Banning “Assault Rifles”
New York Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani claims that he wants a “nationwide ban on assault rifles.”
IN FACT, federal law has largely banned assault rifles since 1986. Mamdani — who wrote in 2022, “We need to ban all guns” — is conflating common semi-automatic rifles used for hunting and home defense with automatic military firearms.
Mamdani’s rhetoric accords with the strategy of a leading gun control activist who wrote that he planned to exploit the “public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic” guns.
