By Kurt Hoffman
Those who make their living demonizing so-called “assault weapons,” as “weapons of war, with no place in our neighborhoods,” face a number of serious logic problems in making their case.
High up on the list of those logic problems is the fact that they very often defend the possession and use (“in our neighborhoods”) of these very same “weapons of war” by the police. One way they try to deal with that difficulty is to give identical firearms a much more benign sounding name, when in the hands of the “Only Ones.”
We’ve talked about this before:
What makes this editorial special is the slick rhetorical gymnastics displayed in this sentence:
“Understandably, officers in more South Florida police agencies have been arming themselves — at their own expense — with patrol rifles to be on more even footing with criminals — particularly gangs — they encounter.”
Get that? An AR-15, for example, that in the hands of “the guy across the street” is an “assault weapon,” magically morphs into the much more benign-sounding “patrol rifle” when in the hands of a cop.
Read the rest of Kurt’s analysis here.
Loading ...
The term “assault rifle” or “assault weapon” was coined by Josh Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center to blur the difference between civilian-marketed guns and fully-automatic guns. And it worked well enough for them to leverage the public’s ignorance.
Assault Weapon = Patrol Rifle = Homeland Defense Rifle = Militia Arms = legal rifle.
A true “assault rifle” as defined by the military is a select-fire (semi or auto) rifle that fires an intermediate range cartridge (i.e. effective range to 500m).
“Assault weapon” is anything that can be defined by politicians and anti-gun activists.