Reply #18: Did you see Tartaro's "citation" for that claim?

[benEzra]

Did you see his "citation" for that claim?

(10) See SHOTGUN NEWS and other firearms publications beginning in the early 1980s.

Shotgun News, at the time, was a tabloid-format weekly of mostly classified ads posted by individual gunsmiths/collectors or mom-and-pop businesses--and he can't even seem to cite an instance ("see half a decade's worth of WEEKLY classified ads, or maybe some other magazine, but trust me on this"). Maybe he recollected accurately, and maybe he didn't, but it looks like he pulled the citation out of his head, and if he's a lawyer you'd think he'd own a copy of the MLA Style Guide.

He wrote that article in 1995; Josh Sugarmann had already been popularizing the term in the gun-ban literature for nearly a decade by that point. Color me skeptical.

Another passage from his article contradicts much of what he implied in the other cite:

First, the term "assault weapon" is erroneously applied. Assault weapons are by military procurement definition "selective, fire (full auto continuous or burst fire plus autoloading) arms of sub caliber." Since fully automatic and selective firearms have been severely restricted, taxed and licensed--and owners screened by local and federal law enforcement--since 1934, real assault weapons have been strictly regulated by federal as well as state laws for sixty years. The firearms which are targeted by recent laws and current legislative proposals are mostly semi-automatic (requiring a single trigger pull for each shot) or, in the case of the Street-Sweeper type shotgun, functional revolvers. They are indistinguishable in operation from other semi-automatic firearms used for self-defense, pest and vermin control, sport hunting and recreational shooting since the turn of the century.

He contradicts himself here, and also conflates the term "assault weapon" with "assault rifle" (Sturmgehwer); the definition he cites is the DOD definition of assault rifle. And the National Firearms Act restricts assault rifles, not "assault weapons."

It was Sugarmann's 1988 pamphlet that popularized the term, though it is possible he lifted it from an obscure antecedent. I had personally never heard it until it was used by the proponents of a ban circa 1989. The fact remains though that in 2007, "assault weapon" is a term used to demonize popular civilian rifles with handgrips that stick out, or firearms that exceed 6 or 10 rounds capacity.

I also noticed this gem:

The ballistic data for the .30-06 and M1 carbine cartridges, the .45 ACP used in World War II and Korea, and the .308 (7.62 X 39) M-14 individual infantry arm used by some units in Vietnam are substantially more powerful than the 5.56mm (.223) U.S. small arms cartridge of the M16 or 5.45 X 39mm Soviet Russian cartridge fired in current AK47 military small arms and their semi-automatic civilian derivatives.

Now, he's right that a .30-06 (now the most popular deer caliber in America) is twice as powerful as the little .223 Remington. But .45 ACP is a pistol cartridge, even further down the power spectrum; .30 carbine is also less powerful. The M14 was 7.62x51, aka .308 Winchester and similar to .30-06; 7.62x39 (.30 Russian short) is a much lower-powered round used in AK-47's, civilian AK lookalikes, SKS's, Ruger Mini Thirty's, and such, and is similar to .30-30 Winchester. 5.45x39 is the AK-74 cartridge, not that of the AK-47. In short, he apparently isn't terribly familiar with firearms, and appears to be talking out of his posterior.