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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not clear on what the argument here is. Are current assault rifle regulations bad? Yes, clearly. But they didn't start out that way; most centerfire semi-automatic rifles that accepted detachable magazines would have been (properly) considered assault rifles under the original 1980s proposals. (The AR-15 itself, of course, was designed by Eugene Stoner to be a standard-issue US military rifle.)

The only thing I think we can conclude about the incoherence of firearms legislation is that they have staunch and effective opposition from firearms advocates. I do not think it is at all valid to look at them and say "legislators don't know what an assault rifle is".

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If you wanted to effectively ban assault rifles, you’d pattern a ban on the energy and firing rate of the gun. Instead, the bans are based on cosmetic characteristics such as the presence of a pistol grip. That’s true even of Feinstein’s new bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/209...

Maybe they do know what an assault rifle is and just assume that their voters don’t.

Anything Feinstein proposes is a reflection of perceived political reality given a history of opposition from firearms advocates. It doesn't tell you anything meaningful about public policy, but rather about the limits any one politician faces, both from the firearms lobby and from uncertainty about limitations --- which Scalia explicitly said exist! --- post-Heller. Or, to put it more directly: nobody should care what Feinstein says.

Again: the notion that a weapon is an "assault weapon" due to grips, sights, and flash suppressors is an artifact of a political fight from the 1980s, one the firearms lobby won handily. The original proposals had none of that silliness. They targeted tactical rifles: short to be light, portable, and effective indoors and at close quarters, with detachable magazines to maximize sustained ability to engage targets. That is: rifles optimized for taking down multiple human targets, and for effectively engaging with humans armed with similar weapons.

I'm not even arguing that we should ban assault rifles (and that is not something I actually believe). I just find discussions about firearms policy incredibly aggravating, because they rathole in these manipulatively constructed semantic arguments; I hate to see such an Orwellian maneuver (from the 1980s, not from you!) succeed so completely.

>Again: the notion that a weapon is an "assault weapon" due to grips, sights, and flash suppressors is an artifact of a political fight from the 1980s, one the firearms lobby won handily.

You might want to check your facts: the federal assault weapons ban was passed in 1994 (with a 10-year sunset clause) and prohibited guns based on grips, sights, and flash suppressors.

The firearms lobby certainly didn't "win" this one; though you could consider it one of their victories that the ban wasn't renewed (which it has been in perpetuity in certain states).

>given a history of opposition from firearms advocates.

You are aware that it's the opposition to firearms advocates that continue to parrot these definitions, correct? You'd think that if they were wrong (and they are) that they'd've wisened up in 30 years, but since fundamentally this is about what voters themselves think that "assault weapons" are rather than what they actually are, they have not.

I think you've misread me. I acknowledge that the FAWB was based on those irrelevant details. My point is, that's because the original proposals were beaten back by the firearms lobby.

So you've written, multiple times, with no citation (e.g. a bill number andvrev).

See upthread. Did you think I was just making that up?

You only mentioned the Metz bill, which never went anywhere (not even one committee), so your "gun lobby" claim is odd.

I understand your point about current legislation being proposed against the backdrop of prior fights. I’d point out two things:

1) Gun control advocates appear to believe that assault weapons are banned here in Maryland, based on the ban on “scary looking guns.”

2) A large segment of gun control advocates—indeed, the mainstream of Democrats until last month—seek to distinguish between sporting and hunting rifles and assault weapons. That drives these bans on cosmetic features. I’d assume they genuinely believe in that dividing line, or at least believe they’ve got the votes to ban assault weapons but not hunting weapons. Do these centrists (1) not understand how guns work, or (2) assume their constituents don’t understand how guns work?

My read is:

* Gun control advocates attempted in the mid-late 1980s to ban semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines, wholesale.

* They failed and the proposal got whittled down the FAWB.

* Democratic politicians (by the time the FAWB passed, the ideological sort had completed and they were all Democrats) have ever since tried to save face by fighting a rear-guard action over cosmetic features, tacitly acknowledging that real policy changes would require political capital they were unwilling to spend.

All I'd add to that is, since Heller's overreach and (especially) Sandy Hook, the political capital equation has changed, and I don't think the FAWB capitulation is determinative going forward. Which is refreshing, however this stuff sorts itself out; aren't you exhausted by how stupid the last 15 years of gun debates have been?

If we agree that FAWB-ish regulation is stupid, and we're discussing policy futures, what do FAWB definitions matter?

