Assault rifles [View all]

[JonLP24]

Often times when something happens there is a rush for legislation based on public pressure which the legislation is symbolic, does little-to-nothing to prevent what happened that led to the legislation, and there is unintended affects.

That is how I feel about recent calls for assault rifle bans. Assault rifle in this context, I believe, deals with semi-automatic military style rifles. As far as the function, a semi-auto military rifle is no different than non-military semi-auto. I often read that these weapons were designed for warfare rather than hunting which because of that reason which makes most of these rifles piss poor for hunting big game(rather than what's implied such as them being too powerful). Most of them such as the AR-15(you can get it for different calibers) fires standard a .223, 5.56m bullet which are widely considered too small and inhumane for deer. They would be used for smaller game. For Deer, hunters generally use much larger rounds such as 7.62 for AR-15 or .30-.30 on other models.

For those reasons a specific assault rifle bans doesn't make sense when I'd rather get shot by a M-16 than a Deer/Bear hunting rifle. It also wouldn't prevent other gun massacres because there is nothing special about a AR-15 that would make a gun massacre possible that other rifles wouldn't.

One argument that seems reasonable is the Rambo types, the ones more likely to engage in a massacre would be attracted to these types. That may be true but I would have difficulties legislating against a mindset but it is a fair point.

In general, they are rarely used in crimes. Handguns are used by far more than any other kind of gun in violent gun crimes. I won't argue against those for banning all guns or all rifles since they would actually address the problem of gun massacres but a specific military rifle ban would prevent nothing (except for choice in weaponry) and harmful on legal gun owners.