9781422273494

Take Your Best Shot

A fully automatic firearm is what you likely think of when you think of a machine gun: a weapon that only requires you to hold the trigger down to create a continuous rate of fire, since a machine gun automatically reloads and fires the next bullet after it is shot, stopping only when you run out of ammunition. By contrast, a semiautomatic firearm is one where the bullets load automatically as each one is fired, but the shooter must pull the trigger each time to fire them rather than continuously holding the trigger down. entered public use. While legend holds that none other than Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler coined the term assault weapon (allegedly giving a new name to a German machine gun, the Sturmgewehr , meaning “storm” or “assault” gun), we know for certain that gun control advocate Josh Sugarmann introduced the American people to this new idea about firearms in a study titled Assault Weapons and Accessories in America . Sugarmann’s study referenced two types of firearms: fully automatic machine guns and semiautomatic assault rifles, arguing that the similarities between the two (“anything that looks like a machine gun is presumed to be a machine gun”) would lead to public support for restrictions or outright bans on these guns. A year later, the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in Stockton, California, created a public outcry against the types of semiautomatic weapons that the gunman, Patrick Purdy, used to kill five schoolchildren. (This was the deadliest school shooting of the 1980s.)

Assault Weapons

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