Federal gun laws have traditionally treated handguns differently from rifles, shotguns, and other long guns. When the Gun Control Act of was passed, legislators raised the legal age to purchase handguns to Congress likely focused on handguns because they were, and still are, used in the majority of firearm-related crimes.
Yet, year-olds were still allowed to buy rifles, often used for hunting, under the act. At the time, assault rifles like the AR were not popular or widely available to the American public. As assault weapons became more popular over the next few decades among both manufacturers and gun owners, the minimum age requirement of 18 for purchasing long guns still applied to these more powerful rifles.
Subsequent gun laws struggled to keep up with this trend and largely failed to address the gap. Finally, in , Congress passed a federal assault weapons ban that was set to last for 10 years. The law effectively made it illegal to manufacture a wide variety of assault weapons for civilians.
Though one could still own and resell existing guns, people weren't supposed to be able to buy most new ARs — it didn't matter if you were 18, 21, or A decade later, however, the Republican-controlled Congress let the ban expire.
Thus, the Gun Control Act of is still a major pillar in our current federal firearms laws, especially when it comes to age restrictions. Yet the AR is the "patrol rifle" of choice for modern police departments from Mayberry to Manhattan.
And when you understand why police have adopted the AR, then you'll understand yet another reason why I own one. The AR is less a model of rifle than it is an open-source, modular weapons platform that can be customized for a whole range of applications, from varmint control to taking out pound feral hogs to urban combat.
Everything about an individual AR can be changed with aftermarket parts — the caliber of ammunition, recoil, range, weight, length, hold and grip, and on and on. In the pre-AR era, if you wanted a gun for shooting little groundhogs, a gun for shooting giant feral hogs, and a gun for home defense, you'd buy three different guns in three different calibers and configurations. With the AR platform, a person with absolutely no gunsmithing expertise can buy one gun and a bunch of accessories, and optimize that gun for the application at hand.
You can even make an AR into a pistol. Similarly, the individual members of police and military units can tailor the AR to a specific mission without the help of a professional armorer. Barrels can be swapped out, calibers changed, optics added or removed, and the gun can be totally transformed for every type of encounter, from a long-distance sniper shot at a hostage taker to a close-quarters drug raid in a crowded apartment complex. So cops and civilians buy ARs because that one gun can be adapted to an infinite variety of sporting, hunting, and use-of-force scenarios by an amateur with a few simple tools.
An AR owner doesn't have to buy and maintain a separate gun for each application, nor does she need a professional gunsmith to make modifications and customizations.
In this respect, the AR is basically a giant Lego kit for grownups. Indeed, anyone who tells you that the AR is bad for hunting and home defense has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, because by definition an AR is a gun that can be exquisitely adapted for those niches and many others. To return to the Sig MCX that was used in Orlando, the "ARness" of this gun is debatable — it takes many of the same accessories as an AR, and it fits on an AR lower, but unlike a normal AR it has a folding stock and a piston-driven operating system.
Because of this, the MCX is the perfect example of the degree to which the "AR" is more of a loose collection of standards than a specific collection of parts. Its very existence is emblematic of the adaptability that's a big part of the AR family's appeal. If you're still with me, then maybe you're beginning to understand why the AR platform is the most popular type of rifle in America.
The AR's incredible flexibility, accuracy, and ease-of-use combine with its status as the most thoroughly tested and debugged firearm in military history to make it massively popular with shooters of all stripes, from hunters to home defense buyers to competitors to police.
Parts for the AR are available everywhere, and the internet is chock full of maintenance information and training videos. The rifle's popularity is almost certainly the main reason why mass shooters increasingly reach for it when they go on a rampage. Think about it: If you're planning to shoot up a room full of people, are you going to reach for a rare, exotic weapon that you have little experience with, or will you select the familiar option that's easy to train with and that you have plenty of practice time behind?
The answer, for anybody who shoots, is the latter. When it comes to operating a firearm under pressure — whether it's the stress of combat or the excitement of competition — familiarity and muscle memory are everything. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which this is true.
