In an old army training film, the Garand was touted has having superior rates of fire as a semi over the bolt action, since with the bolt action one had to remove one's hand from the trigger to operate the bolt. Still, a bolt action could be operated pretty quickly --- just not as quickly.
A lever action helps overcome the necessity of removing the hand and reaching up, but it still removes the finger from the trigger temporarily. During the production of the old TV series The Rifleman actor Chuck Connors was trained how to manually cycle a Winchester 1892 quickly enough to almost simulate semi auto fire by keeping his trigger finger in a specific place, but ultimatly insurance concerns prevented this and the tricked out set screw was introduced into the trigger guard to perform the task .... however, the sequence at the beginning of the intro (where Connors shoots 11 rounds instead of the carbine's normal 10 round capacity due to editing) suggests how fast a lever action might be used.
I've heard a lot of people argue that if ARs were banned people would only be able to use slower firing weapons and someone might be able to thus overpower a shooter. However, no one seems to "get" that the semi auto AR-15 fires no faster than, say, a WW2 era M-1 carbine, Garand, or other semiauto. Even a double-action revolver can fire plenty fast, though for only 6 rounds.
A similar argument is made to limit magazine capacity to 10 rounds ...or 8, or 6, or whatever. The idea is that during a mag change someone could run toward the shooter and overpower him.
What I'd like to see, in any scenario, is someone running TOWARD the shooter. In the Pulse Club, and other mass shootings, it seems that everyone is running away from the shooter.
Except the police.
So I rather doubt that banning any weapon will have much effect on anything.
The Virginia Tech school shooter, Cho, used two handguns rather than an AR-15, and killed more victims in that school shooting than Adam Lanza or others.