This is the crux of the matter. There needs to be a figure of merit that quantifies “lethality” that can be delivered by a weapon in a given period of time. A threshold can be defined where a weapon for self-defense becomes a weapon of mass destruction.
The explosives argument seems to be circular - people don’t normally have and use them, so they’re illegal. Since they’re illegal, people don’t normally have and use them.
But as I understand, you can still buy a can of black powder. Or fireworks.
And to the creation of things like an “AR15 Pistol” basically a very short-barreled AR15 without a stock. That then requires adding an arm brace in order to have a chance to hit anything with it, and then people begin making “braces” that look a damn lot like stocks (and people using those from the shoulder instead of the arm) and the regulator decides they all are anyway and we’re back where we started.
The legislation on the matter is very convoluted and so is its regulatory application.
Yeah, that whole saga was definitely a situation where people were trying to be clever to get around regulations, and then complained when the regulations were updated so that they couldn’t get around them anymore.
It reminds me of when I was working fast food, and some customers would get “water” and then go fill it up with not-water from the soda fountain.
When we stopped providing cups for free when people asked for water, it wasn’t the people who were actually looking for water that complained.
An assault weapon is one designed for assaults. Yeah, I’m going to need to explain that better, aren’t I?
Before you had assault weapons, you had rifles, and pistols. And then of course you had machine guns, but machine guns were too unwieldy for soldiers to go into assaults with them. They were too heavy, had too much recoil, and generally you would use a machine gun by carrying it into position, deploying its bipod, and then firing it, while a second person would feed it ammo. Rambo can fire a machine gun from the hip, but he was firing blanks. A real soldier firing real bullets needs to drop the machine gun into position and use the bipod.
Since a regular machine gun was too heavy and couldn’t be used for assaults (you can’t jump into a trench and tell the enemy “hey, wait a minute, I have to set up this machine gun before I can shoot you!”) they started making smaller machine guns, which they very creatively called submachine guns, aka machine pistols. These fired pistol rounds, so the recoil was manageable. You could easily fire it from the hip as you are charging a the enemy. But they had a drawback in that the light pistol rounds just didn’t pack enough oomph. They needed something deadlier.
So they (actually the Nazis, but everyone else quickly copied them) came up with the idea of basically a submachine gun on steroids. This would work basically like a submachine gun. A single soldier could carry it, it didn’t need to be deployed to be used (no messing with a bipod, just carry it and shoot), and it would use magazines instead of belts. The limited ammo from the magazines meant that you wouldn’t want to fire it a lot in full auto because you’ll quickly run out of ammo, but, like a submachine gun, it would be very effective in short bursts. The round would be bigger than a pistol round, since that was too wimpy, but smaller than a rifle round, because rifle rounds on full auto generate too much recoil and you can’t keep the weapon on-target. Thus, an “intermediate” round, between a pistol round and a rifle round.
The first assault rifle was actually called a machine-pistol (aka submachine gun) during development. When Hitler found out what an improvement it was over actual submachine guns and that it was actually an entirely new class of weapons, he had it renamed the Sturmgewehr, “sturm” meaning “storm” (as in storm the castle, not as in a thunder shower) and “gewehr” being the German word for rifle. So literally, a rifle for “storming”, or assaulting the enemy positions. Hence, “assault rifle”.
Voila! Now you have the modern assault rifle.
We tried to make our own assault rifle by turning the M1 Garand into an assault rifle (creating the M-14), but while the .308 was less powerful than the .30-06 of the Garand, it was still too powerful for assault rifle and the “fun button” (the switch to put it into full auto mode) was removed from most M-14 rifles before they even made it out to the field. Our second attempt, the M-16, used the much smaller 5.56 cartridge, and that worked. Or it did once they got all of the bugs out of the M-16. The Soviets did the same thing with the AK-47, and similarly went to a smaller cartridge with the AK-74.
The civilian AR-15 uses the same 5.56 intermediate cartridge (bigger than a pistol but smaller than a rifle cartridge), but it lacks the full auto fire capability of an assault rifle. As a result, the AR-15 is just a fairly wimpy rifle, at least by military standards. The 5.56 is intentionally wimpy so that you can still control it in full auto mode, but it’s too weak to be a proper military cartridge if all you are capable of is semi-auto (single shot per trigger pull) fire.