> The original proposals had none of that silliness. They targeted tactical rifles: short to be light, portable, and effective indoors and at close quarters, with detachable magazines to maximize sustained ability to engage targets.

This doesn't match up with my understanding of the history of assault weapon legislation. Roberti-Roos in California (1989) banned weapons by name, not by how light they were or how useful they'd be in close quarters combat. I can't find any early drafts of alternative proposals. By the time the Federal Assault Weapons ban came around in 1994, this approach was exposed as unworkable because manufacturers would make minor changes, change the model number, and get around the ban list. That's how you got the feature tests, which were added to Roberti-Roos in 1999.

If you know of any early assault weapon ban proposals that banned based on functionality, I'd really appreciate some citations. I've seen more recent proposals to ban all semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines, but nothing that dated to the 1980s.

Will track down! It'll be somewhere in my pile of bookmarks.

Here you go:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/386...

This was Metzenbaum's reaction to the Stockton massacre; it was covered in the NYT (both at the time and in retrospectives about how we ended up with our batty FAWB). Note that in addition to definitionally regulating AR-15s, it also bans them outright by name.

(The definitional criteria here is --- this is from a skim and from memory, so correct me but don't jump on me if I have this wrong --- any semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine that accepts more than 10 rounds).

According to Wikipedia the 1994 law banned both by name and by functionality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban#...

The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons ban was the source of the irrational feature tests under discussion. These feature tests originated here because California's experience showed that name bans were easily subverted. The 1994 FAWB did not contain a functionality ban aside from the feature tests only applying to semiautomatic pistols and rifles with detachable magazines and semiautomatic shotguns. Semiautomatic pistols and rifles with detachable magazines and semiautomatic shotguns remained legal.

>Maybe they do know what an assault rifle is and just assume that their voters don’t.

They know what their voters think an assault rifle is.

And what their voters think assault rifles are is anything painted black and lacking a "traditional" appearance, which is why rifles identical in mechanical function to "assault rifles" tend not to be banned by the laws these politicians think their voters want.

Ignorance of this voting bloc about the way guns work (and the qualities that make one better suited to a particular task than another) acts in the favor of those who are against their prohibition. Being on national news and saying a barrel shroud is a "shoulder thing that goes up" does not help endear people who know that's false to your cause.

>The only thing I think we can conclude about the incoherence of firearms legislation is that they have staunch and effective opposition from firearms advocates. I do not think it is at all valid to look at them and say "legislators don't know what an assault rifle is".

Well, if we're calling AR-15s and centerfire semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines assault rifles, then we don't know what assault rifles are. The term has been in use since WW2 and refers to selective fire rifles with intermediate cartridges and detachable magazines.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean about the original 1980s proposals - afaik the only major 1980s attempts at legislation occurred after a school shooting in California, had limited opposition in California, and was enacted into law. It included classifying rifles as assault weapons if they had detachable magazines plus at least one of other relatively features, such as pistol grips, barrel shrouds, folding/telescoping stocks, etc. Most of those features have limited to no impact on the ability of the rifle to be a deadly weapon.

>(The AR-15 itself, of course, was designed by Eugene Stoner to be a standard-issue US military rifle.)

The ArmaLite AR-15 designed for the military was a select fire rifle that ultimately became the M16. The trademark was sold to Colt. Colt later used that trademark in producing the semi-automatic civilian version. An AR-15 or AR-15 clone a civilian can buy is not the same AR-15 that Eugene Stoner designed.

As best as I can tell, most legislators have no idea what assault weapons are, what assault rifles are, or much at all about guns in general. And this includes those on the conservative side. I'm pro gun control, if we can find a way to effectively do it, but if we're actually concerned about human life, assault weapons don't even make sense to be the focus. Over 60% of homicides committed with firearms are done with handguns. Rifles only make up about 4%. Mass shootings are scary, and make news, and are terrifying. But they're responsible for a tiny fraction of gun related homicides, and the focus on rifles (and particularly features that are more related to appearance than efficacy in being deadly weapons) screams to me that it is almost entirely a political play and less related to any real concern over the healthy and safety of those living in America.

Incidentally, the National Firearms Act (1934) was originally meant to ban handguns. The current regulation on short barrel rifles and short barrel shotguns are vestigial remnants of this intent (if you ban handguns, it only makes sense to also ban somebody chopping up their shotgun to make it handgun-sized.)

Literally the one difference between the "official", Hitler-approved definition of "assault rifle" and an AR-15 is that the AR-15 doesn't support selective fire†. As, like, literally any time spent in gun and military nerd forums or "I was in combat ask me anything" AMAs will quickly inform you, the importance of more-than-semiautomatic fire in actual military operations is highly contested.

Do I concede that the AR-15 is thus not an according-to-Hoyle assault rifle? Sure, but only Hoyle cares.

The reason this debate exists at all is because of "assault weapons bans". But the semantic argument is, of course, circular: it matters if a weapon is an "assault weapon" because we might ban assault weapons, and a weapon is an "assault weapon" if we might ban it. To reasonably discuss them as they pertain to public policy --- which is what this subthread is doing --- you have to engage on the merits. The appeal to definitions is a smokescreen.

† For the advanced Facebook version of this discussion, try making an argument about the legitimacy of binary triggers; is an AR-15 fitted with a binary trigger group an "assault rifle"? Well. Let me tell you something about fully automatic fire: it occurs only when you eject multiple rounds with a single depression of the trigger, and also, with a binary trigger, you have you depress the trigger a certain way to "select" rapid fire, which doesn't really count as "selection", so...

> Literally the one difference between the "official", Hitler-approved definition of "assault rifle" and an AR-15 is that the AR-15 doesn't support selective fire.

In case anybody isn't clear on what that means: one is a machine gun and the other is not.

I mean, sort of? If we're going this deep into the weeds on terminology, a machine gun is optimized for sustained fully automatic fire; in particular, it's heavier and doesn't become impossible to handle due to heat after prolonged firing. Automatic rifles are not generally machine guns.

"Selective fire" is the gun nerd way of saying "capable of fully automatic fire".

All automatic rifles fall into the categories under machine guns and are thus banned as machine guns. A select fire carbine battle rifle such as the Uzi or the MP5 are in fact classified as sub-machine guns. The term machine gun denotes a firearm that can fire more than a single round with a single trigger pull. There are pistols that are classified as machine guns.

  Automatic rifles are not generally machine guns.

Words no longer mean things, then.

One of the interesting things too is the fact that in WW1 & WW2, we had a thing called a "Battle Rifle" and these were higher calibers, such as .30-06, .303, .30-30, etc...

These "Battle Rifles" were able to reach out to thousand plus yards and still be effective for a regular grunt. These rifles and their calibers were meant for killing, taking body parts off, creating gaping wound channels.

I don't remember exactly when, yet sometime after WW2, the US Forces surveyed and found that they weren't engaging targets 800-1,000 yards out. Instead, they were engaging targets in the 50-300 range.

The US military decided that they wanted to carry more ammunition and bring the engagement zone down from the 800-1k to the 250ish. This resulted in a smaller cartridge (.223/5.56). The strategy moved to taking the enemy combatant out of the fight by injuring them instead of killing them. This had a huge advantage in their eyes... rather than the main goal of killing, they wanted to injure. By injuring, it took them out of the fight, but it also took precious resources away from the enemy, which now has to care for their injured comrade.

Why don't we hear anything about the larger calibers, which are meant to be truly destructive?

I loved your write up, cthalupa and i find it a shame that people, when discussing topics such as this, don't even know about the items they're arguing about.

This "5.56 is designed to injure not to kill" thing is another gun policy canard. What's true is that the Army concluded that the ability to carry more rounds was more important than the ability to hit at a long distance, and that in a military tactical situation, any non-trivial rifle injury is sufficient to neutralize. It is absolutely not in reality the case that an AR-15 is a less lethal weapon than a handgun.

And, of course, injuries from rifle rounds are not the same as injuries from handguns, as this trauma doctor ably explains:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-...

Unfortunately, that's not the only narrative you can get on rifle injuries from civilian trauma doctors; there's also the famous (and amazing, excellent) narrative from the doctor that coordinated an ER receiving mass numbers of patients in Las Vegas after the Mandalay shooting.

You might find "The Gun" but CJ Chivers very interesting. It covers the history you're talking about accurately and in depth.

Not sure wounding vs. killing was the big differentiator. As tptacek mentions, any non-trivial rifle-calibre hit is incapacitating. What determines whether the victim dies immediately or has a chance to survive depends on where it hits.

The big things, as you mention, was that real life engagement ranges were considerably shorter, so you could sacrifice long-range performance and gain lighter weight (allowing the soldier to carry more rounds) and making the thing somewhat controllable on full auto for close-quarter fighting.

