The Birth of the Bullshit:

You can be sure that weapons that fit the 3-part definition above are pretty good for this kind of shooting - as are all the semi-automatic rifles that even the gun lobby used to call assault rifles. All the confusion about this is very clearly and intentionally engineered, and most definitely not by gun-control advocates.

You may have noted that my definition above says “rapid-fire”, not “fully-automatic” fire.

Since the era of the ban, the gun industry has stuck firm to their strategy of insisting that full-auto is crucial to the definition of an assault rifle, but that is clearly more convenient for the gun lobby’s political goals than it is accurate.

Back in day — before the late 80’s to early 90’s — this particular function only differentiated military assault weapons from civilian assault weapons, and often that was the only thing that did differentiate them, literally. I can’t really say it any better than Colt:

It is pretty clear that for the gun industry as a whole the only thing full-auto really defined was military versus civilian versions of assault rifles, and that was pretty much the only difference between them. Both types are highly optimized for that deadly combination of sustained and effective rapid-fire, but one is also better suited for some other applications - such as covering or suppressing fire.

But both civilian and military versions shared the necessary combination of functions that allow for highly scalable violence —the rapid and effective killing of many people by one person — as easy and foolproof as possible. The military rifles just had extended capacity, but the primary purpose of full-auto was not even for killing people. Full auto is mostly about suppression and covering fire. (You can find much more on this in the WTF Are They? section).

The principle point is that rapid-fire is necessary, and for that semi-automatic is more than sufficient. Full-auto is not necessary, it is just better for some things. It is an optimization, or enhancement, not a necessity. That is true for the function and application of the guns, and it’s true for how we name them as well.

Most civilian assault rifles began as military weapons, or are derived directly from them. That makes sense because that is where all the money went into perfecting them for job of killing with greater ease and efficiency, and of course reliability. Beyond the cost savings that came with repurposing, and the added marketing value of selling military adopted weapons, why reinvent the wheel? Regardless, these semi-automatic rifles are perfectly adapted in every way to creating sustained and effective rapid fire. It is simply not true that only full-auto weapons fit that lethal assault rifle recipe.

So while the gun lobby likes to cry foul whenever someone says “assault rifle” nowadays, it was a term they used when it suited their own interests, and that only changed when it didn’t.

That’s all. There was nothing controversial for them back then. It also generally and obviously helped separate the military-optimized rifles from other less controversial and less dangerous rifles, like bolt-action or lever-action guns, guns that are more optimized for and associated with things like hunting rather than killing humans.

Differentiating assault rifles in order to sell more guns is perhaps when the game-playing around the name really started. A look at how Colt brought the AR15 to market clearly shows how at least that one company understood the framing, and were willing to camouflage the assault rifle in order to sell more of them when doing so worked better for that.

Being Coy: Playing "Come Here, Go Away” With The Label.

Some people like to point out that Colt, who held the early patents on the civilian AR15, never sold them as an "assault rifle”. They seem to believe this is proof that the term was never really used by the gun world, or at least for AR platform guns. We know the first part is bullshit, but it is hard to be sure how true the latter part really is.

It is hard to disprove because older assault rifle ads are very hard to find now (almost like they had been actively scrubbed from the net or something…) so it’s possible Colt at some point jumped fully on the assault rifle bandwagon, but for sure they were usually more cautious in their wording. However, it was not because they anticipated the ban 20-30 years early or were confused about what these weapons were for.

The civilian AR15 was originally sold as the Colt “Sporter” starting around 1964. But oddly enough, it appears the motive for that name, and for not calling it an assault rifle is very similar to the motive for avoiding it now: marketing and framing.

The difference is that the effort was not originally to hide the assault rifle aspect from the general public so that gun-nuts could still buy them. That came later. The motive was to re-frame them to make them appeal to a larger group of gun buyers, because in the early days they just weren’t selling. Colt knew full well how lethal the weapons really were, and what they were made for, but not enough gun buyers wanted them on that basis. So: Sporter, the great —er — hunting rifle?

The name and marketing of the AR15 was aimed away from "assault rifle" because they wanted this rifle to appeal to the larger majority of gun buyers — many that were hunters — that were turned off by the association with combat. This was not because these people were afraid of what these guns could do, it was just that they didn't like them.

The “tacti-cool” thing was originally something of a turnoff apparently. Perhaps many didn’t want the associations with their own experiences of war and combat, but in that era a gun that was made out of plastic and stamped metal parts just looked like a cheap toy compared the the tried-and-true steel and wood weapons most gun owners had known all their lives. That “modern” appearance definitely wasn’t helping sales.

But it’s also likely that the majority just recognized that these weapons were not optimized for hunting, they were optimized for combat and killing people, and that has never been what the vast majority of gun owners in America, or Canada, want their rifles for. Thankfully.

The market for hunting-type rifles was much larger, and Colt recognized that the widely understood meaning and associations with assault rifles was not going to help them move units, and they really wanted to sell these guns. So Colt very happily — and wisely from an advertising perspective — just manipulated the image for the AR15. They leveraged framing to force-fit a different association, by calling this weapon designed for high volumes of effective fire at fleeing targets the much more innocuous sounding “Sporter”.

This is just standard branding and marketing stuff, but consider what they were selling here: this was a weapon designed for war which they opted to try and mass market. Charming.

And it worked very well. Eventually. At first sales were still lackluster anyway, so they also tried some more mixed messages, trying to find the sweet spot in the market:

Mixing a little “down on the farm” utility with “survivalism”? Maybe a bit weird, but it was a good effort, just maybe a tad ahead of the curve. Regardless, it seems civilian assault rifles, at least the overtly military optimized variations, remained pretty niche.

How niche? Based on Colt’s serial numbers there were something like 15,000 sold by the end of the 1960’s. By 1982 it was 158,000. Sound like a lot?

It’s impossible to be sure now, but current estimates suggest there are between 5 and 10 million AR platform rifles in the US today, and that is just AR’s. They definitely caught on.

But that wasn’t until some other things changed and the industry pivoted to lean harder into marketing the assault rifle from a more direct angle.

Why The Pivot?

Some theorize that the harder push to sell assault rifles came when overall gun sales began to severely wane in the early 80’s. And seriously want - like as much as 50% from the 60’s and 70’s.

Sales were down, and on top of that prices were dropping in a race-to-the-bottom , which some feel was due to the competition to supply all the cheap semi-automatic handguns that were tied into the explosive growth in handgun crime at the time. Whatever the motive, between market saturation, shifting perspectives on gun ownership, and shitty margins, the gun industry was looking for new markets to expand into.

Whether or not this sales dip was the true driver is hard to prove, but the timing certainly correlates with the golden-era of free use of the term assault rifle, and where Colt’s “survivalist” strategy started to make a lot more sense.

Whatever combination of factors led us here, we now we have tens of millions of them in private hands. For sure, it was during that period between the early 1980’s and the early 1990’s that the gun industry and community happily embraced “assault weapons” with both hands. And they embraced more than just the name, it was all the military associations too - meaning of course all the enhanced lethality associated with those rifles. Marketing shifted from trying to con hunters into buying them into straight-up selling to the military-minded, to survivalists, and the assorted commando wannabes, like the one’s pictured several screen-scrolls back. Just one to refresh:

Be sure to note the name on that. The HK: Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle is literally what it was called, and it’s pretty clear who this is aimed at. That ain’t your Uncle Bob and his hunting buddies.

So, when did this become not an assault rifle? What changed again? Basically, the mass murder of children.

The Birth of the Major Bullshit:

People understood that these rifles were more dangerous than typical hunting arms. It was understood to be the reason they existed at all, but even if that fact wasn’t clear, the sheer number of people dying in mass shootings because of them — not to mention in military conflicts around the world — made their function fairly obvious. The public knew there was something different about them, even if they didn’t have the technical details to explain it. They began to ask, quite reasonably, why exactly these things were in civilian hands in the first place?

The response from the gun lobby was anything but reasonable.

Easier to spot, and familiar from the news, the iconic looking assault rifle, and the very term “assault rifle” became a focal point for a move to ban this category of arms. This was a category considered the most dangerous rifles: namely those capable of rapid fire, with high powered ammunition, and detachable magazines that made sustained fire possible or vastly easier. Function is what made them dangerous, not simply naming them.

That category includes military-style assault rifles for sure, but it also includes many other rifles and guns that are very dangerous, but are just not quite so well-adapted to the scalable lethality found in mass shootings. As noted, that is actually a lot of other rifles, and this idea freaked the gun world out more than a little. This likely lit quite a fire and probably prompted the rush to focus on full-auto over semi-automatics.

Many of the well-known and more archetypical assault rifles had both military and and civilian versions, such as the AR15 and the M16. Otherwise identical, the full-auto military versions were already banned or at least far more controlled in most places. Full-auto weapons have been carefully controlled since the 1930’s in the US, and since the 1950’s in Canada (although more strictly only much later).

The only difference again was the military rifles had a fully-automatic mode and civilian models were limited to semi-automatic - that single function that the gun industry pins so much on even now.

Regardless, full-auto weapons rarely showed up in crimes and mass shootings (and still don’t), so the prohibition on machine-guns was (and is) either largely working - or perhaps those guns never mattered much in the first place, which is something explored in much more detail in the WTF Are They? section.

Either way: it was the semi-automatic (and very civilian-accessible) assault weapons that were becoming the rifle of choice for mass shootings, and with dramatic effect, but the gun lobby still tried to pin the name and bad reputation on the military guns anyway.

In Canada, the first restriction on the AR15 in particular actually happened in 1977 - which is possibly surprising as the evidence is thin on the ground for people having good judgment in the late 70’s:

Interestingly, and to clear yet another point of gun lobby bullshit, while that first Canadian ban was enacted by a Liberal government, it was not driven by the terrified and silly masses or left-wing agendas. It was motivated — and probably surprisingly to many nowadays — largely by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Even back then, before the real bulk of mass shootings, the police were worried about what could be done with them, and referred to semi-automatic assault rifles as “weapons of war”.

That restriction was fought by the gun lobby here in Canada, and the laws flip-flopped a couple of times over the years. The ban remains contested by the Canadian gun lobby to this day, but the larger contest really only began in earnest when the US started moving towards an even broader ban after Stockton, in the later 80’s. That is when the international gun lobby and industry started turning on the bullshit machine for reals.

The debate and political process in America went on for a long time, but culminated in the 10 year Federal AWB which was in force between 1994-2004. As an aside, and in a shocking coincidence, that ban correlated with a nearly 70% drop in the odds of being shot and killed in a mass shooting. Weird huh?

The Federal AWB attempted (and attempted is the right word) to eliminate civilian assault rifles, but was met with huge resistance from the NRA and the gun lobby. It got down to splitting hairs and trying to muddy the definition of what exactly an assault rifle was, never mind how they were being used. This process became the epicenter of the world of assault rifle bullshit, and one outcome was that it managed to firm up and clarify some of the definitions and complexities (and bullshit) that surround assault weapons right up to the present.

This is when gun lobby put their nickel down on full-auto as a key characteristic of an assault rifle. The gun lobby continues to make concerted efforts to create a false — but very clear and very public -- distinction between assault rifles and all civilian weapons by over-hyping the importance of the full-auto thing.

Once they hung their hat on that one, gun manufacturers basically just changed the labels they applied to the semi-automatic civilian versions into things like “tactical” or “modern sporting rifle" and tried to sweep all that bad history under the carpet.

The AWB still recognized semi-automatics as assault rifles, but its teeth were heavily pulled, at least in part by tying the definition too much to optimizations like pistol grips and folding stocks, as well as core function. Either way though, the industry was playing the long game. The ban was passed with a 10 year sunset clause and expired in 2004, which isn’t that long for companies that — in some cases - have histories going back hundreds of years. And they stayed busy over that time.

In fact, the AWB — and other serious threats of bans — have actually spurred highly increased sales of assault weapons, and gun people try to stockpile and take advantage of legacy clauses.

Emphasizing full-auto as a function was and still is a major part of their effort to try to limit the reach of bans, and ensure the most possible weapons are excluded. This is also why they care so much about the term - or the main reason anyway- and work so hard to connect “assault rifle” to full-auto and disconnect it from anything else.

