From: Jeff Chan Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:25:30 -0800 It may be worth pointing out some of the history of the terms so that we can use them correctly. An assault rifle is a specific military designation for a select fire, intermediate-caliber rifle: essentially a fully-automatic military machine gun carried by an individual soldier. The first was the German MP44, followed by the Soviet AK-47 and later by Eugene Stoner's U.S. M-16, among others. All are fully-automatic in that they can fire more than one round per trigger pull. The so-called "assault weapon" is a term invented by anti-gunners, specifically Josh Sugarman in his March 1989 paper titled "Assault Weapon: Analysis, New Research and Legislation." In it Sugarman recommends exploiting: "...the public's confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons [sic] -- anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun..." This confusion along with most of the propaganda and lobbying strategies he proposed to exploit this confusion in support of semi-automatic firearm bans were picked up by anti-gun legislators like Feinstein, former California Attorney General John Van De Kamp and others. They used the confusion to successfully promote gun bans in the state and federal legislatures. In a technical sense there is no such thing as a so-called "assault weapon." Box magazine-fed semiautomatic firearms have existed since before 1900. Other semi-automatic firearms that do not look like semi-automatic versions of military firearms have similar or greater performance than the so-called "assault weapons". We should not use the anti-gunner's terminology against ourselves. Doing so is essentially giving them victory by letting them define the terms of the debate. It is also technically incorrect and serves to falsely demonize guns that are ideally suited to the defense of our freedom and nation. Jeff C.