The Germans figured this out, and towards the end of WWII they fielded the "Sturmgewehr 44 (Stg 44)". This fired a shortened version of their standard rifle calibre round (7.92mm). The Soviets did the same with their Ak-47 family. The price of keeping the full rifle caliber but slow round (around 700 m/s muzzle velocity) was poor ballistics and armor penetration.

Later on the US went to the other extreme with a very small caliber firing at higher than usual rifle muzzle velocity (almost 1000 m/s).

Ironically there was research going back all the way to pre-WWII times suggesting the "optimal" infantry caliber would be somewhere in the 6-7mm range with muzzle velocity in the "standard" range for rifles (around 800-900 m/s).

I don't think we can conclude that at all. Firearms advocates have loudly and coherently pointed out just how nonsensical this all is to anyone who'd listen. It's your country's gun control activists who think these rules make sense. They're the ones who grab pictures of scary-looking black .22LR bolt-action rifles and write tweets about how terrible it is that 18 year olds can buy them, then get their media pals to smear their opponents for mocking this. They're the ones who contrast those scary guns with the old-fashioned wooden rifles their relatives used to use for hunting. They're the ones who blame the repeal of that nonsensical assault weapon ban for mass shootings. They're the ones who outright take pride in their ignorance about guns, to the point that I'm not sure it's possible to be accepted as pro-gun-control if you actually care about whether what you're saying is accurate. American gun control laws are the way they are because of the American gun control movement.

You're not really saying anything here. Is your point that we shouldn't regulate weapons based on their color or the material their stocks are made out of? I obviously agree with you.

The subtext here is yet another Firearms Policy Canard, which is that anyone who thinks semi-automatic rifles should be regulated must solely be reacting to the color of the weapon, and clearly doesn't know that there are farmers that rely on them to clear out smallish animals or whatever. Sorry, I get that most people don't take any time to research these topics, but they're in fact not that complicated (these are devices that were designed to be broken down and reassembled in a jungle during monsoon rains by teenagers), and I'm not cowed.

My point is that we shouldn't regulate weapons based on anything the US gun control movement ever says. Not because guns are too hard for anyone but gun nuts to understand, but because the whole shebang is built on a foundation of willful, weaponised ignorance.

I don't think it's possible to patch up those policy demands and make them sensible either. The whole case for why rifle regulation is more important than handgun regulation and should be stricter than it - one of the key pillars of the current US gun control movement - relies heavily on the imaginary distinction between good hunting rifles and evil human-hunting rifles. Without that distinction, it's hard to justify the position that those guns should be banned or tightly restricted but not the handguns used by the armed guards protecting all the Hollywood celebrities cheering on gun control as anything but urban-vs-rural cultural warfare. Handguns cause a huge amount of death and misery in the US right now compared to rifles. (Of course, there's also some constitutional issues with taking those away... but that's another problem entirely.)

I don't think it's reasonable to base public policy on a caricature of one faction. Issues are resolvable on their merits. You can find noisy factions on every issue saying stupid things; we can't freeze up as a result, generating a sort of inadvertent heckler's veto.

But actually none of this matters on HN. The interesting question HN is what the policy should be, not what the dumbest people in America advocating for that policy are saying. We're not actually going to impact gun policy at all here, so we might as well free ourselves to discuss it rationally.

If we were discussing it rationally, we would have to acknowledge that the firearms industry loves bans on features and accessories, because they get to increase sales through replacements, new innovations and fear.

Announce a ban on pink magazines to take effect at the beginning of next year, and sales of pink magazines will rise; American Rifleman will run articles comparing the effectiveness of various color choices; Guns and Ammo will have a feature on 20 pink magazines you should buy before the ban; and sales of colored tape will rise in two different ways: pink tape will be applied to drab magazines -- "less than 35% coverage, so it's legal!" -- and black tape will be applied to pink magazines -- "More than 80% coverage when inserted, so it's legal, but when we finally defeat the irrational ban, you can take it right off!"

I don't understand how the marketing goals of firearms manufacturers should influence firearms policy.

Should or does? I'm not arguing that they should, only that they do.

Legislators attempting to talk about banning "Assault Weapons" come across about as intelligent and informed as those who want to ban violent video games. Neanderthals to those who know whats going on, saints to those who are blindly stomaching hype and propaganda.

California has a notably terrible nitwit (Deleon) who has made hilarious public gaffes in his discriptions of firearm technology. Feinstein notably said -> “We have laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than 3 rounds, yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 30 round magazines”.

These are not informed people, they're partisan politicians trying to pit people against eachother.

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