And the industry had, and still has, little to lose with this strategy as well because the military versions were largely banned already. Shooters didn’t care much because it selective-fire is really more of a novelty for most, and most know it is not terribly important to effective shooting anyway. Thus full-auto became what it still is: a pawn.

Since the ban expired assault rifle sales have exploded- so they had, and still have, a lot riding on it, and all the games have been incredibly, incredibly worth their while.

But still, lessons were learned, and to avoid long-term stigma of "assault rifle", and to avoid future ban-related hassles, the gun industry and lobby kept calling all civilian assault rifles “sporting” or “tactical” or just calling them "semi-automatic rifles" and avoiding those risky “assault" type labels altogether. Probably because it had been a successful way to limit the scope of the Federal AWB, there was also an industry-wide push to re-focus the discussion and emphasis on the optimizations found on military-type weapons, things like rear and front pistol grips, collapsible or adjustable stocks, flash hiders, that have played parts in bans before.

Sometimes the optimizations were pointed at as meaningful or important - so weapons (like the Ruger Mini14) that didn’t have them (or have as many) were somehow not assault rifles, or were just less dangerous. Sometimes - because they liked those extra toys too and wanted to keep selling and buying them — they swung the other way and an effort was made to have the public start thinking of those as little more than fashion accessories, as “cosmetic” only. Bullshit in both cases, but apparently quite effective as many non-gun people think these are both true.

It is actually amazing how many anti-assault rifle people still think and talk about rifle design as just “appearance”. Amazing, and scary when you consider the implications.

These “cosmetic” elements make the weapons quite a bit more dangerous, but for sure they also make them more obvious, which is useful as a distraction if for nothing else. Options and accessories became political chips and devices to re-shift focus, and remain a go-to distraction from the core functional lethality. Everything about that is little more than a sleight-of-hand to put the sense of risk and danger in the wrong place, to mislead, and to sway public opinion, and steer the politics in favour of the gun lobby’s objectives, rather than the facts - and definitely not in the favour of public safety.

In Summary

But that word "style" is misleading, and is often used for exactly that reason. It is far more accurate to say that there are many more weapons - the Ruger Mini-14 is a good example - that are also assault rifles, but that just have fewer modern optimizations and enhancements that improve their usefulness for killing lots of people. Like those one would find on, for example, the AR15. But don’t be fooled.

The Ruger Mini14 “Ranch” model. A great example of an assault rifle that many don’t recognize as one because of it’s design. Mostly this is just because it has a wooden stock. This weapon has been used in multiple mass shootings to very deadly effect.

All of this is why a more robust and useful definition of assault rifle should focus on sustainable rapid fire and not simply on the red-herring of full-auto. This captures the weapons and their lethal potential much, much more accurately and usefully. It would really be best to avoid getting hung on terminology all together though. Call them whatever you want - just focus on functionality, as has been done with great success with gun laws in other countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

In any case, why their “style” is not just a fashion thing is covered in much more depth elsewhere . Hyping the looks and people’s reaction to them is just more gun lobby bullshit, and hearing that kind of thing should be a major red-flag that people are playing games to hide the truth, or just don’t understand their own guns. You pick.

As with the label we put on such guns, the importance of design and form (how they “look”) should be recognized, but also: not over-emphasized. They indicate things that increase lethality, but that are enhancements and optimizations to the core functional combo that creates the bulk of that potential. Once again: rapid-fire, medium sized/centrefire cartridge, and detachable magazines.

Precisely defining assault rifles can be a hot-button topic with gun people, but we know what that is all about now. Precision is really only important for the wording of laws and bans. The over-emphasis on this point just serves to shift attention from function, and artificially narrow the focus of public attention and legal structures, all in order to move them away from what really matters to the lethality of assault rifles. The flat-out lies and insults that get thrown around about what the guns are called, and by whom, is pure gaslighting. Sleazy, at best - but it has been going on for a long, long time now that it’s become normalized.

Don’t be fooled by this bullshit. Forget the name, follow the body count, and the money trail. It’s all pretty clear.

Thoughts about the article? Feel free to drop me a line.