1) As far as statute goes, "assault weapon," like "dangerous drugs," can mean whatever the legislature wants it to mean. I've read statementss that when the CA AG was drafting that state's AWB, they bought a catalog (annual, now I forget its title) of guns that showed their images, and listed any whose picture seemed too nasty.
2) The term does have a military significance, keyed to full auto only. Going into WWII, all nations had two classes of shoulder arms: (1) the full power rifle (8mm, .30-06, .303) of about 2000 ft/lb energy, meant to be effective out to 600 yards, and too powerful to fire full auto and (2) the submachinegun, shooting far less powerful pistol ammo at full auto, effective to 50-100 yds. German designers determined that the average infantry fight came at about 200-300 yards. Out of range of the subgun, and at a point where the full powered rifle had a lot of wasted energy. Solution: create a full auto firearm with about half the energy of the full powered rifle (or about 1000 ft/lb). Dropping the power made the gun usable in full auto, and it still had plenty of energy to function at the real world 200-300 yard battlefield. Thus going full auto is the entire core of the real AW idea. If made in semiauto, they are simply half-powered rifles. At 1000 ft/lb they have power on a par with the ,30-30 of 1894, and far inferior to the .30-40 of 1892. _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