Because it can’t fire full-auto, the civilian AR-15 isn’t an assault rifle. It’s just a wimpy rifle. It’s deadly compared to a pistol, but it’s crap when compared to a much older M-14 or an even older M1 Garand. Some states won’t let you use an AR-15 to hunt deer because it’s too wimpy to be guaranteed to kill the deer, and they don’t want you to just wound the deer and make them suffer. By comparison, both the M1 Garand’s .30-06 round and the M-14’s .308 round are considered perfectly acceptable for deer hunting in all 50 states, and in fact are quite popular cartridges for a lot of hunting rifles today.
So why doesn’t the military still use the M-14 or the Garand if the AR-15 is wimpy? Because the military is using the assault rifle version, not the civilian version, and the assault rifle version of the AR-15 (aka the M16 and other modern variants, which you cannot legally own unless it was made prior to 1986) has a much higher rate of fire due to its ability to fire in full auto, and is therefore much more effective when assaulting an enemy position.
Remove that ability for full auto bursts, and the weapon is much less deadly, and is no longer an assault rifle. You wouldn’t want to engage in a military assault using a civilian AR-15. You would be less effective on the battlefield than a WWII soldier.
Politicians and anti-gun folks tend to use the term to mean “anything that looks like a scary military weapon”, which has no useful definition. Some are intentionally misusing the term to make the weapons sound more scary, some are misusing it simply because they don’t know any better. In my experience it is more the latter.
Think of it this way. A true assault rifle is a submachine gun on steroids. If you take out the machine gun part of it (the automatic fire), it’s just a rifle, and not a very good one at that.
There’s also a distinction between the terms “assault rifle” and “assault weapon”. The former is a term used and defined by the military, and is based on the role the gun serves. The M-16 and the AK-47 are assault rifles. The latter, when it’s defined at all, is defined in legislation like the various forms of “Assault weapon ban”, and the definition often rests on trivial matters like whether the stock is made from plastic or wood.
But my understanding is that it is fairly trivial for the purchaser to convert a civilian AR-15 to be capable of full automatic fire. Is this incorrect?
To be honest, I don’t know how easy it is.
I suspect that if you know your way around a machine shop, then yes, it’s trivial. However, as soon as you make the parts, you have committed a felony. You don’t even have to install them. Just owning them is a felony. And because of that, you can’t just go down to Bob’s Gun Shop and buy the parts.
If you don’t have that level of mechanical skill, then it’s probably nowhere near trivial. I believe it also requires modifications to your AR-15 to accept the new parts, so it’s not just a matter of swap out this one part with this one other part.
I did some googling to get a better idea of how the fire control groups of each work. Basically, to make an AR-15 full auto, you need to turn this:
into this:
I don’t know about the rest of the parts, but I do know that the auto sear (the part in dark blue) is illegal to own. It is a felony just to have it in your possession, unless it comes from an NFA regulated weapon built prior to 1986 (and you have the paperwork to prove it).
So why did some of the Uvalde victims need to be ID’d by DNA? Was this because the AR15 packs a hefty punch, or because typically for hunting humans they use fragmenting bullets? News discussions suggested the AR15 does incredible damage compared to other (legal) civilian firearms?
Well, it’s more backwards from that. Basically legislators looked at different weapons that were considered to be assault weapons, and tried to find things they had in common and address those. They did as much as the politics would let them do, which didn’t end up being much, especially as the manufactures immediately found trivial loopholes like making the stock out of plastic instead of wood that got around the attempts at defining them.
Well, it holds up well enough if what you are assaulting is a school or movie theater.
You answered the question, “Why is it not an assault rifle?” quite well, but the question was, “Why is it not an assault weapon?”
Which you did answer with your first sentence, but the rest did not.
