I was originally going to say “…is a firearm that (in the opinion of gun control advocates)…” . But I omitted that precisely because it sounded like I was bashing gun-control. Actually I’m pro-gun myself.
And which in the public mind extended not just to civilianized assault rifles and military carbines, but to civilianized machine-pistols and SMGs, and just anything that could firea large number of rounds before you stopped to reload. Therefore the 10-round limit for magazines in ALL weapons, apart from the specifically-banned ones.
Let’s for a moment jog our memory back the late 80s/early 1990s, an era in which, were we to believe various of the US media outlets, we were on the edge of being overrun by Drug/Steet Gangs on one side and Supremacist Militia on the other. One of the things that was being hammered in to the collective consciousness at the time was that the Bad Guys were equipping themselves with paramilitary weapons that could outgun anything police or ordinary Joe Whitetoast could reasonably pack. One special “evil” of the time were things like the MAC-10 and TEC-9, cheap pseudo-machine-pistols highly celebrated in action movies/TV and gangsta music video, about which it was reiterated over and over that just about anyone capable of operating a shop bench w/o losing fingers could convert them to full-auto mode. Another thing that was burned into the public mind at the time was that California bank hold-up where the robbers were packing AK or HK assault rifles reconverted to full-auto and fitted with large-capacity drum magazines (and wearing body armor), and were mowing down the responding police right and left.
See post #9. Assault weapon (not rifle), in some context, is mentioned in 1985.
So, what exactly is a “heavy assult rifle”? And why is it being applied to an M-16(with which not exactly heavy)?
IIRC, they were AKs. Were the firearms “reconverted”? Or were they illegally-obtained military guns? An AR-15 is fairly easy to convert except for the automatic sear. You either have to mill the inside of the AR-15 lower receiver to accept a military autosear, or you have to manufacture a “drop-in” autosear that will fit inside of the civilian lower receiver. Either operation seems a bit complex for the situation, if you wanted the rifles to function correctly. I know that drop-in sears were banned from manufacture nearly 20 years ago, and I think that mil-spec sears (as well as the other necessary parts) are now prohibited from sale.
I don’t know how difficult it is to convert an AK-series into a selective fire weapon; but I have a booklet on how to convert an HK.
Modifying an HK-91 to function like a G-3 involves modifying the hammer, bolt carrier, trigger housing and grip, and requires the manufacture of a tripping block and release lever catch assembly (spindle, catch, release lever); plus heat treatment of the parts. Rather involved, and I doubt anyone would really want to go to the trouble. (While I did say what has to be done, I’m not going to say how it’s done or even look for a website that might have diagrams. I just wanted to point out the difficulty of converting certain firearms, because so many people think “all you have to do is file the sear” or some such.)
My M-W cites assault weapon from 1972.
I think that the term “assault weapon” was fairly common prior to the mid-eighties, although it got popularized at that time.
Example: 1980 column by Richard Cohen, visiting a Palestinian refugee camp, and being guarded by a teenager with an “assault weapon.”
A 1979 story about the fall of the Shah of Iran, and describing “bearded revolutionaries carrying assault weapons.”
A 1977 story about the coup in The Seychelles, describing people carrying Russian made “assault weapons.”
A 1973 article about a new($150) Israeli weapon, the “Galil.” The article said “Equipped with a collapsible bipod and stock, it is instantly convertible from an automatic weapon to an assault weapon.”
Prior to the 1970’s cites, the term was used mainly about anti-tank things. Not what we’re looking for.
So, my guess is, that any gun that didn’t look like a standard “rifle” but rather resembled those Russian made thingies that you saw foreign terrorists carrying were the origins of the term.
I can’t speak to this directly. but I do remember a 60 minutes story several years back about an imported Chinese version of the AK so sloppily manufactured that on many copies a single trigger squeeze would result in a burst of several shots. IIRC, they equated it to turning off a car ignition and having the engine continue to run for a few more seconds.
