Good question. David Chipman, Biden’s nominee to run the ATF, couldn’t come up with a definition but he wants to ban them anyway. Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana pressed him for a definition. Chipman said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.” Senator Cotton of Arkansas did as well. Chipman tried to redirect the question to Congress and dredged up an old memo on suspect weapons crossing the southern border. He described the memo defining an assault rifle as semi-automatic, detachable magazine, in caliber 22 on up. He just made illegal most of the rifles and pistols in the possession of good American citizens.
That’s the problem with the mythical gun: it can’t be defined in any sensible way. It’s a rhetorical mirage. Take a look at the rifles below. Which one is an “assault rifle”? Is it “A” or “B”?
A:
B:
You say “B”. Why not “A”? “B” looks military – it’s the notorious AR-15 – and “A” is for hunting Bambi, you might say. So it must be about the looks of “B”, right?
Looks is the only difference because both are semi-automatic, besides the fact that the hunter uses the more powerful 30-06 round as opposed to the smaller 5.56 in the other.
Will “B” assault you more effectively than “A”? If so, how so? Will the bullet out of the barrel of “B” assault you more effectively than the projectile leaving the barrel of “A”? Let me help you. The answer is “no”. Both will tear into anything that happens to be in the way. Thus, all guns with a bullet exiting the barrel “assault” whatever is in their path.
Of course, the thing just sits there as an inert piece of metal, wood, and plastic, till a human mind behind a human finger at its trigger turns it into a projectile-ejecting tool. No human, no assault. Simple.
Is the semi-automatic feature scary to you? You see “automatic” in semi-automatic. They aren’t the same. For all intents and purposes, full auto weapons aren’t available to you and I. The only thing that we can get is a gun that will fire only one round with each pull of the trigger. “A” does it just as well as “B”.
Chipman enters Alice’s Wonderland when he said that the AR-15 was issued to him as a federal agent and called it a “particularly lethal weapon”. Particularly lethal? How? All guns are lethal if you happen to be in the flight path of the bullet. Just point ’em in a dangerous direction. And another round will issue out of the hunter as quickly as the AR.
The “assault rifles” discussion is demented. If you can play word games with a legal and widely available gun in order to ban it, then any gun can be banned if you can find the right word chemistry to use against it. And there goes the 2nd Amendment.
RogerG
*Also on my Facebook page.