Going to California gun show, on the other hand, is like hitting a strip club. You get to see all this great stuff, but you can’t actually have it.
OK - after the mandatory waiting period you can - but the fun of buying a new gun and walking out with it is gone.
From the same Wiki article:
*The term assault weapon is often confused with the term assault rifle. There is no technical military definition of an assault weapon, but in a general sense, the term assault weapon can refer to a military weapon used to aid in military assault operations, that is, attacking a fortified position … The legislative usage follows usage by political groups seeking to limit the individual’s right to keep and bear arms, who have sought to extend the meaning to include a semi-automatic firearm that is similar in name or appearance to a fully automatic firearm or military weapon.
Note that this term is not synonymous with assault rifle, which has an established technical definition. The US Army defines assault rifles as “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachinegun and rifle cartridges”*
So a fully operational AK47 or M16 is an asault rifle. The kicker seems mostly to be selective fire (semiauto or “rock n roll”).
Further reading yields this:
The close similarity to the term assault rifle and wide variety of definitions has led to considerable confusion over this term. In addition, inaccurate media reporting and political propaganda have created a common public misconception that this term covers many items regulated in the United States by the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934.
It seems the term is used pretty loosely, and as Humpty Dumpty might say, “it means whatevr I want it to mean”.
That was my contention, not Beef’s. If you want to beat up someone, at least beat on the guy who said it (me).
I was never a ‘pro’ gun person until I saw how completely uneducated the ‘anti’ gun folks are about guns. It’s stunning. AND that they refuse to listen to people that happen to have the knowledge. If you know something about guns, it’s not knowledge, it’s a fetish.
Anti-gun folks are doing themselves a terrible disservice by refusing to educate themselves. It makes me wonder if those that do educate themselves, become less anti gun.
Dan Your recent posts suggest that the military considers a bolt action rifle or a revolver an assault weapon. Do you agree with this position? Would you argue that these guns should be included in a new AWB?
ExTank, I love going into my local gun shop. Sure I always LEAVE with a $200 Mossburg or whatever, but there’s just something truly nice about a WW1-pattern Lee-Enfield .303 (and it’s priced like the owner doesn’t actually want to sell it. =P)
Oh, come on. A central tenet of the pro-gun position is that guns are either a symbol of liberty or the only thing standing between them and a dictatorship.
There may be lots of ignorant anti-gun people, but there are just as many crazy pro-gun people.
ETA: that was a response to enipla.
They missed some then… How about trebuchets? Molotov cocktails? Catapults?
I don’t know what good a revolver would be for assaulting or destroying a structure. A beer bottle full of gasoline probably works a lot better.
I’ve recently become an M1A Convert. I’m diggin’ the “old-style.”
Seriously, I don’t know why people are in such a lather about gun shows.
I mean, what difference does it make if I buy 10 guns at Bass Pro, Cabella’s, or Tom, Dick, & Hary’s Guns Emporium, all with paperwork/background checks, or if I buy 10 guns from 10 different tables at a gun show, all with paperwork and background checks?
I regularly attend gun shows, and rarely see private sellers; most of them are guys selling WWII collectibles, like ancient Garands, 1911s, Mausers, etc.; the other few are someone, typically an older lady, selling off her recently deceased husband’s gun collection.
Are there “parking lot deals?” Not at most of the shows I attend here in Missouri; most exhibition halls/convention centers prohibit them, and the cops love to check out the kinds of hoosiery people who discretely sell guns out of the trunk of their cars in parking lots.
It just puts the jam in their donut. 
I did not call the anti gun folks crazy.
I think you know very, very little about gun owners. 90 % of the people I know own a gun.
Though I will admit that there are a small percentage of pro gun folks that are waiting for the black helicopters most of are just your everyday folks getting on with life.
I think you exaggerate both positions, but even so, these are political viewpoints, not facts. I didn’t say the gun control advocates were crazy, I said they were liars and that they were not concerned with the actual utilitarian results of their work.
Again, I wasn’t talking about crazy, but this also strikes me as the “as long as one person on either side is crazy, both sides are equally crazy!” bs we hear current republican-affilated people on the board say to excuse the craziness of their party.
We’re not talking about gun owners. We’re talking about gun rights advocates.
Every pro-gun-rights advocate I personally know is like me or Ex–there’s a mix of moral issues, rights issues, and Constitutional issues involved. And a lot of us HATE getting drowned out by the psychopaths, but it’s hard to compete without money and reasonable has never raked in the contributions.
