The Effects of Bans on the Sale of Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines
March 2, 2018
The term assault weapon is controversial. In state and federal gun laws, it generally refers to specific semiautomatic firearm models that are designed to fire a high volume of ammunition in a controlled way or to firearms that have specified design features, such as folding stocks or pistol grips (Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, undated-a). Those in the gun industry refer to many of these firearms as modern sporting rifles, contending that assault rifle should apply only to automatic weapons used by militaries. Furthermore, they argue that the characteristics used to differentiate banned firearms from nonbanned semiautomatic weapons are cosmetic and do not make them more deadly than similar weapons without those features. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which banned “the manufacture of military-style assault weapons, assault weapons with specific combat features, ‘copy-cat’ models, and certain high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than ten rounds” (U.S. Department of Justice, 1994; see also Pub. L. 103-322). The law included a sunset provision, calling for its repeal after ten years. It was not renewed in 2004, and thus there is not currently a federal assault weapon ban (Plumer, 2012).
Read the report HERE.
Semiautomatic pistols and rifles, as defined in 27 C.F.R. 478.11, are firearms that use energy expended from the firing cartridge to extract the fired cartridge case and automatically chamber the next round of ammunition but require a pull of the trigger for each shot (Krouse and Richardson, 2015). In contrast, fully automatic weapons (i.e., machine guns) can produce continuous fire by a single trigger function without manual reloading, and their sale and possession has been federally regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934 (currently codified as amended as 26 U.S.C. 5801 et seq.).
Views: 9
