I have never seen any credible evidence that the gun community popularized the term “assault weapon” prior to Josh Sugarmann’s 1988 screed “Assault Weapons and Accessories in America” that the Violence Policy Center ran with, and pushed it insanely hard after the Stockton, CA schoolyard shooting in 1989, or that it was ever mainstream in the gun press as a marketing term for Title 1 semiautos. I have seen some unsupported handwaving that it was once used obscurely in Shotgun News prior to Sugarmann et al, and possibly one gun magazine cover that may or may not have been talking about Title 2 military weapons and that might have been after Sugarmann et al, but nothing more than that.
But as someone who was closely following the gun issue on Fidonet and Usenet at that time, and who subscribed to both G&A and the American Rifleman magazines starting in 1988 or 1989 and still has many of those magazines (plus a couple of ban-era issues of Shotgun News), I can tell you categorically that both the RKBA crowd and the gun press considered “assault weapon” to be a prohibitionist buzzword intended to conflate restricted Title 2 assault rifles with civilian rifles, shotguns, and handguns, and that the view was that “Assault Weapon” was used because Sugarmann et al wanted to use the issue to restrict handguns, not just rifles. The gun control lobby at the time openly acknowledged that long guns were not a crime problem, but Sugarmann’s white paper explained how the “new topic” of scary-looking rifles could be used to resurrect the push for a ban on handguns.
Of course, Sugarmann and the VPC’s efforts ultimately had the opposite effect, launching carry licensure reform/shall-issue while making the AR-15 the most popular rifle in U.S. homes, but their goal at the time was a handgun ban, and the misleading elastic term “assault weapon” was a means to that end.
I strongly disagree. Using the terminology popularized by the prohibitionists just grants them control over the language and terms of the debate. An AR-15 is a small-caliber civilian rifle, not an “assault weapon”. Period.
Having said that, I agree that going all “AKSHUALLY…” against the term “assault weapon” vs. “assault rifle” vs. “civilian Title 1 non-automatic rifle” in a debate about guns with modern styling is often going to be a distraction from addressing the argument itself. Usuallly there are far more effective approaches. But I categorically reject the idea that gun owners should accept/adopt it, because it’s ostensibly no big deal to call civilian guns/ammo “assault weapons” or “Saturday Night Specials” or “bunker busters” or “cop-killer bullets” or “antiaircraft weapons” or “automatic weapons” or what have you. The slogan “assault weapon”, as-used, is a propaganda tool of the gun control lobby, and should be viewed as such, IMNSHO.
