Assault weapon

Assault weapon is an American term referring to any semiautomatic firearm that can accept a detachable magazine and features a pistol grip. Semiautomatic guns fire one bullet every time the trigger is pulled. Magazines are rectangular ammunition-storing devices that shooters insert into firearms, thus reloading the weapons. A pistol grip is a handle that extends below a gun to make holding and firing the gun easier for the shooter. Despite frequent confusion of the two terms, assault weapons—in twenty-first-century American terminology—are distinct from assault rifles, which are fully automatic weapons that can fire many rounds of ammunition with each pull of the trigger.

The name assault weapon is a political phrase coined by American legislators in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to firearms considered too dangerous for public use. President Bill Clinton's Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 prohibited the use of eighteen of these semiautomatic weapons based on their various features. These features included not only the guns' detachable magazines and pistol grips, but also many other military-like aspects such as bayonet mounts.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004, having been only mildly effective in reducing incidents of gun violence in the United States. Federal legislators continued trying to ban certain types of assault weapons in the 2010s, but disagreement in Congress between Democrats and Republicans prevented such bills from becoming law.

Background

Assault weapon is a phrase conceived by American state and federal lawmakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s to refer to certain types of semiautomatic firearms. The term is often confused with assault rifle, an automatic gun that can fire many rounds of ammunition with one pull of the gun's trigger; the US federal government began closely regulating the sale and ownership of assault rifles in 1934. The assault weapons that state and federal legislators wanted to ban in the early 1990s encompassed only a series of semiautomatic firearms.

Semiautomatic weapons were developed in different countries in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with the semiautomatic rifle appearing in 1885, the semiautomatic pistol in 1892, and the semiautomatic shotgun in 1902. Unlike fully automatic weapons, semiautomatic guns fire only one shot when a shooter pulls the trigger. They cannot be set to fire bursts of ammunition or to fire automatically, and converting them to fully automatic weapons is nearly impossible.

Semiautomatic firearms became popular in national militaries in the early 1900s. The American armed forces, for instance, began using the semiautomatic M1 Garand after World War I in 1918. These rifles were loaded with clips containing eight rounds each. Shooters had to fire all eight rounds before they could load a new clip into the Garand. The US military began using the M1 carbine in the early 1940s to make firing easier for soldiers. The carbine was loaded with magazines, small devices that hold rounds of ammunition and are simply inserted into a gun. The M1 carbine was a hugely influential firearm. Although the gun itself was semiautomatic, its simple design later influenced the fully automatic AK-47 and M16 assault rifles.

One of the most well-known semiautomatic weapons in the twenty-first century was the AR-15, with the letters standing for ArmaLite rifle. The American ArmaLite company developed the rifle in the late 1950s specifically for the US military, but the gun was later sold to American civilians. In the 2010s, the AR-15 was one of the most popular rifles in the United States, with about four million in national circulation. Some firearm experts attributed the extreme popularity of the AR-15 to the gun's simple design and mechanics, which allowed the weapon to be customized heavily with, for example, different colors, barrel lengths, and scopes.

Impact

Semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15 became politically controversial in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century in the United States due to endeavors by gun control advocates to reduce the country's incidents of gun violence. Gun control is the set of laws that regulates the manufacture, sale, acquisition, and use of firearms. It was around the late 1980s and early 1990s that US state governments started branding various semiautomatic weapons as assault weapons and subsequently banning them from the citizens of their states.

President Bill Clinton focused on banning certain kinds of assault-style weapons at the federal level when he took office in the early 1990s. Working with legislators in Congress, Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban into law in 1994. The legislation, created in the aftermath of a deadly shooting at a California elementary school, was meant to curb gun violence in the United States.

Clinton's law prohibited the public's use of certain types of semiautomatic weapons. Given that fully automatic weapons had been heavily regulated in the United States since the 1930s, the majority of firearms carried by American citizens were semiautomatics. However, the assault weapons ban was not intended to outlaw all semiautomatic firearms, for this would make nearly every gun in the United States illegal to own. Therefore, the ban had to describe exactly the types of guns it was prohibiting.

The law banned American citizens from owning eighteen different varieties of semiautomatic firearms along with specific military-style gun features. Some types of AR-15s and AK-47s became illegal, as did semiautomatic guns with pistol grips, high-capacity magazines, or bayonet mountings. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban may have curbed gun violence in the United States over the ten years it was active, but its detailed and specific language made evading its prescriptions easy. For instance, gun manufacturers could circumvent the ban by altering only a few aspects of their firearms, thus making the guns legal again.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004 and was not renewed by Congress. President Barack Obama tried several times in the 2010s to reinstate a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons. The Assault Weapons Ban of 2013, sponsored primarily by Democratic US senator Dianne Feinstein, sought to prohibit the manufacturing, sale, and importation of any semiautomatic rifle or pistol that was loaded with detachable magazines and that featured such other elements as pistol grips, attachments for grenade or rocket launchers, or folding or detachable stocks. The bill failed to pass Congress, as did additional gun control proposals introduced to Congress in 2015.

The question of how much access Americans should have to assault weapons arose again in June of 2016, when a man used a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle, a weapon designed for US special forces, to kill forty-nine people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

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