The seven states with assault-weapons laws have much different standards. Since then, California and other states, as well as the proponents of a new federal ban, have incorporated a list of military-style characteristics that seem to make the most popular assault weapons especially deadly. They simply named the guns that would be banned, and gunmakers responded by changing their names and model numbers. In 1989, California lawmakers - horrified by a mass shooting at a Stockton schoolyard - adopted the first assault-weapons ban in the country. “What’s politically possible to get and widely supported is not going to be effective because it’ll be narrowly confined to a subset of weapons, let’s say ‘the scary-looking ones,”’ said Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminology professor who has written several books on gun control and gun violence. But it’s almost impossible to do that: There are M-16 look-alikes that are far less dangerous than a common pistol, as well as hunting rifles that can do nearly the damage of Connecticut school shooter Adam Lanza’s Bushmaster. Lacking a rigid definition, lawmakers have struggled for years to come up with a set of criteria that sweeps in the rapid-fire, military-style rifles used in some of the nation’s most sensational mass murders while leaving out popular hunting rifles that allow a sportsman to quickly fire a half-dozen bullets at a deer dashing through the forest. The debate begins with a simple question that has no simple answer: Just what is an assault weapon?
President Barack Obama jumped into the center of the fiery debate when he called on Congress to ban those weapons and their high-capacity magazines in the wake of December’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., giving new life to the crusade of gun-control advocates to re-enact the federal assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004. The other side says the term “assault weapons” is simply a menacing moniker designed to stir up anti-gun passions. One side calls them “weapons of war” that have no place on America’s streets.
Assault weapons: What are they, and should they be banned? – The Mercury News