lolgaxe wrote:
Friar Bijou wrote:
Huh. I thought the M16A2 didn't have full automatic.
It has a three round burst, or the "Hey, watch me miss twice" mode.
Yeah. I've referred to selective fire mode as "automatic fire", which isn't technically correct. So my bad. What I'm trying to get across is that if a weapon has any firing mode that allows more than one bullet to be fired with a single trigger pull, then that weapon meets at least one of the requirements to be an assault rifle. Any weapon that does not have that capability is not an assault rifle. We don't need to go on to other criteria because it's already failed one.
And this capability (whether full auto, or burst fire) is the primary distinction between a rifle and an assault rifle. If you're starting with a single person rifle, and thinking "How to I convert this so it can fire faster, without running out of ammo too fast, and without being too heavy for one person to fire", you arrive at the assault rifle. Which sacrifices some hitting power and long range accuracy for the ability to put far more lead down field in a given period of time. It's useful because it can be fired at that high rate, effectively providing suppression, even while moving rapidly (something that machine guns can't do). It also retains some of the accuracy of a rifle, allowing it to be more multi-use than a sub-machine gun (like say a Thompson), but doesn't need as much accuracy and range because in those sorts of assault conditions, you're rarely shooting at anything more than a couple hundred yards away. Being able to put out more rounds in an area is more important than accuracy or power.
In short. It's ideal for infantry assaults. Hence the name.
The problem is that gun control advocates love to conflate the name and apply it to weapons that simply don't qualify. They do this so they can play on the "full automatic" scariness of military weapons in order to pass regulations on weapons that do not actually possess the qualities that make people afraid of "assault weapons" (note the change of the second word from "rifle" to "weapon", designed to cause confusion and incorrect association at the same time). I have on many occasions had people defend the need for an "assault weapons ban" on the grounds that "no one should be able to own a weapon that can fire <insert automatic weapons fire rate> rounds per minute". I then have to tediously explain to them that such weapons have actually been illegal for general private ownership since the 1930s, and thus has no bearing at all on the discussion of the merits of any particular weapons ban being discussed today.
Of course, that's usually followed up with an assertion that even if they aren't full auto capable (or burst capable), they're still "assault weapons", so they should be banned anyway. At which point we go around and around trying to even come up with a definition for what an "assault weapon" is (which, um... usually boils down to a circular definition based on whatever the writers of the ban in question want to ban), only to at some point have someone forget that I already countered the whole "automatic fire" bit, and bring up rate of fire again ("spraying bullets" or some other similar language) as though we're talking about military weapons. And we go around in circles again.
Edited, Mar 4th 2016 7:33pm by gbaji