Assault Rifle, or Assault Weapon, or "Modern Sporting Rifle," or...?
Assault Rifle, or Assault Weapon, or "Modern Sporting Rifle," or...?
The history - and diverting affect - of debating what to call the AR-15
By: Matt Valentine
Anyone who debates gun safety issues will eventually find themselves diverted into a semantic cul-de-sac, arguing about what words to use, rather than what policies best address the harms of gun violence.
Gun rights activists will gladly pick a fight over the use of a terms like “silencer” or “high capacity magazine,” perhaps preferring those conversations to more substantive, less comfortable ones about slaughtered schoolchildren or record-high rates of gun suicide.
The gun rights advocate is especially ticklish about the term “assault rifle.” It sounds bad. An “assault rifle” sounds like a type of gun that a bad guy would buy for offensive (rather than defensive) purposes.
Surely such a connotatively negative label shouldn’t be attached to the AR-15, the most popular gun currently sold in the United States?
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) would prefer that the AR-15 and its variants be called “Modern Sporting Rifles,” which certainly sounds more innocuous than “assault rifles.” The NSSF emphasizes that the AR-15 can be used in various marksmanship competitions (including some that were recently invented by the NSSF) and in varmint hunting — should one need to dispatch as many as 30 prairie dogs without pausing to reload.
Is the AR-15 a weapon of war? That was the original idea, yes.
ArmaLite developed the semiautomatic AR-15 for the American military in 1958. From the semiautomatic prototype, fully automatic M-16 rifles were developed and used in Vietnam. Meanwhile the AR-15 and similar semiautomatic weapons were marketed to civilians, where they were indeed called “assault rifles” in sales advertisements and in industry publications. (Here, for example, the term appears on the cover of Guns & Ammo Magazine, July, 1981.)
The phrase “assault rifle” is likely adapted from the German “Sturmgewehr” (literally “storm rifle”), a class of weapons developed during the Second World War that have many of the characteristics still associated with assault rifles today.
Most importantly, these guns used an intermediate cartridge — ammunition that was sufficiently powerful to kill, but small enough that a magazine could carry 30 rounds (rather than the five of typical infantry weapons of the era).
Today’s AR-15 style rifles can be chambered in different calibers, but they most commonly fire an intermediate round — the .223 Remington cartridge, which duplicates the 5.56mm NATO cartridge used by American and NATO troops in combat throughout the world. Indeed, the 30-round ammunition magazine of a fully-automatic M-16 or M-4 rifle is typically interchangeable with the magazines used on civilian AR-15 style rifles.
The only substantive difference is whether the trigger must be pulled with each round fired (semiautomatic action), or whether the trigger can be held down while multiple rounds discharge in rapid succession (fully automatic action — already strongly regulated).
While the terms “assault rifle” and “assault weapon” remain contentious, they needn’t be. If Congress were to enact a new assault weapons ban, the legal definition of what constitutes an “assault weapon” would be spelled out.
The previous assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, addressed weapons with military features such as a flare suppressor, pistol grip, or collapsing stock. Critics rightly pointed out that such features do not make a gun any more deadly. Some saw the ban as reflective of a fear of “black rifles” — weapons that look scary, regardless of functionality. But a more coherent set of criteria could be used in the drafting of a future assault weapons ban, criteria that undoubtedly affect the severity of mass shootings.
A coherent assault weapons ban would have only two criteria:
1) The ability of a rifle to accept interchangeable ammunition magazines, and
2) Semiautomatic action.
Such a ban could have made a difference in Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas, Aurora, Uvalde, Buffalo, and El Paso.
Matt Valentine
Matt Valentine is co-editor of Campus Carry: Confronting a Loaded Issue in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2020).