What Is an 'Assault' Weapon?
And is banning assault weapons the answer to gun violence?
A man armed with an ax jumped the fence of a school playground in Brazil and killed five children between the ages of five and seven. A dad in Vancouver was fatally stabbed after asking a stranger not to vape in front of his daughter. One person was killed and seven were injured after a man in a U-Haul drove erratically across streets and sidewalks in Brooklyn.
The weapons in these three events could safely be called assault weapons because they were used to cause injury and death. In fact, that’s how the NRA defines assault weapons.
Since the late 1960s, however, the term “assault weapon” has been used by many groups to exclusively refer to “any of various automatic or semiautomatic firearms (especially assault rifles).”
A brief explanation
Fully automatic rifles such as machine guns continually fire bullets with the trigger depressed. According to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Federal law prohibits the possession of newly manufactured machine guns, but permits the transfer of machine guns lawfully owned prior to May 19, 1986, if the transfer is approved by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives….As of 2020, the national registry of machine guns contained registrations for 726,951 machine guns.”
Semiautomatic firearms, of which the AR-15 is the most well-known, are more commonly used than fully automatic guns because they are currently legal. Semiautomatic firearms have features designed to enable shooters to repeatedly fire…quickly,” according to Giffords Law Center.
(It should be noted that the “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle” or “automatic rounds,” as has sometimes erroneously been reported. Rather, it stands for ArmaLite Rifle, after the company that developed it as a military rifle in the 1950s. ArmaLite sold the patent for the rifle to Colt in 1959. After the patent expired in the 1970s, other gun manufacturers began to produce their own versions of AR-15 rifles.)
Many proponents of banning what are termed assault-style rifles point to the features that can be added to them to make them more deadly. Last June, the city council in Boulder, Colorado, passed restrictions on assault weapons with “unique features that allow shooters to rapidly fire a large number of rounds — more than is ever needed for lawful self-defense — while maintaining control of the firearm in order to accurately target and kill more victims.” Some of those features included a folding stock to make the weapon easier to conceal and detachable magazines that in some cases can fire up to 100 rounds.
Firearms advocates such as the Firearm Industry Trade Association (FITA), describe guns like the AR-15 as “modern sporting rifles” (MSRs). “These rifles are used by hunters, competitors, millions of Americans seeking home-defense guns and many others who simply enjoy going to the range,” the organization argues. “MSRs have been utilized by law-abiding Americans since the 1960’s. They are functionally similar to any other semiautomatic rifle and the cosmetic misnomers do not change that fact.”
As was mentioned in a previous article, the bullets from AR-15s and similar styles of rifles create an incredible amount of destruction inside the human body. From an article in Wired: “These high-velocity bullets can damage flesh inches away from their path, either because they fragment or because they cause something called cavitation. When you trail your fingers through water, the water ripples and curls. When a high-velocity bullet pierces the body, human tissues ripples as well - but much more violently. The bullet from an AR-15 might miss the femoral artery in the leg, but cavitation may burst the artery anyway, causing death by blood loss.”
In other words, put into the wrong hands, a rifle such as this can lead to gruesome injuries and multiples deaths, as we’ve seen in mass shootings like the ones in Uvalde, Texas, and Las Vegas. In the Las Vegas shooting, the murderer modified his rifles (legally) to operate more like fully automatic rifles.
Efforts to restrict assault weapons
Through the years, efforts have been made to prohibit the sale and use of “assault weapons.” In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. This included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which prohibited specific firearms and certain features on guns. It did not, however, ban all semiautomatic weapons. The ban expired in 2004 and was not renewed under the George W. Bush administration.
A study of six cities during the 10 years the ban was in place noted that the number of gun crimes involving semiautomatic weapons dropped by 17% . Another study showed that mass shooting deaths began to increase once the ban was lifted.
Following a mass shooting, renewed interest in assault weapons intensifies. The recent deaths of three children and three adults at a Nashville school enraged gun-safety advocates, who staged protests in Tennessee and around the country. In response to the deadly shooting, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee proposed more than $200 million to secure both public and private schools through measures such as hiring private security guards and adding behavioral health liaisons.
Some politicians and citizens want teachers and administrators to be able to carry guns in schools for protection. Others believe that the answer to gun violence is not more guns.
In many instances, carrying a gun would be impractical. On April 7, two men fired guns on the beach in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, wounding six people. It would be ludicrous to suggest that all beachgoers tuck guns for self defense inside their swim trunks or under their blankets. No one wants a Wild West beach vacation. Nor does anyone want metal detectors at the entrances to beaches. Something, though, needs to be done to limit the amount of gun use happening in this country.
Gun violence as a whole
Mass shootings involving semiautomatic weapons shock the public; yet, they account for less than .5% of all gun deaths each year. Furthermore, most mass shootings in the United States (56%) involve handguns. Those are not the ones that draw the most attention, though.
Inner-city gun violence is high in many cities, including Cleveland, where shootings and gun-related murders are prevalent but don’t get the amount of news coverage a mass shooting with an assault-style rifle would. It shouldn’t matter how many people are killed in a shooting or what type of gun is used; the loss of human life is the most disturbing part.
It’s unclear how many guns exist in this country, but many researchers agree that guns outnumber people. That likely means that many people own more than one gun. There is no federal law limiting the number of guns a citizen can legally buy. Individual states can and sometimes do create strict gun laws. The disparity between states shows how politics divides the idea of gun control. Different interpretations of the Second Amend further suggest that we are far from being united on guns.
What makes people want to kill?
While debate continues about gun rights and laws, attention should be paid to why anger and violence lead some people to commit murder, and why guns seem to make that even more enticing. In the final installment on this issue, The Critical Reader will examine that aspect of the situation.