Absentia wrote:Surprised nobody has mentioned it yet: Dick's Sporting Goods, the largest sporting goods retailer in the country, has announced they will no longer sell assault rifles (Dick's branded stores haven't sold them since Sandy Hook in 2012, but their outdoor specialty Field & Stream stores have up until now). They're also eliminating sales of high capacity magazines and restricting all firearms sales to customers over 21 years old.
Assault rifles have been almost completely illegal since 1934. What they're actually banning is rifles that fall into the category of "assault weapons". Notice that the ABC article says "assault-
style rifles" rather than "assault rifles"--in other words, guns that
look like an assault rifle but actually aren't, like the AR-15.
Here's a post I wrote elsewhere on the difference between assault rifles and "assault weapons", and the reason why minding the difference is so important for anyone who supports gun control.
As far as I can tell nobody disputed that the AR-15 is an "assault weapon" under the definition provided in the 1994 AWB. They're disputing whether the AR-15 is an "assault rifle".
The relevance of this is that assault rifles are, by definition, capable of fully automatic fire. The M16 is an assault rifle, for instance. Fully automatic fire is a feature that most Americans have agreed should not be allowed on mass-market civilian firearms, so if the AR-15 were an assault rifle then even most gun-rights people would think it should be banned. Only a minority of the most extreme gun control opponents think full-auto weapons should be allowed again, and the rest of the gun-rights movement tends to resent being lumped in with those folks, for the same reason liberals hate being lumped in with communists. That's why they hate it when you accuse them of wanting "assault rifles" to be legal.
By contrast, the legal definition of "assault weapon" was a semiautomatic weapon that possesses a detachable magazine and also possesses any of a list of ancillary features that were deemed threatening, including a bayonet lug, barrel shroud, underbarrel grenade launcher, silencer threads, a pistol grip on a non-handgun, or a collapsible stock.
While some of these criteria made perfect sense (grenade launchers for instance are a pretty absurd thing for a civilian to have), a lot of them are pretty arbitrary and unrelated to a weapon's killing power. For instance, barrel shrouds are a safety device designed to keep you from burning yourself on a hot barrel. They tend to make a gun look more "military" since shrouds are most common on military weapons, but they don't do anything to make the gun more powerful and they actually make it a bit harder to conceal if anything.
Consequently, there are quite a lot of Americans who think the Assault Weapons Ban was too broad, even among more moderate gun control supporters. It's certainly much more controversial than banning assault rifles, so it's important not to confuse the two.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn