Parents of Sandy Hook victims planning lawsuit against gunmaker Bushmaster

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349. Here is the problem

for all the talk about military style weapons, strip away all the plastic furniture and all you have is a semiautomatic rifle. Semiautomatic rifles are very old technology that have been available to civilians for nearly a century.

Caliber of bullet and rate of fire are all that matters when talking about lethality. There is nothing unique about military style rifles that allow a bright line to be drawn between military and civilian rifles. There are plenty of non-military rifles out there that are just as lethal as an AR-15.

We got to this point because of a deliberate choice by gun control advocates in the 1990s when they were pushing the first assault weapon ban. They decided to blur the lines between fully automatic military rifles and semiautomatic civilian models to create a moral panic and get the AWB passed. The AWB would then be the first step in getting stricter laws regulating handguns. But the law was so poorly written (because "assault weapon" was a made up term with no actual technical meaning) because they didn't want a blanket ban on all semiautomatic rifles (only the evil military ones). Since the only difference was cosmetic features, the ban was simply a list of banned cosmetic features. The gun manufacturers simply removed those features and kept on selling AR-15s.