Why are gun rights supporters worried about bans on so-called assault weapons?

that and the fact that we own semi auto rifles that are NOT assault weapons( even Bill Clintons administration members finally admitted that there are NO assault weapons it wa s made up) and enjoy shooting our weak but fun ARs is enough for me

I believe that those in congress can and might classify just about any gun they want to eliminate as a Assault weapon. It will not matter wheither or not their defination is correct, If they pass it, it can be banned.

"Assault weapon" has no fixed meaning.

It's merely whatever any given anti-gun cultist wants to ban at any given moment.

The last sentence it the same logic that people use when arguing against "gateway drugs".


Like any decent salesman would tell you getting "your foot in the door" is the most important part of making a deal.

Or the same way to eat an elephant, one bite at a time...

The author, Eugene Volokh, is a prominent pro 2A law professor. His blog considers many legal issues other than 2A, and is worth reading.

"Assault weapon" has been an established military term for several decades, meaning a rocket launcher platform used to soften the resistance of defending forces along with aerial bombardments before a large scale infantry assault.

It was coined as a propaganda term after the widespread ridicule anti gun movement was subjected to after starting to call some semiautomatic guns "assault rifles". Nobody bothered to check if the term already had a well defined meaning or not.

I remember the proposed early ban lists very well. Mainly because they consisted of 100% the same and only guns that were listed in 1986 and 1987 editions of Shooter's Bible catalog section. Literally every single gun that was listed and looked even slightly unconventional was on the list, none that weren't was. Absolutely, positively and without the shadow of a doubt picture book "logic", and there's no question how they came up with their list.

Even a real assault weapon doesn't make anyone a violent criminal. If you have the funds, the means and a place to fire a hundred or so high explosive rockets to a distance of several miles, there's no real reason why you shouldn't be able to do so. That may be an extreme example, but that's how it should work in practise.

Many are mistaken that it was the anti gun crowd popularized the terms "assault rifle" and "assault weapon". Both terms were made mainstream by firearms manufacturers and gun writers in the late 70s and early 80s.

Assault rifle as a term has its roots firmly in StG44 Sturmgewehr, even though it still seems to be a subject of debate who's responsible for the english translation. Assault weapon and many other terms may have been used by gunwriters in special interest publications for quite some time, but whatever was implied with them was by no means common knowledge to general public until much later. I'm too young to remember the 1968 Gun Control Act and I've never bothered to browse through press archives of the time, but if any new, artificial terms to describe various types of guns were coined at the time, I'm not aware of any of them having stuck. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

The supreme court recently denied cert to over turn a weapons ban case. And the Heller decision left the door open to ban dangerous and unusual weapons.

Jody Powell tried to tell Bill Clinton in 1994, via George Stephenopolos, that the AWB would be a loser politically and probably cost the Dems Congress.George agreed.

Bill ignored Jody and George and the GOP grabbed
the Senate and the House for the first time since 1954.

Jody was quite a brilliant man.

Even if some rifles were actually "Assualt weapons" what difference at this point does it make to ban them? We have a second amendment.

I agree with the author, but alas, it is still coming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yWkq-ZMQtg

The writer mentions the early years of the war on drugs. The drugs were banned, and it made absolutely no difference in availability on the street. So, after a few years of the dog chasing its tail, now there's a push to legalize drugs. Id it possible the same scenario may repeat itself with guns? Ban them, then when crime doesn't go down, legalize them with stiff taxes attached. That gives the liberals their victory: ban guns, then heavily restrict them, and add billions of dollars to the treasure to buy more votes.

I hear that New Jersey just decided that a pellet gun with
a suppressor is now an assault weapon, and is now banned.
Not sure but I heard it on the radio.

Zeke

Good article, but really anyone who doesn't understand why we'd be concerned about another assault weapons ban is terriblely ignorant. They've done it once, and every Dem currently running for POTUS has openly stated they want to put it back in place.


The questions answer is so obvious, I don't even know why he wrote the article to begin with. A 6 year old can see why there's concern if they pay Just a little bit of attn.

This is not just some Washington Post op-ed:
o Volokh Conspiracy is a long-running blog by a dozen law professors, generally libertarian, commenting in favor of free speech, gun rights, etc.
o While VC has found a "home" at Washington Post, it is independent of WaPo and does not represent WaPo opinion.
o UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh does write academic articles published in peer reviewed journals and has been cited in Supreme Court decisions in favor of gun rights.
o The illustration to Eugene Volokh's article was a photo by Oleg Volk.
o 695 comments to this one article so far. 695 is a lot, but VC articles often gather hundreds of comments.

Arkansas Paul said:

I'm not sure what they writer's exact views are, but he does seem to get how we think.

Click to expand...

If you want to know what the writers views are, it's all right here. A LOT of good reading IMO.

From Volokh's mouth to Obama and Bloomies ears.

Bill ignored Jody and George and the GOP grabbed
the Senate and the House for the first time since 1954.

Click to expand...

Then "we" provided a full sweep, POTUS, House and Senate and they did nothing except let it sunset and hope we would come together again and again, forever relying on them to save us at every election.....

First of all, "assault weapon" was an undefined term. It was thought up so as to conjure up an impression of an ASSAULT RIFLE, which is a defined term (an intermediate caliber weapon capable of selective fire.)

They defined "assault weapon" based on how the weapon looks. For example, one attribute of an "assault weapon" was a bayonet lug -- when was the last time someone was bayonetted in this country?

The result was a hodge-podge of restrictions of a purely arbitrary nature -- with two virtually identical guns, one could be legal, the other outlawed because it had a single non-functional feature the banners didn't like.

And once such a law was in place, all they had to do was amend it now and then, adding more and more features until almost all guns were defined as "assault weapons" and banned.

Finally, after 10 years the "assault weapon" ban expired -- and even it's most ardent supporters are unable to claim that it had any effect on violent crime. In other words, it was totally useless.

I tend to worry when laws with disproportionally heavy sentences that don't fit the crime are passed especially when the reasoning behind them makes no logical sense.