I recently got my hands on a Springfield M1A , and I spent my entire first range session with my laptop open to YouTube just trying to figure out how to work the gun and change magazines consistently. The Springfield M1A above is a modernized version of the heavy, wood-stocked service gun that the AR replaced. The M1A is an amazing gun a closely related weapon is actually used by the Marines , but despite the fact that the M1A fires a much larger, deadlier. I can do all that because the AR is what I know, and it's what I know because it's what everyone else out there knows.
At this point, you may be thinking: "But why can't you just buy a defense rifle or other 'defensive' firearm instead of an assault rifle? I see this "defense" versus "assault" nonsense a lot, and I just shake my head, because a "defensive" firearm has the exact same characteristics as an offensive firearm.
Specifically, in a defensive situation, you always "shoot to stop the threat," which is a police euphemism for "shoot to kill. And even if you were trained to shoot at limbs, you'd need a gun that's even more controllable and accurate, because moving limbs are harder to hit than center mass! To put it another way, there is a spectrum of force, and a firearm of any type is always at the "lethal force" end of it.
Once you've gone past fists, Tasers, and batons, and gotten to the gun, you are no longer in the realm of trying to preserve the attacker's life; you're trying to preserve your own. It's also the case that, contrary to what you saw in First Blood , adrenaline-fueled humans are hard to kill, even with a rifle. The more fast follow-up shots you can get on-target, the better your chances of scoring a hit that will stop the threat. This is why smaller-caliber rifles and pistols like the AR and the Glock 19 are now dominant in police departments and militaries across the globe — smaller bullets mean you can carry more ammo, which means you have more chances to make that fight-stopping shot.
So the "defensive rifle" as opposed to the "assault rifle" is a nonsense idea that exists only in the minds of people who know nothing about guns.
This being the case, you can't fault gun owners for not buying or building such a weapon, because that is not a real thing and never will be. An assault rifle is a defense rifle, and a defense rifle is an assault rifle; these two concepts are identical — such is the very nature of armed combat, in which one person is trying to prevent himself from being killed by killing the other guy first.
Anyone who "needs" a defense rifle "needs" an assault rifle, because they are the same. So there you have it: The above represents a few reasons why I and a few million other non-crazy Americans own and shoot so-called semiauto "assault rifles. It really just means "any scary looking gun that we don't like and want to ban," so please spare me the nitpicking for using the term to cover semiauto ARs.
We lost that definitional battle a long time ago. The ban has survived earlier court challenges, often by the National Rifle Association and its gun advocacy affiliates. The group has spent heavily on political campaigns, and one of the original authors of the assault weapons ban found himself the subject of a recall in by the gun lobby. Many California gun owners find the required modifications detract from the appeal of the weapon — though not necessarily enough to deter them from buying.
The gun is legal despite those characteristics because it has a magazine lock, slowing down reloading. Later that year, Sposato strapped his daughter in an infant backpack and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, addressing then-Sen. Joe Biden and helping pass, in , the first federal assault weapons ban, which would expire in Perhaps the manufacturer of the Intratec TEC-DC9 should publish this information with an instruction manual for its murderous weapon.
There are no morals or ethics in the gun industry. What f—ing planet is he from? Sposato owns guns. His deceased wife grew up poor in Maine, where her family hunted to put food on the table. Still obviously the right call. Of the more than , rifles bought by Californians since Jan. Does that mean we should cease to take any action whatsoever and let the gun lobby continue its profit-driven perversion of what it means to be a gun owner and an American citizen?
Absolutely not. Last month, a disgruntled transit worker walked into a San Jose maintenance yard and shot and killed nine co-workers before turning a gun on himself.
Parkin said this was proof that the assault weapons ban does not stop mass shootings. He blamed the shooter, who carried three fully legal semiautomatic handguns, and his mental health issues. But, he said, he thinks of the lives saved by the federal and state bans and has no regrets — and no plans to rest. Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
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