AR-15 In Particular And Guns In General Flying Off The Shelf.

[Recursion]

22. The problem is that's way too many guns

The actual salient characteristics here are "semi automatic weapon that accepts detachable magazines". That's what makes it usable in a mass shooting.

If you want to ban that (or reschedule it under the NFA or whatever) we can certainly try, the reason that's not what the AWB did is because doing that winds up catching way too many guns for it to be politically feasible, and in particular a lot of guns that look much less frightening than the AR-15 despite operating the exact same way. So either you have to grandfather them in (and a ban that grandfathers in a hundred million durable items seems kind of pointless) or you have to figure out a way to take them from people (which is going to be all kinds of problematic).

Once the people working on the 94 ban saw exactly how many guns we were talking about (and that's only gone up since then) they tweaked it to only affect guns that looked like military weapons (and, again, the look doesn't change how they actually operate) because they could sell that (when someone sees an AR-15 they think "that's a deadly assault weapon" despite the fact that it's functionally identical to their grandfather's hunting rifle that they wouldn't want to ban). But the end result was for the manufacturers to weld the stocks and get rid of the bayonet lugs. For that matter Connecticut has an assault weapons ban, and the Bushmaster was legal under it.

Now, you could also simply ban the brand, but somebody else would make the Shrubmaster or whatever in a few weeks.