Is everything an Assault Rifle now?

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sph33r

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I just watched this new show on Spike called DEA. They are following around some DEA guys in Detroit and, as can be expected, the show is overly dramatic. I still found it mildly entertaining.

In one of their raids, they kept stressing that the dealer had a pistol and how dangerous she could be. When they finally got in her house, they found *gasp* a 2nd gun. One of the officers described it as an "assault rifle" but I wasn't prepared for what she really had. The camera panned down and my eyes beheld the latest in high tech weaponry straight from the war zones of the middle east.... a Hi-Point carbine. Oh noes! It's ugly enough to claim it assaulted my eyes I guess. :neener:

And a parting tidbit.. her primary weapon was a Hi-Point as well. I can't say I was surprised.
 
Haha, yeah the way media would portray it she would have been able to take over the city with a damn Hi-Point-
 
Don't forget there are also those horrible long range sniper rifles too. You know the .270's, .30-'06's, 243's, .308's that people hunt with, and as bad or maybe worse those nasty varmint rifles with their "high powered" scopes. :eek:

Ever notice that every gun is high powered and evil according to the nitwit liberals.
 
I'm curious as to who coined the term " Assualt Rifle" & how come an AR-15 is ( to the media) an "Assault Rifle " but a Mini-14 isn't .
 
I think its simply looks. Black furniture, big thingys on the end of the barrel, etc... (namely, anything that does not look like it was used in WW1 or 2) is considered evil. The AWB actually rekindled my love affair with revolvers and namely, wood on rifles. I picked up a beautiful rebarreled mauser during that time, where I have cycled so many ARs in and out that Ive lost count.

Hi-Point take over a city? Of course! Hennessey makes me think my enemy is gettin close, boom boom boom, got me shootin at a ghost. Dont get me mad, or Ill be havin my Hi-point with Black Talons be bellin! :D My homies are down, so dont arouse my anger, fool! :D

Sorry, couldnt keep from doing that. Ive watched that DEA show and it goes to show you that even some of the police are ignorant of firearms or even are attempting to manipulate public opinion. Its just a matter of perception. :(
 
Pretty simple... the AR is *gasp* black... the mini 14 is an innocent brown (wood) color. The AR also has one of those deadly pistol grips (weapon of mass destruction, dontcha know?).

What really pisses me off are these cops who KNOW BETTER. I think they just want to puff up how dangerous their job is or something. Kinda like fishing stories, in a way. "yeah, the perp had an ASSAULT RIFLE, grenade launcher, and nuclear missile... so I tazed him and took him into custody...". I don't get it. I have friends who are cops and they don't find the need to BS about the stuff they see. If they face someone with knife, it doesn't get turned into a samurai sword when they tell me about it. I don't know why some people have to exaggerate. STUPID.:scrutiny:
 
I'm curious as to who coined the term " Assualt Rifle" & how come an AR-15 is ( to the media) an "Assault Rifle " but a Mini-14 isn't .
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To the antis, *everything* is an assault rifle. I've had several of them attempt to in all seriousness tell me that my SKS is an assault rifle. What can you do but laugh in the face of such ignorance and arrogance? I have not yet met an anti, not een my own mother, who is in good faith interested in being educated in what an "assault rifle" really is and why the AWB of '94 was based on cosmetics, not what a real assault rifle is.
 
Assault Rifle is a .mil term. Not sure where it actually came from originally. The AR-15 in it's full auto (or 3rd burst) guise is an assault rifle, so no surprise there. The Mini-14 doesn't have a pistol grip, that's why the media doesn't always call it an assault rifle. But then if the weapon isn't bad enough they'd just put up stock footage of some "evil" weapon and call it an AK47.
 
Eh, I've seen on the local news a scoped Steyr SSG-69 bolt action rifle called an "assault rifle" by the newscaster.
 
I'm curious as to who coined the term " Assualt Rifle"
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I believe it was Adolph Hitler (or his PR people) with the WWII German Sturmgewehr 44. Literally translated it means "Storm Weapon" or assault rifle. It was the prototype for assault weapons to follow: select fire for semi-auto or full-auto, intermediate cartridge, pistol grip, large capacity magazine, etc.

Jack
 
On The First 48 the other day (a rerun, I'm sure) they had a car that was shot up by some semi-auto AK variant. A responding officer was holding a small box with a 7.62x39 casing in it and said something like "This is a high-powered round fired from an automatic assault weapon".

Not sure how they gathered all that from just a casing, but I wish I had that kind of skill.
 
According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary , the term "Assault Rifle " has been W/ us since 1972. It is a noun, and is defined as

*"any of various automatic or semiautomatic rifles with large capacity magazines designed for military use"

So by that definition my nice, brown wood stock , non-pistol gripped having M-1 carbine is an "Assault Rifle" but my Mini still isn't, maybe if I put one of those funky black plastic stocks on it?

So by that definition an AR with a 5 round magazine WOULDN'T be an "Assault Rifle" right?
 
On The First 48 the other day (a rerun, I'm sure) they had a car that was shot up by some semi-auto AK variant. A responding officer was holding a small box with a 7.62x39 casing in it and said something like "This is a high-powered round fired from an automatic assault weapon".

