Assault Weapons Essay

A New “Assault Weapon” Ban? Crash! It’s 3 am and Steve’s front door just got kicked in by a pair of men with illegal guns. He runs over to his closet to grab his gun. Then he remembers that just last week the police came and confiscated it. They said a new law had been passed banning AR-15’s. Steve calls the police. When they get there 10 minutes later, they find Steve’s families’ dead bodies and his house ransacked for anything of value. If only he had his gun. Guns have been around since approximately 500AD. The first ones were just tubes closed at one end that had gunpowder and rocks or bits of metal shoved in them. Now there are all different kinds of guns, including so called assault weapons. But what is an “assault rifle” or an “assault weapon?” The dictionary defines an assault rifle as a military rifle capable of both fully and semi-automatic fire, utilizing an intermediately powered cartridge. However this is not the definition gun-ban lobbyists use. The incorrect definition they use is “a …show more content…
Some people will say, “But they were talking about muskets, not military style assault weapons”. However back then the musket was the cutting edge technology. Everyone used them, from the British redcoats to the farmer who shot deer and turkeys to feed his family with. Thirdly, guns are inanimate objects. A gun looking scary does not inherently make it dangerous. The SAFE act, a gun control law in New York State focuses mainly on ascetics and features(Yonkunas). A gun cannot pull its own trigger. It needs the input of a human being. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (“Davis”). Also some uneducated people might say that AR-15 has the words assault rifle right in the name. This is not true the “AR” in AR-15 stands for Armalite, the company that originally designed the firearm