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PrintClarifying assault weapons
Editor, Index-Tribune:
What is an “assault weapon”? ?What does “assault weapon” mean?
Actually the words “assault weapon” are a bogeyman created by misinformed individuals who know little or nothing about the differences between military, fully-automatic and civilian semi-automatic firearms. Some civilian semi-automatic rifles look like the military, fully-automatic types.
These semi-automatic rifles may have pistol grips, folding stocks, shorter but legal barrels and detachable magazines. I agree that they are scary looking.
A semi-automatic firearm can be a rifle a shotgun or a handgun. After being loaded, a semi-automatic fires one bullet with one trigger squeeze. It then automatically ejects the spent brass and loads a live round into the firing chamber.
These are not what the military would use as “assault weapons.” They would be out-gunned by the enemy.
A fully-automatic weapon will fire all of the rounds loaded into it with one trigger squeeze until they are all spent. I would agree that these are rightly-named “assault weapons.”
These fully-automatic weapons are usually illegal to be owned by civilians under federal statutes. And that is good.?
Roger Jack Young
Sonoma
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Decades of anti-gun policies and laws has created an almost total loss of basic knowledge of firearms within large segments of the population. Any meaningful discussion about firearms based on facts rather than emotion is problematic due to this fact.