This firearm has only one purpose, by design.
Once again, we have seen a horrific mass shooting in the United States carried out by an individual armed with an assault rifle. Hillary Clinton has called for the renewal of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that lapsed in 2004, and is being joined by an increasing number of Democrats. It is, as many have pointed out, the most obvious and effective thing we can do to reduce both the incidence and the severity of mass shootings. But this call raises some questions that have lingered on since the passage of the original ban back in 1994. What exactly is an assault weapon? What sets it apart from other firearms like hunting rifles or handguns? Why do these weapons exist in the first place? These are all important question to answer if we’re to have any hope of successfully controlling access to the kind of firepower that has enabled lone gunners to kill large numbers of people with such dreadful efficiency.
To understand what an assault rifle is, a bit of definition is required. First and most importantly, it is not simply a rifle. Assault rifle are designed to use lighter cartridges than rifles, though they have many similarities. These fall in between the size and power of pistol (and submachinegun) cartridges and those of rifles. They tend to have lighter, smaller caliber bullets (usually between .223 and .30) and less range and power than standard military or hunting rifle cartridges. Assault rifles will also have several other characteristics: a large-capacity removable magazine, a pistol-grip in the stock, and a semi-automatic or selective fire (that is, it has the ability to switch between semi-automatic and fully automatic fire). This definitional question was one of the problems with the original assault weapons ban, which tried to cover all the bases in order to prevent superficial changes to a rifle as a means of evading the ban. It was only somewhat successful, since they tried a bit too hard to accommodate objections to the list of definitions. But why does such a weapon exist, why did anyone need a gun somewhere between a rifle and a submachine gun? That is a product of the history of 20th century mechanized warfare.
Assault rifles were first invented during WWI, as a reaction to trench warfare (as was the submachingun) and the problems of producing a more versatile rifle for the infantry soldiers. WWI, however, ended before much development was done on assault weapons and they were not much pursued in the inter-war period. It was the submachinegun that “stole the show”, so to speak, in the 1920s and 30s with the use of some types by criminals in the U.S., leading to the still current ban on civilian ownership of automatic weapons. But assault rifles made a serious comeback during WWII, especially with the German development of the StG44, the first production assault rifle. It was developed to counter Russian numbers on the Eastern Front, since it could fire effectively both as a rifle at real combat ranges (the Germans had figured out that in modern combat most firing is at less than 400 meters) and as a submachinegun at close ranges. This was the real reason for the development of the assault rifle, to deliver fire more rapidly and effectively on the battlefield, allowing a relative few soldiers to kill a large number of the enemy. As these weapons spread in the post-war period and the smaller wars of the late 20th century, it became impossible for any military to avoid changing to assault rifles for their main infantry weapon. Older military rifles were excellent at long-range fire, but their heavier cartridges could not be controlled if they were converted for automatic fire. These heavier cartridges were relegated to use in machineguns. This is how the assault rifle became so common in the world’s militaries: it was a highly effective killing machine that simplified the arming of infantry, who no longer needed such a wide range of weapons (from heavy automatic rifles to submachineguns) to get the same jobs done.
It was in this environment of conversion that the firearm used by too many of our recent mass shooters was first developed. The U.S. army was actually very slow to adopt the true assault rifle (largely out of military conservatism) and only developed the AR-15/M-16 in the 1960s after running into reality in Vietnam, where the M-14 battle rifle (a full-sized rifle with selective fire) came up against the quintessential assault rifle, the AK-47. The result was the mad scramble by the U.S. Army to find an assault rifle to replace the M14. What they chose was a scaled-down version of another battle rifle, the Armalite AR-10, designated the AR-15. The Army adopted this rifle (with a few modifications) as the M16. This is the weapon pictured at the top of this diary.
Now we come to the last and ultimate point of this diary: why no civilian should have an assault rifle. I’ll use the example of the AR-15 (the semi-automatic “civilian” version of the M16.) It fires a 5.56x45mm cartridge, so the bullet is only .223 caliber, but is very high velocity (990m/sec, versus a 9mm Parabellum cartridge at about 400m/sec.) This means that the bullets will penetrate a lot of material before they lose enough energy to stop being lethal, such as 6 inches of pine board or two sheets of 14ga steel plate (both at 100m range, too.) This cartridge is paired with a rifle that can fire, even in it’s semi-auto version, at a sustained rate of 60 rounds per minute. An entire 30-round magazine can be emptied in less than 30 seconds, replaced in a handful of seconds, and then fire another 30 just as fast. These facts alone should be enough. An assault rifle is the ultimate tool for an individual who wants to kill a lot of other people. It can fire far more and faster than any handgun. It has power far in excess of what any sensible person might need even if they actually need a weapon for self-defense, since its bullets will pass right through obstacles that would stop a pistol round and present a danger to innocent bystanders. It is not designed for normal civilian activities, like hunting, which do not require things like high rates of fire. It’s long past time we stopped allowing civilians to own weapons that only a military should have.
