"Why does anyone need an "assault rifle," asks an anonymous Ranter. The short answer, I suppose, would be that the Second Amendment is a part of what is known as the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs. The longer answer gets a bit more complex. First of all one needs to actually define "assault rifle." I wouldn't be surprised if the ask-er was thinking of a fully automatic weapon that can empty it's magazine in seconds as long as the trigger is held down. Which is actually (in my opinion) the correct definition of assault rifle. The thing is, by that definition, there are almost NO assault rifles in the hands of average American citizens. The confusion comes from the fact that a lot of civilian semi-automatic rifles are designed to look like the full-auto counterparts. The misunderstanding is also reinforced by some anti-gun members of the media, where a favorite trick is to show footage of full-auto assault weapons while doing a story about their semi-auto counterparts. It's true that there are full-automatic weapons out there on the civilian market. Their numbers are minuscule, and thus their price is astronomical (usually starting in the 5-digit range). In order to own a REAL assault rifle, you need permission from the Federal Government (as well as your local Sheriff in North Carolina).
When people talk about assault weapon bans, both state laws on the books and the prospect of renewing Bill Clinton's failed Federal experiment that ran from 1994 to 2004, they're talking about banning "politician-defined assault rifles." The definition of those, rifles classified as assault rifles because they look "scary" and have some "scary" features. One such feature politicians strongly object to, for instance? Bayonet lugs. How many people have been bayoneted by criminals, exactly? If I ever have the misfortune of being attacked by someone wielding a knife, I can only hope he's stupid enough to have it attached to a long, bulky, heavy rifle when he comes at me. The Clinton ban is considered a failure by all but the most zealous gun-haters who flatly refuse to acknowledge the researched and documented fact that the ban failed to reduce crime - mainly because such guns were very rarely used in crimes. Even "assault weapon" ban champion Dianne Feinstein admitted both before and after the ban that such weapons are rarely used in crimes - which makes one wonder how she justified her claim that they were "turning America's streets into war zones."
Finally, In a free country the burden of proof is not upon those who seek to exercise rights, but upon those who seek to prevent their exercise. "Politician-defined assault weapons" have plenty of perfectly legitimate uses. One advantage of rifles like the AR-15 is the relative ease of modifying it for different purposes. One rifle, in the right configuration, can be used for target shooting, informal plinking, hunting, and of course the defense of life and liberty if the need should ever arise. Naturally the concept of self-defense is foreign to many elitist gun-control supporters who can either afford their own team of bodyguards, or have security teams supplied to them courtesy of the tax dollars of the people they wish to render defenseless. Yet the hard truth is that the police can't predict a crime before it happens and they can't magically appear on the scene the second one begins. Joe Biden and his ilk have their fancy Beretta shotguns - and teams of Secret Service agents (armed with REAL assault weapons). The rest of us have to make do with the most effective defensive weapons available to "ordinary" Americans.
