Gun nuts get very upset when you mislabel an AR-15 as an assault rifle. So to avoid any controversy, please refer to the weapon using its proper technical classification, which is a mass murder rifle.
For the hyper-technical, an AR-15 "style" rifle fires a rifle cartridge (typically, a .223 or .308) and, without modifications, is not select fire. It's only a semi-automatic, so it's not an assault rifle according to the US Army.
But that's irrelevant to its capacity to inflict mass civilian casualties. It can accommodate a 30-round magazine, fire more than 60 rounds a minute, and its ammunition carries such a punch, it can liquify organs. No tasteful little holes to fix.
@huntingdon @lowqualityfacts I feel like if it had automatic fire capabilities like the military version of the ar-15, the M16, which is an "assault rifle", it would be even more dangerous, wouldn't it?
(And automatic weapons have been essentially banned in the US for decades, there's very little political support for changing that, I think.)
But I think that isn't the point of people complaining that the ar-15 isn't an assault rifle. I think the point of all that semantic hair splitting is that the "assault weapon" bans are incoherent nonsense.
Those laws let you buy things like ar-15s (or similar weapons like a ruger mini), but just not if they have certain safety features or pistol grips. That's just... weird.
Do you want to ban semiautomatic weapons? If not, then why do you want to ban just "tacticool" ones like the ar-15? That, if I understand correctly, is the point.
