or other melee implement" trumps "I own a pistol", "I own a hunting rifle", and "I own an assault rifle". Is that correct?