It’s OK to call them ‘assault rifles’
Speaking Security Newsletter | Congressional Candidate Advisory Note 4 | 1 May 2020
*This one’s a bit outside of what I was intending to write about in this newsletter, but hopefully it’s not without value.
Situation
Far as I can tell, mainstream media coverage of the situation below largely avoided invoking the term ‘assault rifle’ (they also bypassed the whole racial dimension of this thing, which is far worse) even though it would have accurately captured the nature of the incident and the posture that these (white) men adopted during their occupation of the governor’s office.
Controlling the discourse through technical ‘expertise’
One of the ways it’s evident that advocates of responsible gun laws cede ground to the pro-gun lobby is how the former lets the latter control the discourse. This might be because progressives tend to equate technical expertise with legitimacy. I could be wrong here, but given the frequency with which the pro-gun lobby deploys technical arguments to discredit progressives’ right to speak on anything related to guns, I think it’s at least worth considering.
Take the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), for example. On its website it features the following under its “Modern Sport Rifle Facts” page:
AR-15-style rifles are NOT ‘assault weapons’ or ‘assault rifles.’ An assault rifle is fully automatic — a machine gun […] ’Assault weapon’ is a political term created by California anti-gun legislators to ban some semi-automatic rifles there in the 1980s.
It’s true that ‘assault rifle’ is a made-up term, but it is in the same way that all words are made-up. Moreover, the technical qualification strikes me as a bit unseemly. These two points are elaborated below.
More than you wanted to know
An attenuated history of assault rifles: In 1938, Hugo Schmeisser was tasked by the German Army Weapons Office to create a rifle that would fill the gap between submachine and machine guns. The prototype, developed at his workshop in Suhl, was sent out to the Russian Front for combat trials under Major General Theodor Scherer. With accounts crediting the new weapon for preventing the Russians from advancing, the Weapons Office invested in alterations to the rifle and eventually named it the MP-43 (namesake = Maschinenpistole + the year of release. The AK-47 also adheres to this nomenclature formula: Avtomat Kalashnikova [lit. Kalashnikov’s automatic rifle], first released in 1947). Production was rapidly scaled up, projected to reach nearly one million per year by 1945. Initially opposed to its development, Hitler became a strong supporter upon noticing the Wehrmacht’s satisfaction with the rifle. He named it yet again as the sturmgewehr, or storm rifle, which in translation became assault rifle, and the designation stuck.
An attenuated technical review of assault rifles: Assault rifles are chambered for different sized rounds, but have this in common: supersonic ammunition (so the bullet travels at least 1,126 ft/s; the original sturmgewehr was a little more than 2,200 ft/s, and a standard AR-15 round is 3,300 ft/s — keeping in mind that kinetic energy is one-half the mass of the bullet multiplied by its velocity squared, so despite the AR-15’s smaller projectile, it’s still a deadlier version than the original assault rifle), around three feet in length (sturmgewehr, 37 inches; AR-15, a little over 39 inches in its standard configuration), portable (they were intentionally designed relatively short and lightweight; in other words, designed specifically to be unlike a machine gun in order to increase a given unit’s overall lethality), and versatile (capable of semi-automatic and fully-automatic fire; civilian AR-15s are only capable of semi-automatic fire, but US military personnel in combat typically default to setting their rifles on semi-automatic, so the NSSF’s ‘automatic fire’ qualification seems to be made in bad faith).
Conclusion
None of what I wrote above is worth remembering. I only wrote it to give credence to the idea that it’s fine to use the term 'assault rifle’ if you want to.
Enjoy your weekend,
Stephen (stephen@securityreform.org; @stephensemler)