The Assault Rifle – Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club

There’s this ongoing political conversation wherein liberals say, “We must ban assault rifles,” and then conservatives respond with an overly pedantic definition of “assault rifle” in order to mock the liberals, who rightly see the conservative response as a steaming pile of horseshit.

But maybe we should all be clear on what an assault rifle is, and why it is (or isn’t) a particularly deadly firearm.

Most gun people recognize the StG-44 as the first assault rifle, and it has all the characteristics of today’s assault rifles (but only if we’re using the military definition of assault rifle). The full name of the gun would be “Sturmgewehr 1944” or “storm rifle of 1944”; the name literally means that the firearm is meant to be used by infantry to storm (or assault) a military target. It was one of the last significant inventions of Nazi Germany.

Characteristics of a military assault rifle include:

Ammunition fed by means of a detachable magazine (typically, but not necessarily, a box magazine). This is advantageous because it allows the soldier to quickly reload the weapon.
Fires an intermediate-size cartridge — i.e., neither an ineffective pistol cartridge, nor a full-size (and overpowered) rifle cartridge. A “Goldilocks” cartridge in terms of size. This is advantageous because the intermediate cartridge is just as effective (at killing people) as a full-sized cartridge at the ranges where gunfights typically occur, while being easier to shoot and lighter to carry. Because the smaller cartridge takes less time to complete combustion (relative to a full-sized rifle cartridge), this also means the assault rifle can have a shorter barrel, so it is easier to maneuver through a complex environment.
Select-fire. A military assault rifle has at least 3 fire-control settings: safe, single shot, and multiple shots per trigger pull. The multiple-shot setting might fire 2 shots, 3 shots, or continuously depending on the specific gun.

It’s this third characteristic (select-fire) that gets the conservative pedant all excited. Since all select-fire guns are legally and technically machine-guns, they are all strictly controlled by the US government. Every machine-gun must be registered. The owner has to pass a complete background check and submit their fingerprints as part of the background check and registration process. There’s also a $200 fee per registered item. In addition to all this, the civilian machine-gun registry was closed in 1986, meaning that no firearm has been allowed to be added to that registry since then. There are currently about 176,000 civilian-owned machine-guns in the US. (The rest of the 630,000 machine-guns in the US would be owned by non-civilians — mostly the police.)

As a result of all the above, almost none (percentage-wise) of the military-style rifles in the US are technically “assault rifles” because they are neither legally nor technically “machine-guns”. Yet, the conservative pedant’s response is still horseshit.

First off, what is the simple way to say “semi-automatic rifle firing an intermediate-sized cartridge fed from a detachable magazine”? The euphemism “military-style weapon” doesn’t really capture that meaning — it makes it sound like people are concerned about an aesthetic rather than functionality. The euphemism “sport-utility rifle” cleverly glosses over the functional niche that such a gun perfectly fills. I’ll state the obvious: Conservatives often limit language as a strategy toward controlling a narrative, and liberals let them get away with it.

Personally, I still think of semi-automatic rifles that fire an intermediate cartridge from a detachable magazine as “assault” rifles even if they are not machine-guns.

Regardless of whether a person is using their non-machine-gun for a noble purpose, a trivial purpose, or something pernicious, the niche that a semi-auto rifle in an intermediate cartridge that feeds from a detachable magazine fills most perfectly is that of killing people. Pro-gun conservatives know this; it is exactly the reason why they own these guns.
Full-auto functionality is not required for a not-a-machine-gun to perfectly fulfill most military scenarios where an assault rifle would be used. In fact, not all military semi-auto rifles in an intermediate cartridge that feed from a detachable magazine are full-auto. Are they not assault rifles? In fact, full auto fire is strongly discouraged by every military on Earth because it wastes ammunition and puts the soldier at a disadvantage when their magazine goes empty in (literally) 3 seconds.
Between training to fire more quickly (see, for example, Jerry Miculek) and devices that allow for an extremely high rate of fire while still technically firing once per actuation of the trigger (e.g., binary triggers), the functionality of a “machine-gun” is insignificant compared to the other characteristics of an assault rifle.

The core of the whole “assault rifle” issue is that liberals don’t understand guns and conservatives are (usually) unwilling to admit that they want to kill everyone who isn’t a conservative. OK, that wasn’t entirely fair — they’re perfectly willing to allow most non-conservatives to keep living if those people will simply bow to conservative authority and live under conditions of continuous suffering and humiliation. By “most” I mean like 60%.

They will, however, point out that the Second Amendment is not about hunting which sort of implies the truth. It’s certainly true that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. The purpose of the Second Amendment is about protecting the American people from tyranny, whether it comes from within or without. Unfortunately, we’re in this very awkward situation where the tyrants are the people who control almost all of the guns. I say “control” because while conservative civilians own far more guns than other civilians, there’s also the issue of the police and military, both of which are staffed by mostly conservatives and strangely immune from democratic oversight. If our society managed to disarm all civilians, the core problem would remain.

