9781422273494

Assault Weapons in America

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons. —General Douglas MacArthur What, precisely, is an assault weapon? This simple question has many separate answers. Like other political arguments throughout American history, the words used to describe these controversial guns mean different things to different people. These different definitions of assault weapons, in turn, have created a wide variety of laws, prohibitions, and technicalities that make the political debate vastly more complex. Weapons of War in America Prior to 1989, the term assault weapon did not even exist in contemporary usage, despite the fact that guns classified as assault weapons had existed at that point for the better part of a century. Furthermore, there exists an overlap between an

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