As you say, an assault weapon is one designed for assaults, and a weapon like the AR-15 is the weapon that is the most designed for assaults that a civilian can own. Sure, it’s not going to do you any good against a military, whether that be foreign or domestic, you aren’t going to repel an invasion or revolt against a tyranny with it, as you said, it’s a bit wimpy when it comes to combat against any real target. But for purposes of domestic violence and terrorism, where the targets can’t shoot back, it’s extremely well suited for assaulting those.
Uh, no.
IMPORTANT NOTE - Garand Thumb is a pro-gun youtube channel. If you are not pro-gun you will probably strongly disagree with political statements within these videos. I am only using these videos as examples because they are the only videos that I am familiar with that show the effects of the AR-15 on a (simulated) human body.
M4A1 (in the same family as the AR-15, and actually is an assault weapon) is at 3:19.
AR-15 is at 9:52.
These are simulated ballistic gel dummies, of course, but they should give you a reasonable idea of what an AR-15 does to the human body.
In both videos, the AR-15 (and variant) is among the weakest of the rifles tested.
No argument there. But the civilian AR-15 is not an assault rifle.
There is no definition of an “assault weapon” if you aren’t using the military definition. It’s a meaningless term. You need to look at each piece of legislation or potential bill and see how they are defining it. It’s not a real term with any real meaning.
Given the technological state of the US military the notion that any group of civilians with any sort of gun/firearm has any chance of withstanding said military is utterly, utterly laughable. And likewise for “the people” withstanding invasion from most other modern militaries. The spunky, fiesty, fierce Ukrainians aren’t holding back the Russians with pistols and rifles (although they still have their uses), they’re doing it with military munitions, tanks, artillery, drones, grenades, and drones with grenades.
That may have been the justification in the 1780’s, but it no longer holds true in today’s world. Which makes the “defend the free state” but forbidding civilians to own rocket launchers and missiles even more of a disconnect. Not that I in any way think civilians owning rocket launchers or missiles should be legal.
You actually can be licensed to purchase explosives of various types, it’s just not a real common thing. They do, after all, have legitimate peace-time purposes - fireworks displays, mining, etc. And you can also legally purchase things that can be used to make explosives, like ammonium nitrate (a common fertilizer) and diesel fuel.
A major difference is that there doesn’t seem to be a political lobby intent on increasing access to those thing and removing regulations around their purchase and ownership.
Well, an AR-15 is certainly going to mess you up.
The need for DNA testing might have been because the kids are smaller than adults, so a bullet of any size can cause greater damage, the kids might have been shot in the face/skull which could complicate visual identification, and the kids could have been shot multiple times resulting in… well, a lot of damage the details of which I’m sure none of us really want to hear about. Multiple shots with any firearm will cause more and more damage. Sure, one bullet from a Desert Eagle’s .50 caliber ammunition is going to do more damage than one bullet from a .22 pistol, but a half-dozen .22’s will can cause a lot of damage, too. There’s also variables like the type of bullet loaded, some of which cause more damage than others (though even the “least damaging” can still kill you).
Bottom line, there are a lot of variables involved.
Sort of. But the question here isn’t what is illegal, it’s what can be made illegal. The Constitution protects certain activities from the whims of the political process. Here the idea is that the Second Amendment protects conduct that has historically been lawful and does not protect conduct that has historically been unlawful.
But, in any event, it certainly doesn’t require that explosives be heavily restricted; just that they may be.
An armed citizenry is a good deterrent to despots, which is why authoritarian governments attempt to disarm the public. Imagine a dictator trying to rule a country that has more private firearms than people. No, you aren’t going to stop an invasion with small arms, but you might stop an asshole from trying to subjugate you, forcibly relocate you to a camp, etc. Or more likely, an armed populace would make it so difficult and painful that they don’t even try.
Do you think Ukraine would be as strong as it is, and its soldiers as effective as they are, if they didn’t have a strong gun culture and widespread ownership of long guns? Do you think the soldiers they’ve called up or had volunteer would be as effective if none of them knew how to shoot?
In WWII, America benefited greatly from its gun culture. Chuck Yeager accounted for his aiming ability as a result of great eyesight but also shooting for food from a very young age. A lot of America’s best soldiers came ftom ‘gun cultures’, both then and now.
