Since the early 1990's, one of the most common Orwellian butcheries of the English language to justify violating the Constitution has been the phrase "assault weapon." It is most often used in conjunction with a 1994 law that has thankfully expired, and most often applied to modern sporting rifles. That law made it illegal to produce new firearms with certain features that had absolutely nothing to do with lethality.
All of the banned firearms were semi-automatic. Organizations such as the Violence Policy Center have actually admitted that they intend to confuse people over the difference between semi-automatic and fully-automatic. This is necessary, as the term "assault weapon" was designed so that people would confuse modern sporting rifles with the assault rifles that military forces use. The difference is that modern sporting rifles are semi-automatic, meaning that after they're loaded and cocked, you have to pull the trigger every time you want a bullet to come out, while assault rifles are select-fire, meaning that they have that option and either an option to fire a three-shot burst or an option to fire fully-automatic, meaning that the user can hold down the trigger to keep firing. That second setting in assault rifles makes them machine guns, which are heavily restricted under US law, and so therefore are irrelevant.
Now let's look at the features banned by the 1994 law:
Vertical foregrips only have one function: better control of recoil.
Vented barrel collars only exist so that the user doesn't burn his/her hand, but we know that some people don't care enough to find out what they want to ban, they just want to normalize their agenda, so that they can eventually make a total ban seem like a mainstream idea.
Pistol grip stocks only affect the comfort of the user.
Folding stocks do nothing but make storage easier.
Telescoping stocks only exist for the comfort of the user.
Flash suppressors make make it so that it's possible to shoot in low-light conditions (e.g. hunting at night) without being blinded. In fact, without a flash suppressor, the Mosin-Nagant rifle (a popular bolt-action rifle that was used by the Russian Empire from 1891 until 1918, the Soviet Union until 1992, and the Russian Federation until 1998) has a muzzle flash that is capable of setting people on fire.
All that this list of features means is that AR-15-style rifles made by Colt, Smith & Wesson, and countless other manufacturers had to be redesigned in order to be sold legally, while the functionally identical Ruger Mini-14 could be sold without a redesign (Bill Ruger's support of Clinton was solely based on the effect that it would have on his business). The banned weapons were unlikely enough to be used in crimes that the law did not have any measurable effect on crime.
I'm not going to discuss the issue of magazines with a capacity of greater than ten rounds in this diary. That's big enough to be another diary.