VA “Assault Weapons” Ban
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger claims that she just signed an “assault weapons ban” because “firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties do not belong on our streets.”
IN FACT, Spanberger signed a ban on common semi-automatic guns used for home-defense and hunting. Moreover, federal law already bans civilians from having firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties. Here are the specifics:
- In 1986, Congress passed and President Reagan signed a law that made it generally illegal for civilians to “transfer or possess a machinegun,” defined by federal law as “any weapon” that can fire “more than one shot” with “a single function of the trigger.”
- These banned guns are classified as “automatic firearms,” which include not just heavy mounted machine guns but also lightweight carryable submachine guns and assault rifles.
- As explained in the book Military Technology, “automatic weapons made war a far more deadly business” because they allowed a soldier to “point the weapon in the general direction of his enemy” and unleash “hundreds of bullets each minute,” killing them en masse.
- The primary purpose of the 1986 law was to reduce mass shooting deaths by limiting the availability of weapons with rapid rates of fire, but no decline occurred in the wake of the law.
- The 1986 ban, which is still in effect, has an exception for guns legally owned before the law was enacted, but because automatic firearms have been heavily regulated since 1934, less than 4 million are currently owned by civilians, and a 2016 U.S. Department of Justice study found “no evidence that” any owner of an automatic gun was convicted of using one to commit a crime from 2006 through 2014.
- Two years after the 1986 ban on automatic guns was enacted, gun control advocates started a campaign to ban certain semi-automatic guns by calling them “assault weapons,” a phrase that sounds like “assault rifles” — the most common type of firearm used by military forces and terrorists.
- The targets of the ban included AR-15s and similar weapons that share some characteristics with military firearms but lack their defining feature: the ability to fire multiple bullets with a single pull of the trigger.
- Per an article from the U.S. Army, “America’s most popular rifle — the AR-15 — is often portrayed as being something it is not. Probably one of the more popular myths is that the ‘AR’ stands for ‘assault rifle’ or ‘automatic rifle.’ It actually stands for ‘Armalite Rifle,’ after the company that developed it in the 1950s.”
- Per an academic book on firearms and ballistics, such civilian weapons are “not assault rifles” because “they are designed for semiautomatic fire only,” and “conversion of these weapons to full-automatic fire capability is difficult and rarely encountered in spite of stories appearing in the press.”
- Nevertheless, a leading gun control activist wrote in 1988 that their strategy to ban “assault weapons” would take advantage of the “public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic” ones.
- Journalists and Democrats followed that playbook, and six years later in 1994, Congress and President Clinton succeeded in passing a 10-year ban on the manufacture, transfer, or possession of any “semiautomatic assault weapon” by civilians unless it was legally owned prior to the law’s enactment.
- After the ban expired, Democrat politicians, journalists, and “fact checkers” used phony statistics to claim that the ban worked, even though credible comprehensive data showed nothing of the sort.
- Contrary to the claims of certain scholars, commentators, and Democrats, interviews with eight firearm experts for a 2015 article in the magazine Tactical Life found that three of them use an AR-style rifle for home defense.
- Contrary to the claims of certain scholars, commentators, and Democrats, a 2011 article in Outdoor Life reported “autoloaders and AR-style rifles are becoming more common in [hunting] camps and virtually every major manufacturer is producing these guns in calibers heavy enough to drop deer, hogs and bears.”
- In 2022, the Associated Press Stylebook — which is billed as “the gold standard for news writing” — reversed is prior guidance to journalists and wrote, “Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms that generally refer to AR- or AK-style rifles designed for the civilian market, but convey little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon.”
- Prominent Democrats — including Spanberger, Obama, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and others — have continued to use those terms while falsely describing these semi-automatic guns as “weapons of war” or “fully automatic.”
- The bill just signed by Spanberger bans “assault firearms,” defined by Virginia law as “any semi-automatic center-fire rifle or pistol” with a “magazine which will hold more than 20 rounds,” or can “accommodate a silencer,” or is “equipped with a folding stock,” like many AR-15s and such.
