Replies

The thing that grabs me about America's gun laws, aside from the fact that they're basically all unconstitutional, is the basic inanity of them. "Assault weapons" are a case in point. There are basically two definitions of an assault weapon, i.e. a political and a military definition.

The political definition is basically just anything which, on a scale of one to ten for being scary looking to demokkkrats, goes much over a six.

The real military definition is more complex. Most assume a weapon has to be at least semi-automatic and preferably automatic to qualify but, in real life, that's not really necessary. In fact in real life, most people attempting to fire any military weapon in full auto mode will never hit anything with it.

What you really want and need for an assault weapon are things which work well in assault situations:

Big enough to injure a human adversary badly enough to take him out of the battle.
Otherwise fairly small, easy to load up with lots of ammo and carry lots of ammo around.
Accurate.
Quick (aimed) follow on shots. This eliminates the idea of taking 600 meter shots with an assault rifle. One guy in the squad (designated marksman or sniper) carries something which CAN do that.
Light, easy to manipulate.

Add to that list the ideas that it would be good if the thing never jammed and were easy to clean. Add all of that up, and what I come up with is a lot different from the pictures you usually see:

That's basically a Henry lever-action rifle in 22 wmr caliber, which is basically a $330 item on Gunbroker or at BassPro or Gander Mountain. Couple that with some of the hotter WMR ammo and you have a 40-gr bullet moving just over 2000 fps which can be totally cleaned by pulling one of your string type cleaners through the bore.

That's about what I'd want for an "assault rifle" in today's world. You'd have to figure some way to make the feed tubes detachable/quick-change, but that's not a major engineering feat.

It is not particularly difficult to turn that Henry into a full auto. A machine shop is not neccessary. You need hand tools, and the method has been tested.

They took the lever guns in Australia, as well as pump actions, I think, because of precisely the issues you’ve raised. Of course, they accomplished nothing. Stupid people pass stupid laws.

The real military definition is more complex. Most assume a weapon has to be at least semi-automatic and preferably automatic to qualify but, in real life, that's not really necessary. In fact in real life, most people attempting to fire any military weapon in full auto mode will never hit anything with it.

"Assault weapon" is a term made up by the gun grabbers. It' means any gun we don't the citiznry to have, this week.

An "assault rifle" OTOH, is, by DoD definition, "“short, compact, select-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges" (submachine gun cartridges are *pistol* catridges, although occasionally loaded a bit hotter). Examples would be the M-16, true AK-47, the FNC, the HK-53, the PRC, Type 95 / 97, the Steyr AUG and a host of others.