Mike McDaniel at the American Thinker today has a piece on the Brief History of Assault Weapons. Spoiler alert...are you ready?...there is none.
And now, a brief history of “Assault Weapons…” There. Did you enjoy it? That’s all the history required. There is no such thing and never was. ATF Director Steve Dettelbach was recently asked by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to define the term. Keep in mind Jackson Lee is very much an anti-liberty/gun cracktivist and was lobbing a softball to fellow traveler Dettelbach:
"Dettlebach was questioned by Democrat Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee who asked the ATF director whether he knew what an "assault weapon" was after acknowledging the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York."
"Let me just hold up just to pay tribute and acknowledge that these are the deceased — their families are still mourning — of the incident in Buffalo at the grocery store. It was an assault weapon that killed them," said Lee."
"She continued, "My question to you is just simply a ‘yes’ or ‘no.' You know what an assault weapon is? You seen one?""
"Dettlebach deflected the question, saying the term is not something he's qualified to rule on."
No matter how she pressed him, Dettelbach, the head of the ATF, an organization all about firearm definitions and laws, refused to define the class of weapons he was testifying must be banned. That’s odd, but unsurprising. Even Dettelbach, who is also an anti-liberty/gun cracktivist, knows there is no such thing.
So, who dreamed up the term "assault weapon"? It was certainly a very effective, if also a totally bogus term that caught on in the gun grabber community, and even has been used by gun writers including yours truly. But if you understand how semi-automatic rifles work, you could simply put a semi-automatic rifle in a wood stock, and it becomes a low powered hunting rifle, while in the typical black rifle furniture, it becomes the dreaded "assault rifle." Incidentally, the AR in AR-15 stands for Armalite Rifle, not "Assault Rifle." Well, here's that bit of history:
The term can be traced back to a 1988 book—Assault Weapons And Accessories In America—by Josh Sugarman, the founder that same year of the Violence Policy Center, dedicated to disarming non-criminal Americans. It was Sugarman who coined the term, and a primary gun grabber tactic:
"Assault weapons-just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms-are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons-anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun-can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons."
In those heady, pre-Heller (2008), McDonald (2010) and Bruen (2022) days, cracktivists like Sugarman believed it was possible to discredit the Second Amendment, disarm the public, and like all good Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) cracktivists, any means to their ends were legitimate, particularly fear mongering and lying.
Their approach was incremental. If they could ban any class of firearm or accessory, that might open the door to banning everything. Thus were “assault weapons” born. Some even began calling common bolt-actioned, scoped, hunting rifles “sniper weapons,” but that never really caught on.
The fact is that there is no such thing as an "assault weapon," and the Director of the ATF knows it. That is why he declined to embarrass himself. Yet, the gun-grabbers continue to try to ban a myth, just as they tried to ban other myths like cop killer bullets and plastic guns.
The Bruen decision along with Heller and McDonald has pretty much put an end to banning the so-called "assault weapons." The only way forward would be to repeal or modify the Second Amendment. For now, that is a pipe dream, though it may be the subject of future debates. But in light of what the Supreme Court has said, I wonder that the people proposing to pass such a law in Congress are not booted out of office. It is, after all not a matter of disagreement on policy, but proposing laws that they know are Unconstitutional.
Gentle readers are encouraged to read all of McDaniel's post.
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