The Second Amendment was not intended to be about hunting, but it also wasn’t intended to be about the right to genocide. Conservatives know this, which is why they constantly fabricate tyranny in the form of conspiracy theories as an excuse to target some group for genocide while pretending they’re really fighting against tyranny. Right now, their most popular cover conspiracy is to claim that all trans women are actually pedophiles and that all pedophiles must be killed to protect our children from this sexual tyranny. As far as I can tell, all pedophiles are conservatives, so it’s an interesting strategy.

While I don’t have the solution to this problem — and I don’t think a solution is forthcoming — I do see that the problem isn’t assault rifles, or really any other physical object, but rather conservatives and conservativism.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Wilhoit’s Law

Unfortunately, liberals are just a different kind of conservative and they are under an interesting delusion that the guns of the police and military are their own guns (by proxy) and that those guns will tend to do the right thing from a liberal viewpoint. More precisely, they believe the police serve their interests and that they (liberals) deserve to be protected and not bound. Put another way, they believe the police will protect liberals and liberalism while binding those who oppose both. In truth, all military small arms must be controlled by a person — by definition — and that person is rarely if ever a liberal.

Are assault rifles more deadly than other guns? In short, yes — and that’s the whole point. But here’s why:

While a bullet fired from an assault rifle is generally less deadly than a bullet fired from a full-sized rifle, the difference is insignificant at normal distances for both combat and plain-old murder.
A bullet fired from an assault rifle is dramatically more deadly than one fired from a handgun (or a rifle that fires handgun ammunition).
The size of an assault rifle makes it more maneuverable (i.e., easier for moving quickly in a complex environment) relative to a full-size rifle.
It is easier to accurately fire an assault rifle quickly than it is to fire a full-size rifle quickly because the cartridge off the assault rifle is less powerful and thus causes less recoil.
The assault rifle and its ammunition are lighter than a full-size rifle and its ammunition, so the person using it can move faster and farther.
The detachable magazine makes reloading relatively quick and easy.
Since it is semi-automatic, it does not have to be reloaded between single shots. It only has to be reloaded between magazines. Therefore, it is easier to fire single shots in quick succession relative to a manually-operated firearm (e.g., bolt-action rifle, or pump-action shotgun).
Because an assault rifle has a stock, it can be shouldered, so it is easier for the shooter to hit their target in comparison to a handgun.

So, yes: An assault rifle is dramatically more deadly than a handgun, and slightly more deadly compared to a full-size rifle. However, the assault rifle is only deadlier than the full-size rifle if we are imagining a scenario where multiple shots are fired and/or the shooter is on the move. More importantly, it is only more deadly in the hypothetical sense. If we look at what kind of firearm actually ends up killing the most Americans, a very different picture forms.

Most (53-62% depending on the year) firearm-related deaths are suicides. The hypothetical deadliness of an assault rifle doesn’t apply there, and these deaths almost always involve a handgun. Similarly, handguns were used in most homicides in the US in 2019, whereas rifles of any type were only used in 2.6% of homicides. The FBI’s data on this is a little sloppy (thanks to police providing sloppy data), but, in essence, the US could eliminate at least 75% of firearm-related deaths by banning all handguns. What’s more likely is that banning all handguns would eliminate more like 90 to 95% of gun-related deaths*. In terms of actual, real-world deadliness, the handgun is the deadliest firearm despite the hypotheticals of assault rifles that I explained above.

Despite the relative deadliness of handguns, Americans continue to believe that a handgun is safe compared to any kind of long gun. When we are teaching liberals, centrists, and leftists to shoot, we find that they overwhelmingly request to learn how to shoot a handgun, and they all choose a handgun as their first firearm. When someone asks me what kind of gun they should get, I tell them an AR-15 (I would prefer that they work up to the more difficult and dangerous handgun), and they immediately say, “I was thinking handgun,” and they are clearly more comfortable with handguns. I do not know why this misconception continues to exist.

I do not have any specific legislative ideas to provide as a solution for the current state of firearm law, mostly because Democrats and Republicans both insist on clinging dogmatically to absurd legislative agendas that are both nonsensical when compared to reality and clearly unachievable. I can point to handguns all I want, but Democrats will point to barrel shrouds and Republicans will point to machine-guns in response. Neither side wants to do anything about fascism, poverty, or the abject hopelessness of American society and both are using firearms as a distraction. The caustic culture that produces the mass shooter himself is treated as holy by the majority of Americans.

There was this joke about conservatives when the debate over the Affordable Care Act was raging — that the conservative health plan is, “don’t get sick, but if you do, die quickly.” In that spirit, the liberal position on guns appears to be, “pretend there’s no threat to the existence of marginalized people, and when that threat materializes, instead of fighting back, you should become a martyr so we can have a really nice candlelight vigil.” It’s not as slick, but you get the point.

*I’m making a silly assumption here for the sake of keeping it simple: That a ban would actually work. Probably, most handguns would not disappear if they were banned.