Howver, I know nothing about guns and while the analogy might be compelling, I doubt there is any actual mechanical similarity to the two events. And ever since Dateline NBC got caught rigging a truck with an incindiary(sp?) charge to demonstrate how vulnerable they were to fire in an accident, I discount about 85% of what I see on TV.
samclem: 1972 could be right. I was nearly a decade away from being able to own a gun, so I wouldn’t have paid much attention back then. I only heard the term in the mid-'80s.
The term “assault rifle” or “sturmgewehr” has been around since the mid-40s, as assault rifles were created in that time period. “Assault rifles” are an actual type of weapon with a universally accepted definition.
“Assault weapons” is a term created by the media and gun control advocates designed to sound similar to “assault rifles” and to sound scary without actually talking about assault rifles.
The guns the media (generally) is talking about when they say “assault weapons” are not assault rifles.
No, I don’t think many people would agree with you. The G3 and FAL are considered to be the most prominent guns in the “main battle rifle” class, which is different from assault rifles.
That’s not true. The 7.62x51 round was designed to replicate the ballistics of a 30-06 as much as possible in a smaller casing. It was intended to be the replacement for the 30-06 in nato standardization as a full rifle round - it was never intended to be an intermediate round like the 7.62x39 or 5.56x45 rounds.
Assault rifles use intermediate cartridges. 5.56mm can be called an intermediate rifle round. It would not be incorrect to call it simply a rifle round. The type of ammunition is one of the characteristics that classify a weapon as an assault rifle. Assault rifles are basically a hybrid between full sized rifles and submachine guns - and their intermediate ammo, somewhere between full rifle rounds and pistol rounds in power, reflects this. 5.56mm isn’t an “assault round”, but assault rifles use a round like it, that is, an intermediate round.
Also, stories about terrorists or guerillas or whatever in which “assault weapon” appears are just sloppy writing. Reporters mean to say “assault rifle” (because in these cases they actually carry assault rifles) but were too sloppy or didn’t know the difference.
You’re very clear in your statementsm SenorBeef, but I want to be very, very clear. You’rte saying that an assault rifle is not an assault weapon?
Is that the same as saying a rifle is not a weapon? Not even a rifle specifically designed as a military weapon?
I think the Brady anti-gun crowd may well have siezed the phrase and popularized it, but I doubt that they invented it.
If I may, I believe his take on it is that “assault weapon” was a casual usage favored by people outside military circles, while “assault rifle”, although not 100% absolute, did have a general-consensus meaning in those circles (selective-fire light[li] auto rifle/carbine firing high-vel “intermediate” rifle ammo).[/li]
[*“light” being a relative term]
There may also be at work here a conflation of US Army training jargon, in which the troops are drilled to refer to their M16 as “weapon”, rather than “rifle” (and of course, never, ever, as “gun”), and a member of each team packs something called a Squad Automatic Weapon, rather than a Light Machine Gun, so some writers/reporters may have understood that the proper mode of address was “assault weapon”.
I bought a “post ban” FAL four years ago. Being a post-ban, it does not have a flash hider, bayonet, collapsible/folding stock, or grenade launcher; the only evil feature is the pistol grip. But here’s what’s interesting: my FAL is not an “assault weapon.” How could it be? After all, assault weapons were banned in 1994! (Though existing ones were grandfathered.) So by definition, my rifle is not an assault weapon. And it’s certainly not an assault rifle. So what is it? I believe the manufacturer called it a FAL Sporter…
Well, as “assault weapon” is an arbitrary term, I can’t definitively say that no one has ever arbitrarily declared “assault rifles” to be assault weapons.
However, all laws that I’m familiar with that ban “assault weapons” (federal, california) do not affect assault rifles in any way because the definition they use for assault weapons do not apply to assault rifles.
I’m pretty familiar with modern military weapon systems and history and I can tell you that I’ve never seen anyone knowledgable refer to any group of weapons as “assault weapons”. You have “assault guns”, mostly in reference to the WWII era, which were armored motor carriages for artillery guns, and “assault rifles” which are very specifically defined as select fire, light individual weapons designed to fire an intermediate rifle cartridges and be a functional hybrid of a rifle and submachine gun, but “assault weapon” is not accepted by anyone knowledgable as far as I can tell as a valid classification of any category of weapon systems.