Well, if “they” take our guns, I know how to build a trebuchet. Bet I could “assault” some structures pretty good with one 
It was not created by the AWB proponents, since it WAS ALREADY IN USE both by the military and by Gun Digest. Now it would be fare to say that the term “assault weapon” is not accurate as it pertains to the AWB, but the AWB proponents did not create the term.
Yeah, I hate those kind of people. :rolleyes:
Yeah, that’s not pedantic bullshit. Someone has strung those two common words together before to form a term, therefore the anti-gun lobby didn’t create the term!
The term as they use it and the other uses you’ve demonstrated have nothing in common - they clearly mean entirely different things. You are arguing against some ridiculous straw men where you seem to think I’ve said no one has ever under any circumstances used those two words together before.
It’s irrelevant. The concept of an “assault weapon” as a weapon that looks like, but does not (completely) function like, certain types of military arms was created by the anti-gun lobby. It was deliberately created in order to confuse the public and have them mistake the term for “assault rifle” - a term with an actual meaning. Instead, they get to have a term that sounds as scary, but they can define it as arbitrarily as they want.
Of course. How is that not pathetic? I don’t even mean in terms of guns - even if you hate guns, then take a self defense course, be in good shape, , learn to use a melee weapon, carry pepper spray, learn a martial art, be aware of your surroundings, whatever. Really, it’s more a matter of attitude. It’s a minor point (since not that many people are victimized by violent crime) but the people who willingly choose to be sheep and hope for the protection of shepherds instead of ultimately having control over their own safety are pathetic. And they seem to resent others who aren’t like them, and wish to alter their behavior so that they look less pathetic by comparison.
I’ve always liked the NZ term for semi-auto versions of the AK-47/M-16 etc:
“Military-Style Semi-Automatic Rifle”
It’s true, it’s a neutral term, and it doesn’t have any baggage with it. And it doesn’t sound suspiciously like “Assault Rifle”, deliberately muddying the waters of nomenclature.
Are they regulated differently than other semi-automatic rifles with equivelant functionality?
If so, at least your arbitrary and illogical laws have a more honest name.
From my point of view, it’s not that I “hate” or even have any particular special feelings one way or the other at all for people who rely on the police to protect them.
I (and, I would guess, most sane gun rights advocates, in which category I’m willing to put you since you seemed to agree upthread that you were in favor of gun ownership with registration of the arms and licensing with a capability/skill test) am simply aware that in this country at this time the police have no specific legal duty to protect any specific person at any given time. The reality is that police have response times (being not everywhere at once and all) and they are generally not held culpable if they are late, delayed, or ineffective at stopping a specific incident. The fact that police are not ubiquitous and not responsible for you in the specific (legal) sense should be a factor if one is considering their own personal self-defense strategy.
Certainly there are places where, even after considering the above facts, one chooses to rely on the police for most or all of their personal protection–I live in one of those places, as I’ve mentioned before. My town is ridiculously safe, I don’t carry anything more deadly than a swiss army knife, and my home defense strategy is the fact that my bedside table is light enough for me to hit someone with in extremis (and my attack cat, but she’s also got reliability and culpability concerns). However, there are also places where one might consider that the overall risk level for themselves and their family is reduced by having some form of weaponry available, due to lack of timely/effective police presence or other danger factors.
Frankly, I’m happy that people who define “assault weapon” by the AWB terms are relying on the police for their protection–because I doubt that said people have enough firearms knowledge to be safe operators of one in a self-defense context.
It’s not hard once you get out the “ruh” sound. Try it “I was wrong”. The term assault weapon was used to refer to guns with large capacity magazines that were designed for military use. It dates back to at least 'the 70s. The AWB, as misguided and ineffectual as it is, was trying to address the perception that rifles with large capacity magazines were becoming less expensive and more commonly used by criminals and had the capacity (no pun intended) to make shooting sprees worse. If the regulations had called it an assault RIFLE then you would have been complaining that they were stupid because street sweeper-style shot guns are not rifles.
Now I’m sure that you and the NRA would have welcomed increased regulations on rifles and shot guns with large capacity magazines. Since you are such good shots I don’t think you’d need more than a few rounds to kill a deer or an errant ATF agent.
Incorrect. I can put a hole in the organ of your choice with gun or especially sword and I don’t care what label you pin on your particular gunny-wunny. “An assault weapon in the US is that which is on the AWB” works fine for me.