what is an assault weapon?

[Euromutt]

63. That's a legal definition, and thus not necessarily applicable for practical purposes

Peruse any piece of legislation, and you'll come across phrase like "for the purposes of this Act, x is defined as y" where x can be "black" and y can be a description that boils down to "white." By way of example, the DoJ succeeded in convicting Paul "Max Hardcore" Little of "distribution" of obscene material, where "distribution" (for the purposes of the law in question) included shipping the material to a customer (actually an undercover FBI agent) at that customer's explicit request. It's not as if Little was shipping his (admittedly vile) material to every gas station and convenience store in Florida in hopes of unsuspecting customers buying it; he shipped it to a specific address in Florida at the request of someone posing as the resident of that address. In other words, not what one would commonly define as "distribution" but in this case, the legal definition differed from the commonly used definition.

Case in point in this particular context: the Olympic Arms PCR, "PCR" being short for "politically correct rifle." The PCR was specifically made to comply with the 1994 AWB as not being an "assault weapon" under that particular legal definition. So, for federal legal purposes, the PCR is not an "assault weapon." However, the state of California has classed the PCR as an "assault weapon," simply by designating it as such by name. So we can't really say there is a single, even halfway clear definition of what constitutes an "assault weapon" when a particular model of rifle simultaneously both is and is not an "assault weapon."