America and Canada are almost impossible to invade. That’s not the worry. The worry is internal collapse followed by despotism. An armed populace is fine insurance against that.
Private citizens can get almost any weaponry in the U.S. You just have to be licensed for it. And the more dangerous the weapon, the more controls are put on them - but you can still get them.
I’m currently in Las Vegas, and we’re planning to visit ‘Battlefield Vegas’, a private company that will let you shoot pretty much every class of weapon, up to and including blowing stuff up with an M60 main battle tank or firing a 4,000 round per minute minigun. They have every machine gun you can think of, mortars, etc.
For example, the ‘Platoon experience’ lets you shoot the weapons used in a platoon in Vietnam. You get to shoot an M-60 machine gun, an M-16A1, an M-79 grenade launcher, and a Colt M1911.
Their collection includes 350 fully-automatic machine guns.
Check out their inventory here:
All of those weapons are privately owned. It just takes the right license. I have no problem with that, as I think the real limiter on the second amendment is the collision between 2A rights and reckless endangerment of the public. What that means is that once you get past personal protective arms, the requirements for training, storage, and registration begin to increase. You want to own a tank and store live rounds? Sure, 2A and all that. However, you are going to have to show that you can do it in a way that is safe, cannot harm the public, is secure from theft, etc. In other words, you’ll have to be Battlefield Vegas or something of equal capability. You want to own a nuke? Nope. There are entire countries we can’t trust with the ability to secure nuclear materials. The bar is just too high, even if conceptually it would be allowed if you could clear it.
I would add that for weapons of area destruction like explosives, missiles, etc., you need to show a rational, valid use for such ownership. Battlefield Vegas? For commercial purposes? Sure. A movie studio shooting Top Gun? Okay, but you will need licensed professionals and facilities, etc. John Dutton’s ranch? For ‘protection’? Um, no.
That seems close to the way it is now.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had plenty of guns.
If the army is backing the despot? Nope, not going to work no matter how many “long guns” and other fire arms the populace has because in a country like the US the military armaments are light years beyond that.
Ukraine is having cities pounded to dust. Sure, their “gun culture” is of some help but if they don’t have tanks and anti-tank weapons they’d have been conquered by now. They’re actually getting a lot of foreign aid, and they’re using drones in some remarkable ways. And I’m all for civilian aviation of any sort, including learning how to fly drones which clearly have self-defense (and offensive) applications.
Not to mention some spectacular incompetence on the part of the Russian military.
The days of a populace armed with hunting weapons and pistols being a credible threat to a despot with a modern and competent military is long gone. That doesn’t mean I oppose gun ownership, or think guns are useless - I don’t think that at all. I just don’t think a bunch of guys with AR-15’s have a chance against the US Army or Marines.
Not to mention, that even the most heavily armed individuals in the US store ammunition in the thousands of rounds, not tens of thousands (maybe, maaaaaybe for .22, but I have my doubts). As the war in the Ukraine is pointing out, it’s about logistics as much as will and weapons. You can have all the firearms in the worlds, or artillery, but if you don’t have the ammunition, then you’ll be a brief insurgence and then out of ammo and luck.
Plus, @Sam_Stone’s assumption seems to assume an unpopular despot that sees the nation as a whole rise up against them. I’d say that in the US example he proposes, using a dictator along the lines of Trump, that, say 1/3 to 1/5 the population would use their OWN guns to put down those who disagreed with the new President-for-Life.
IE a better example would be if we had a new Civil War on our hands, rather than the great uprising against The Evil ™ - and that’s if the military is equally split, which I doubt.
ETA - FTR, I actually suspect, that similarly to the OP SD column on the 2nd amendment that the writers of the Constitution WOULD support personal ownership of both firearms and explosives. Early American War for Independence weapons and artillery were privately purchased after all. But as it has evolved, well, I don’t control the Supreme court and consider the rights and responsibilities to be things evolving with society, to be modified legally via the legislature, courts and future amendments.
No, I’d say that the existence of a heavily armed population is a kind of an inoculation against the rise of such people in the first place. Porcupines have quills not to be able to destroy a bear in combat, but to prevent the bear from considering it in the first place.