Assault weapons are semi-automatic firearms—meaning that they fire a round every time the trigger is pulled—that are capable of accepting a detachable magazine and have another military-style feature such as a pistol grip, a folding stock, or a threaded barrel. Firearm manufacturers, in response to declining sales of handguns, began selling assault rifles in the civilian market in the s as part of a broader effort to create a new market for military-style guns among civilian gun owners.
A high-capacity magazine—also referred to as a large-capacity magazine—is a device that feeds ammunition into a firearm that holds more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
A gun fitted with a high-capacity magazine can fire a higher number of bullets before needing to be reloaded. Today, models exist that can hold 20, 30, 50, or rounds of ammunition in a single magazine. The functionality of high-capacity magazines has advanced in recent years, with the firearms and ammunition industry designing the devices to reduce the probability that ammunition will jam while multiple rounds are rapidly fired.
The use of an assault weapon equipped with a high-capacity magazine increases the likelihood that a particular shooting will have a high death and injury count. These weapons are designed to fire bullets at higher velocities than handguns, increasing the lethality of shootings perpetrated with them.
There are currently no restrictions in federal law on the manufacture, sale, and possession of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. In , a federal ban was enacted on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 6 but it was allowed to expire in Currently, seven states and Washington, D.
In July , for example, a shooter shot 15 people, killing 3, in Gilroy, California, using an assault rifle purchased in Nevada. Although this firearm was banned and unavailable for sale in California, it was easily available in Nevada, which does not have a state-level assault weapons ban.
A growing body of research finds that the federal assault weapons ban—though only in effect for 10 years—had a positive impact on reducing both the use of assault weapons in crimes and the numbers of firearm injuries and fatalities in mass shootings:.
Following the expiration of the ban in , assault weapons and high-capacity magazines once again became legal to manufacture and purchase, and the gun industry responded with renewed fervor, flooding the civilian consumer market with these guns.
Since the expiration of the federal ban, assault weapons and high-capacity magazines have been used to perpetrate some of the deadliest public mass shootings in modern U. Not only do these highly dangerous firearms and accessories continue to be used in horrific mass-casualty shootings, they are increasingly being used in cities that experience high rates of gun violence. It appears you are using Internet Explorer as your web browser.
Please note, Internet Explorer is no longer up-to-date and can cause problems in how this website functions This site functions best using the latest versions of any of the following browsers: Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. The federal assault weapons ban, which prohibited the sale and manufacture of certain military-style semiautomatic weapons and high capacity magazines in the US, expired in Despite AAP advocacy to restore the ban, efforts have languished in Congress.
Meanwhile, states have enacted their own bans on assault weapons along with high-capacity detachable magazines—typically defined as those which hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition at a time.
States are also considering bans on bump stocks, which are trigger accelerating devices that can be attached to semiautomatic weapons to increase firing speed.
The decline in gun massacre fatalities during the AWB was not simply a product of declining violent crime, which has continued downward, even as mass shooting fatalities have skyrocketed. Note that in the last five years alone, we have already surpassed any previous decade in the number of deaths in these horrific gun massacres. Importantly, every gun massacre in the last 5 years has used weaponry — a prohibited assault weapon or high-capacity magazine or both — banned by the federal AWB.
Without dedicated governmental action, there is no reason to believe this ghastly trend will abate. The Reason article does inadvertently make two rather good points, which its author would likely be unhappy to learn. First, it buttresses the point that the gun lobby did try to dampen the effectiveness of the assault weapons ban by restricting the array of weapons that would come within its prohibition.
Sollum apparently thought he had issued a fatal blow by showing two rifles — an AR pictured immediately below and a Mini pictured thereafter — when only the AR would be deemed a prohibited assault weapon.
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