"There were at least 6 weapons to choose from immediately at hand. The fact that he didn't take

[Recursion]

56. We seem to have reached a tipping point of equating "assault weapon" with "semi-automatic"

Trying to stop that will probably be as useless as my repeatedly failed rear-guard attempt at getting people to distinguish the meanings of "nauseous" and "nauseated". So, fine. If what you're talking about is semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines, that's what I'll read "assault weapon" to mean. A couple of things, though:

1. That's not what the 1994 Federal AWB or any subsequent state AWB banned, so reinstating the AWB won't get rid of those.
2. You're talking about a very widely owned class of firearm, much more widely owned than anything we've banned or tightly controlled in the past (we've placed incredibly strong restrictions on machine guns, for instance, which very few people owned or even wanted in the first place).
3. If a ban is extended to include all semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines, we lose the "scare" factor that the original assault weapons ban had, because people aren't scared of their grandfather's snake rifle despite the fact that it works exactly the same way as the scary-looking black weapon with a pistol grip

The same thing that made the '94 ban so useless will confront us today: nobody has a realistic idea for getting rid of the hundred million or so semi-automatic rifles in people's homes today, so any law will be either impossible to enforce or wind up with so many grandfathered or excepted weapons that it's kind of pointless.