Americans Don't Have the Right to Bear Just Any Arms

[benEzra]

59. The gun control lobby pushed the "assault weapon" issue as a way to build momentum

"Why did they ban assault weapons in 1994? why do several states have bans on them, encompassing perhaps near a third of the population of the US?"

The gun control lobby originally pushed the "assault weapon" fraud as a way to build momentum for tighter controls on handguns, even knowing full well that rifles weren't a problem.

http://www.vpc.org/studies/awaconc.htm

Unfortunately for them, by going after lawful gun owners instead of criminals, by going after the most popular "enthusiast" guns and demonizing their owners, they provoked an activism backlash from tens of millions of same that all but destroyed the gun control lobby. It still boggles my mind that Sugarmann/VPC and the Brady Campaign didn't see that coming, but once the media swallowed the bait-and-switch then it was probably hard to acknowledge the truth without losing face.

The "assault weapon" meme first gained traction in Washington under the supervision of arch-right-winger William J. Bennett, as I recall, who saw it as a way to look "tough on crime" to right-leaning authoritarians, but all he was able to push through was some arcane import restrictions later codified into 18 USC 922(r) that could be worked around by using U.S.-made parts. Bill Clinton later jumped on the "assault weapon" bandwagon, for exactly the same reason (as a way to triangulate conservative law-and-order types) not realizing the ban would be hugely unpopular with mainstream gun owners. Dems paid the price hard in '94, '96, and '00 for that mistake, as Clinton recounted in his autobiography, and the sitting Speaker of the House lost his seat for the first time since the Civil War.

To this day, it never ceases to amaze me how the gun control lobby became so unhinged over modern rifle styling, and how many otherwise reasonable politicians fell for the wacky rhetoric ("they blow deer to smithereens! don't even have to be aimed! spray fire from the hip! only useful for mass murder!&quot even when faced with the incontrovertible facts that rifles are the least misused of all weapons, and that "assault weapons" are just Title 1 civilian semiautos.

"Proscription provides an upper limit to what combination of lethality & accurate rapid fire can be produced"

Oh, baloney. The original sponsors of the AWB spent as much or more time demonizing oversized 9mm pistols (civilian Uzi, Intratec TEC-9) and civilian 7.62x39mm AK's than they did demonizing AR-15's. They argued that "assault weapons" are inherently inaccurate, "designed for spray firing from the hip", can't be used for target shooting, ad nauseaum. You're probably the first gun control advocate I've had discussions with who actually acknowledged that an AR is as accurate as a bolt-action, all else being equal. Most claim it's not accurate enough to be a target rifle, and are surprised to find it's the most popular target rifle in America.

Second, the AWB was all about posturing and "othering" of gun enthusiasts, not violence prevention or even banning guns. It didn't actually ban the AR-15 platform, or civilian AK's; it only banned 19 marketing names, not actual guns. It easily tripled AR-15 sales, leading to an explosion of new manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s; the company that made mine (Rock River Arms) started making accurized civilian AR's in 1997. The only thing that changed after 2004 was that new Rock Rivers and such could finally have flash suppressors instead of muzzle brakes, and adjustable stocks could finally be sold without locking pins. The Feinstein law also exempted by name other .223 semiautos with the same capacity and rate of fire as the AR, and exempted AR's as long as they weren't named "Colt AR-15" and had a smooth muzzle or a pinned-on brake. It also allowed 30-round AR and AK magazines to be freely imported from all over the world, in the tens of millions. Later Federal proposals did indeed focus on bans, but the original AWB mostly affected pistol magazine prices, not rifles.

BTW, if you think accurate semiautos are ban-worthy, how do you feel about civilian AK-47 derivatives in 7.62x39mm, which shoot lowish-velocity .30-caliber rounds and are only as accurate as a lever-action? Or how about those civilian Uzis and TEC-9's?

"Rather than ask why assault weapons should be prohibited since they are not much used in crime, you should ask what overall benefit do they provide to override the potential mass damage they can produce, whether now or if in the future, they become more common."

They are *already* more common (they are the most common centerfire rifles in U.S. homes, and have been top of the market for going on a couple of decades now). Their "potential mass damage" is no more than any other semiauto civilian rifle using detachable magazines (like the .223 Ruger Mini-14, which Dianne Feinstein herself praised as a legit sporting rifle in '94).

As to what benefit they provide? The same benefits as any other small- and intermediate-caliber civilian rifles feeding from detachable magazines: Light recoil, low penetration (especially .223), less costly to shoot, better reserve capacity, and so on. And your own figures show they're the least misused of weapons, as do the FBI weapons stats.

"These type rifles were mostly designed for use in combat on battlefields where rapid fire & quick incapacitation & death were far more needed than when applied to civilian communities."

No non-automatic .223 is issued by any military on this planet, as far as I am aware, except for some police-type forces. Civilian AR's are widespread as police patrol rifles, but the entire raison d'etre of the scaled-down 5.56mm NATO for military use was to allow more accurate cyclic fire than .308/7.62mm, at the cost of some effective range in semiauto compared to .308. Likewise, the original military AK-47 was designed so that one rifle could replace both the PPSh submachinegun (in automatic mode) and the Mosin-Nagant rifle (in semiautomatic mode). In both cases, the ability to fire in cyclic mode, which a civilian rifle cannot do, is fundamental.

Also, how about those designed-for-combat-on-battlefields rifles that were explicitly created to kill human beings half a mile away?



Look familiar? Because that's the basis of a Winchester Model 70, via the Model 58 (yep, a sporterized Mauser).

Thing is, *all* common civilian rifle types are civilian derivatives of military designs, and in turn many military designs adopted features from civilian guns (look at a Remington Model 1908 and a Kalashnikov sometime, or how many U.S. military rifles and carbines now wear civilian-derived Aimpoint optics). What determines whether a rifle is civilian-legal or military/police-restricted is how it works, not how it looks. If it's under .51 caliber, non-automatic, is made difficult to convert to full auto, and has at least a 16" barrel and 26" overall length, it's a Title 1 civilian rifle. Period.