One of the most common lies told by the Gun Control Complex is the myth about so-called "assault weapons" and "high-capacity magazines." President Obama makes speeches saying, "Weapons of war have no place on our streets," Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State says, "No one hunts with an assault weapon, no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer, stop the madness..." and similar refrains such as these can be heard and read from all manner of media, pundits, and politicians. Another common one is, "No one 'needs' an assault weapon!"
What such people are unaware of is the nonsense of the term assault weapon, the fact that the Second Amendment is not about hunting (hunting is most certainly included, but included in the way that writing romance or science-fiction novels is included in the First Amendment, i.e. it's not the main reason for writing an explicit protection of the right), or that fact that it is one's right and not one's "need."
So what are the problems with the term "assault weapon?" Well, "assault weapon," as a legal-term, is something that was made up by politicians and gun control proponents. It has no actual technical meaning, and its meaning can be constantly changed by said gun controllers depending on if they want to expand its scope so as to ban more guns by labeling them as assault weapons (usually the refrain here is referred to as "closing loopholes"). In the late 1980s, the gun control community saw an ample opportunity to ban whole groups of guns simply by labeling them as "assault weapons" and taking advantage of the ignorance of much of the public about the subject, who would think that they are machine guns that are being banned.
California pioneered the first assault weapons ban, then a federal level one was passed in 1994, which is widely-believed (including by Bill Clinton himself) to have played a major role in why the Democrats lost control of the Congress for the first time in forty years in the 1994 elections. The federal assault weapons ban defined an assault weapon as a "semiautomatic weapon containing at least two Evil Features" (yes they really called them that---later state-level bans got rid of the term due to how ridiculous it sounded; saying one wants to ban guns with evil features won't win the public the way saying one wants to ban guns with special military features that increase their deadliness can win people). The "Evil Features" consisted of a bayonet lug, flash suppressor, grenade launcher (a specific type of grenade launcher), pistol grip, folding or retractable stock, and may have included another feature I am not thinking of, but that was the basic gist of it.
Now, the logic here was flawed for multiple reasons:
1) The right to keep and bear arms is about the right of the people to possess, at the very least, the same basic types of weapons utilized by soldiers. It is not about a right to possess weapons that the government "approves of," no more than the right to free speech or a free press is about speech or media coverage that the government approves of. The debate on this goes all the way back to ancient times, when Aristotle wrote in his work "Politics" about the importance, as he saw it, of the people possessing arms so as to prevent tyranny from forming, and also for protecting against criminals.
By claiming that "military-style" guns can be banned, one might as well do away with the concept of the right to keep and bears arms altogether. This is an ancient concept and has been a fundamental debate throughout history, in that do the people have the right to be armed, or should only the State have the ultimate authority and power over weapons.
2) How exactly these features listed as military-style features (or "evil features" as the federal ban referred to them) is never explained by said bans. How said features make the weapon supposedly more dangerous or deadly is never explained, although pretty much any ergonomic feature that makes a weapon easier for a person to utilize can be claimed as some kind of feature that increases the weapon's deadliness.
3) What can be labeled as a military-style or evil feature can be anything the gun control proponents want it to be.
So even if one wanted to claim that people did not have a right to guns with military features on them, a lot of these features are not actual military features. In reality, almost all are just ergonomic features which make the weapon easier, (and thus SAFER for people to handle. It is not a good idea for someone to have to use awkward and difficult-to-handle weapons for self-defense).
Another common refrain heard is that these are weapons that are "designed to kill people." A common claim is that "assault weapons" are weapons "explicitly designed" to "kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible." How this definition ever came about I have no idea, but it is total nonsense. A semiautomatic rifle does not suddenly become a weapon designed to let you kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible because you attach a bayonet lug to it or a retractable stock for example. As for being designed to kill people, well the problem with this claim is that it gives the impression that guns not labeled as "assault weapons" are not designed to kill people. This is flawed for two reasons:
1) Since the difference between an assault weapon and a non-assault weapon can be a simple ergonomic feature, it's a pretty baseless claim to make that by somehow adding said feature, that the gun now becomes explicitly designed to kill people
2) People are animals, namely the great ape known as Homo Sapien Sapien. If the gun can be used to kill a multitude of other non-human animals, so long as they are within the same size and weight range of humans or moreso, the gun can be used to kill a human.
In addition to the above, technically, almost all guns that are commonly owned by American civilians are military, or functionally identical to military guns or grounded in military designs:
AR-15: Semiautomatic version of the M-16 (actual assault rifle, capable of automatic fire); as such is not technically a "military-grade" weapon.
12 Gauge Pump-Action Shotgun: Extremely common gun among civilians, law enforcement, and the military. Has been used in every military conflict since World War I, where the Germans nicknamed it the "Trench Broom" and wanted its use banned, and wanted to try American soldiers captured using it for war crimes. Design dates to 1885.
Remington 700: Bolt-action hunting rifle. Design grounded in original military bolt-action rifles, which consequently also themselves make excellent hunting rifles. Used by the military and law enforcement in the form of the M24 and M40 sniper rifles. Bolt-actions date back to the 19th century.
9mm handgun: Very popular among civilians, also carried by law enforcement and standard sidearm of the military for many years
.45 caliber handgun: Design dates to 1911 (Colt 1911, hence the name). Very powerful handgun and standard military sidearm for many decades.
Lever-action rifles: Straight-up military firearm, design dates back to mid-19th century. First used by the North in the Civil War. Still extremely popular for self-defense, law enforcement use, and hunting.
And then of course, going back to the Revolution, muskets were military arms, built to be rugged. Many civilians at the time had hunting long guns that were rifled, and thus significantly more accurate than muskets, which were used for volley fire. Muskets tended to be more rugged and were cheaper and simpler to produce.
Yet another baseless claim often made is that so-called "assault weapons" are weapons that one can "fire from the hip." This claim in particular is made by Senator Barbara Boxer. Now for one thing, nobody who is skilled with a long gun (rifle or shotgun) is going to fire it from the hip. Firing from the hip is a Hollywood type of thing. Two, the pistol grip, one of the features to makes such a gun be labeled as an assault weapon, actually makes it more difficult to fire from the hip, and thus makes a person less able to fire it from the hip, not more. So if you want to stop people from having guns that they can fire form the hip, so-called assault weapons would be made the only guns available, not banned!
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