Not sure how they gathered all that from just a casing, but I wish I had that kind of skill.
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Me too...I was watching an episode, and they picked up a 7.62x39 next to the dead guy and said he was gunned down by an AK47...Now how they knew it was an AK and not an SKS or something else I will never know.:confused:
 
<Redheaded guy from CSI, leans down to pick up an empty casing> ".308, that's a sniper round. Looks like we've got a big problem here boys."
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You forgot to add a few unneeded pauses in there. This is more like it.

<Redheaded guy from CSI, leans down to pick up an empty casing> ".308... that's a sniper round. Looks like.... we've got a big problem here boys."
Click to expand...
 
Quote:
<Redheaded guy from CSI, leans down to pick up an empty casing> ".308, that's a sniper round. Looks like we've got a big problem here boys."
You forgot to add a few unneeded pauses in there. This is more like it.

Quote:
<Redheaded guy from CSI, leans down to pick up an empty casing> ".308... that's a sniper round. Looks like.... we've got a big problem here boys."
Click to expand...



AHHHHHHH!!!!! You got me there.:p
 
I believe it was Adolph Hitler (or his PR people) with the WWII German Sturmgewehr 44. Literally translated it means "Storm Weapon" or assault rifle. It was the prototype for assault weapons to follow: select fire for semi-auto or full-auto, intermediate cartridge, pistol grip, large capacity magazine, etc.
Click to expand...

The quest for intermediate power

Most countries went back to war in 1939 still tooled up with a mixture of bolt-action rifles, submachineguns, and supporting machine guns firing full-poke rifle ammo. After handing everyone else a massive kicking in the first couple of years, however, the Germans carried out some analysis of the way things had gone while they were grinding Europe under their jackbooted heels.

The remorselessly efficient Nazis found that it was, in fact, very rare for soldiers to shoot at one another from distances much greater than 400-600 yards. The beautiful old bolt-action rifles with their powerful cartridges and thousand-yard accuracy were massively over-spec’d, and they were still far from ideal in a close-up scrap. The Germans decided to make a serious move towards an intermediate-power cartridge, lying between pistol and rifle. They designed a new weapon to go with it.

This new class of weapon would be powerful enough to make kills out to 500 yards or thereabouts, but light and handy. It held a lot of bullets and it could be fired on full auto by a standing, unsupported man. It could do nearly every job well enough, and it could be cheap to make as well.

There remained the question of what to call the new class of gun, however. The Germans initially called it a “machine carbine,” then changed their mind and filed it among the submachineguns as the Maschinen Pistole 1943, refined in 1944 to become the MP44. It’s generally thought that the designers did this because Hitler was a great believer in the mystique of the storm trooper, so much so that Nazi political thugs operated under that title at one point – which has led to the unsavoury connotations of the term “stormtrooper” in English. (Not to mention its usage in the Star Wars movies, one might suggest. There’s no surer way among Anglos to suggest that a government is menacing and evil than calling its soldiers storm troopers.) The signature weapon of the Nazi storm trooper was the machine-pistol, and a gun with an “MP” title was more likely to gain political approval.

But even Hitler could see that the new gun wasn’t really a machine-pistol. Nonetheless, it needed to evoke the legend of the storm trooper. In the end, the Nazis decided to call it a “Sturm Gewehr,” or “storm rifle” – a rifle for stormtroopers. This was translated into English as “assault rifle,” and so the new type of weapon was misnamed forever. Assault rifles don’t have any particular connection with assault operations, as we’ve seen: they’re general-purpose guns.

Sorry about all that – but at least we know what we’re on about now. ®
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From this article:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/03/gun_dork_history/page2.html
 
Yes, I saw that same clip on DEA. Some cops know better than to call a High Point an assault rifle, I think most just don't have the knowledge necessary to distinguish a rifle from an assault rifle. Of those who know the difference and still call it that anyways, they know that if they can increase hype about crime, then they can get a bigger budget or new equipment so they ignore the facts.

Anyways, another aspect of the DEA show I found annoying was when the agents talked about how irritating it was that property owners confront them when they park in unmarked vehicles and out of uniform to meet drug informants. They talk about this as they are doing just that, and being hassled by a nearby homeowner, because it looks like a drug deal going down. Of course what they don't want to acknowledge is that if every property owner in that neighborhood ran drug dealers off their property it would cause crime to go down in that area.
 
Let's be fair, half of the people that newly get into guns and are sympathetic to our cause call them "assault rifles", unwittingly. People who like guns are not gonna care if they are referred to as "Homeland defense weapons" or "splatter the brains of your attacker guns".

I am curious why there are so many who are offended by the term though...

So the term is being used by the media to "demonize" semi auto carbines and guns in general... The anti's will do what they will do, but it seems like their methods of working against the people who believe in freedom and the 2nd amendment are not fairing too well. Consider all of the progress we have and can make in the pro-gun movement. Consider the influence we have... what we did with congress after the AWB was enacted and how our influence kept Al Gore from the whitehouse (and despite what people's opinions are of GWB, he elected pretty good judges which will end up helping us BIG TIME!). Consider the likely pro-gun ruling that will come from the SCOTUS (Imagine if Al Gore had elected those 2 judges instead of Bush!!). Consider the amount of CCW states compared to 20 years ago.

The best way to combat the anti's is too educate people on the purposes and usefulness of firearms according to the 2nd amendment and how they can help protect themselves and their families from those who would do them harm. If everyone in America had a good amount of exposure to firearms and an education about them and how to use them we'd have the battle won regardless of the terms used by the media.
 
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