It would seem that the gun control advocated wanted to make a pass at scary looking guns modelled after military weapons, but couldn’t use “assault rifle” to refer to them because it’d be flat out inaccurate, so they tried to mislead people by creating an arbitrary term “assault weapons” which they could define as they like and it would still sound scary like assault rifles.
This type of failure is known as “doubling.” Usually a disconnector that has improper geometry causes a second shot to be fired when the trigger is released. I’m not sure I can explain it without a diagram but in a semi-auto weapon the hammer is held in place by a sear which may or may not be part of the trigger. Pulling the trigger releases the hammer which falls and strikes the firing pin. On firing a separate system causes the bolt/carrier to slide back and cock the hammer. Since the trigger has not been released by the shooter’s finger the hammer is caught by the disconnector, sometimes called a secondary sear. When the trigger is released the hammer is released by the disconnector and caught by the primary sear so a subequent shot can be fired. I don’t have documentation but have heard of cases where someone was prosecuted for posessing an unregistered machine gun because of this defect.
FWIW most machine guns don’t work by just disabling the disconnector. This is true in the case of some submachineguns which operate from an open bolt but not for any rifle I am aware of. The mechanism is a bit more complex with a tripper device that is activated by the bolt as it slided forward.
Going from memory here. (Never been in the armed forces, and my reference books are still packed away.)
In an M-16 (not an AR-15, unless you’re talking about the early pre-adoption prototypes) you load a magazine into the magazine well.
Pull back the charging handle. This pulls the bolt carrier back and cocks the hammer. Release the charging handle. This chambers a round when the bolt and bolt carrier are driven forward under pressure from the recoil spring.
Turn the selector to the full-auto position.
Pull the trigger. This releases the hammer, which hits the firing pin, which hits the primer, which fires the round. There is a hole near the muzzle that is connected to an aluminum tube. This tube fits into a “socket” on top of the bolt carrier. Some of the gasses generated by firing the round go down the tube and push the bolt carrier back – just like when you pulled back on the charging handle (which does not move back now).
With the finger still on the trigger, the hammer is engaged by the automatic sear. This holds the hammer back under its spring pressure until a new round is chambered and the bolt is locked. During the last bit of the bolt carrier’s travel, the tail end of the bolt carrier hits the top of the automatic sear. This releases the hammer and the cycle is repeated until the trigger is released. When the trigger is released, the disconnector engages the hammer and keeps it in the cocked position until the trigger is pulled again.
(The mechanics of these machines is one of the reasons I’m fascinated by them.)
The reason the hammer is held back until the last moment is that there is danger of premature detonation if the hammer simply follows the bolt carrier back and hits the firing pin. In an M-16 the bolt must be locked for safe firing. Some submachineguns do not have this safety device/sequence.
My first AR-15, one that comeone built and that I bought at a gun show, “doubled”. This is a bad thing for two reasons: First, it is, as I said, unsafe in this firearm. Second, it legally makes the rifle a “machine gun”. Needless to say, I took it straight to the gun shop for repair.
Mentally picture, SenorBeef and others, the typical table full of guns always laid out by the anti-gun people to illustrate what they want banned. What, collectively, should one call these weapons? Besides “scary looking”, please. 
That’s getting a little old.
Most of us “in the middle” types don’t care about the finer points of weaponry, nor are we at all “scared” by hearing the phrase "assault weapon. Give us a cooler sounding name than “assault weapon” and we’ll probably use it. Unless you nitpick the term fits, overall, and has worked it’s way into our language.
The problem is that the term is meaningless because an “assault weapon” is functionally identical to a “semiautomatic firearm” (cf. AR-15 vs. Mini-14). The differences really are only cosmetic. “Assault weapon” seems to be a term that was made up by anti-gun people and/or the Media specifically to fool the public into thinking that a “semiautomatic rifle” is an “assault rifle”.
That is, an “assault weapon” is “a civilian firearm that looks like a military firearm”.