Ron Moore writes: > ... >I wonder how they are defining "assault weapon". On their web page they >identify the Ruger Mini-14 as a "rule cheater" assault rifle even though it >has been on the market for decades and it is built like nearly every other >semi-auto hunting or plinking rifle that Americans have been buying for a >century now.
Looking at the http://www.vpc.org/studies/officetwo.htm list, I notice that they says (footnote 11) that the 8 listed SKS rifles are not assault weapons under the 1994 federal law unless they were modified. (The SKS has a fixed magazine, not a "detachable ammunition magazine" - but they could be modified to use a detachable magazine.) While the status of these 8 SKS rifles is not known, only a small minority of the SKS rifles that I have seen have been so modified. There are 7 MAK 90 rifles listed. These were specifically manufactured to avoid triggering the criteria of the federal ban. If one wants to call them "cheater" rifles - that might fit (although the ban criteria were silly, and so making silly changes in response isn't cheating IMHO, it is scrupulously following a silly law) but it is a distortion to call them "assault weapons" in the sense of the 1994 federal law. (This is the same point others have made about post-ban AR-15 types of rifles.) All in all, this raises doubts about whether at least 29 (of the 41 claimed) are legally assault weapons in the context of the federal law.
