Don't call it an assault weapon.

[Straw Man]

66. Actually, not so much.

You can use an AR15 as an assault weapon. Ergonomics plays a major role in how fast a

Person can fire rounds.

Are you referring to pistol grips? They may have a marginal effect on rate of fire, but they have more to do with accuracy and controllability. That's why Olympic rifle competitors like them.

The US Army toyed with the idea in the late '80s with doing away with the full-auto feature on the M-16, but instead they just changed front handgrips and added 3 round burst and renamed it M-16 A2.

Toyed with and then abandoned the idea. You need more than semi-auto capability for suppressive fire.

The reason the military wanted to do away with full-auto was due to the number of rounds being wasted and declining accuracy the longer a soldier pulled the trigger.

In other words, there was an economic motive. This was the same reason the military stuck with Springfield muskets and Sharps carbines long past the point at which they should have adopted repeating lever-action rifles. The theory was that if soldiers were armed with repeaters, they would waste too much ammo. A self-fulfilling prophesy: soldiers waste even less ammo when they're dead.

Accuracy is not really relevant to suppressive fire. The era of semi-auto battle rifles is over.