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Originally Posted by Radar
(Post 511603)
Assault weapon and assault rifle are both incorrect. It's like saying this is a "stabbing knife". Any knife can be used for stabbing. Any gun can be used to assault or to defend. The terms "semi-automatic rifle" or "fully-automatic rifle" are correct.
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Bullit is right and you're not quite, Radar; you stumbled right at the edge. You should have written that there is an assault
rifle, but no assault
weapon. The latter is rejected by the pro-gun people of liberty because of its facility to be defined down all the way to a screwdriver or a stone axe, or a big wet rock for that matter. So, it's popular among the people who try and scare the electorate into submission, that their hoplophobia may be the better accommodated. That hoplophobia makes crime, civil rights abuses, and genocide all very much easier is well proven, however much this be ignored by those who bitch at freedom people like me. Or, in another corner, Radar.
The defining feature of an
assault rifle is its selective fire capacity -- you can throw the switch to go full-auto. Its middle-power range of smallish rifle cartridges is to permit the rifle to be controllable when hand-held. Carbine cartridges, as it were. The Germans invented the rifle and its name.
Sturmgewehr means "assault rifle." In WW2, the Germans did a sort of systems analysis of what a military rifle did. They concluded that the cartridges of the day were too powerful for what a soldier could actually do with them -- that the long range they gave was almost useless because you couldn't even see your target at ranges of 1000-1200 meters out. You really only needed three to four hundred meters tops for range you could use, and a submachinegun-like ability to fire full-auto bursts was also a fight-winner. The German cartridge devised for this has its descendant in the AK's 7.62mm x 39 cartridge. Another engineering solution to the full-auto controllability problem was to shoot smaller bullets, as invented twice by the Americans: a prototype of the M14 chambered in .243 Winchester (a shortened, light, carbine version of the .25-06) and the successful 5.56mm NATO cartridge of the M16, a/k/a .223 Winchester. The AK later adopted this style of cartridge also.
The arm has always been called an assault rifle. Changing
rifle to
weapon is what the fakers are doing, the better to deceive and frighten any in the electorate who don't know their guns, or the proper relationship of a republic to its government. The fakers never comprehend that their desire impairs checks-and-balances, erodes civil rights by making abuses more possible -- less danger to the abusers -- and is a necessary precondition to a genocide. They love all these bad things without even knowing it consciously. They should all get a punt in the crotch with a Godwin club -- Nazi Germany couldn't have done what it did if non-Party people could have kept a Kar-98 and two hundred rounds of ready ammunition. And that is a bolt-action rifle, very suitable for deer hunting!
Unhappily from the checks-&-balances and antigenocide points of view (the one favored by libertarians, the other by human-rights people), US law only allows civilians to own semiauto-only versions of assault rifles, making these rifles simply rifles with automatic transmissions as it were. Saves some money on ammo, but a nation really committed to a classically liberal democratic government and suppression of genocide would promulgate a selective fire assault rifle over every mantle in America. Hey, it works for Switzerland, and they have a murder rate a bit lower than South Dakota's. Or England's.
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If this law is signed into law by the next Congress and president, it will be shot down by the USSC.
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From your mouth to God's ears, Radar. And to your Congresscritters', both House and Senate. Lobby against the resumption of pointless excess power.
