(COMMON DREAMS) Bernie Horn, June 14, 2016 — The murderer in Orlando on Sunday used a Sig Sauer version of the AR-15 assault weapon. The story is so awfully familiar.
The mass murderers in San Bernardino who killed 14 and wounded 21 used AR-15 assault rifles. In Aurora, Colorado, a man with an AR-15 killed 12 and wounded 58 in a movie theater. It was an AR-15 that slaughtered 20 children and 6 faculty members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A database compiled by Mother Jones magazine shows that assault weapons were used in seven of the eight high-profile mass shootings since July 2015.
An assault weapon is a gun that incorporates the features of a modern military rifle or submachine gun, enabling the shooter to fire numerous bullets very rapidly, and yet keep control of the gun. Because it’s a semiautomatic copy of the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle, the AR-15 is designed with a pistol grip so it can be fired rapidly from the shoulder or hip; it is designed with a barrel shroud so the non-trigger hand can keep the gun stable during rapid fire; it is designed to accept very large capacity magazines so there is little pause to reload.
The parts or features of an assault weapon are not there to look scary (as the NRA suggests); they are there to make it possible for the shooter to do scary things. With these features, any deranged person can empty a 30-round magazine as fast as he or she can pull the trigger while maintaining control of the gun—and then quickly insert another fully-loaded magazine. Which is exactly what happened in Orlando.
It is obvious that AR-15s and other assault weapons should and can be banned. They are banned or substantially restricted in seven states, and President Clinton signed a law that banned assault weapons in 1994. But that law was limited to 10 years and the conservative Congress of 2004 let it lapse.