How Smoke & Mirrors Can Make Your AR Disappear
One of today’s most popular, and most villified rifles on the market today are the AR-15-style rifles. Most often misidentified as "assault rifles" or "assault weapons” this is an intentional deception on the part of the anti-gun lobby to confuse this semi-automatic civilian rifle with full-auto military machine guns. They are, in fact, neither assault rifles or machine guns. But today, the AR is a legal semi-automatic firearm whose legal future is unclear.
First, some background: “Assault rifle” is a political term created by the California anti-gun lobby in the 1980’s to ban a group of semi-automatic rifles. AR actually stands for Armalite Rifle, for the Armalite company that developed the rifle in the 1950’s. Though the modern sporting rifle looks like many of the military’s automatic weapons, it is not. An AR has a semi-automatic action, which means one trigger pull equals one bullet fired, no different than my first Stevens 22 squirrel gun, the Remington Woodmaster, or any number of semi-autos in use today.
You see, the anti-gun lobby is using smoke and mirrors to terrify the public with lies and innuendo. Remember the Clinton gun ban? The one in which the determining factor of the legality of the gun being plastic parts like pistol grips or adjustable stocks? On the surface, it’s laughable to think how little these people know about firearms, but that would be a mistake. They understand full well an AR is just another semi-auto rifle, but with all those scary accessories, it’s much easier to get the entire category banned, which, in fact, happened under Bill Clinton, making AR sales illegal for 10 long years.
Those who fail to remember the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them and liberals have the AR in their sights once again. But if you think that all is well and the NRA has things well in hand, consider a statement from Josh Sugarmann, founder of the anti-gun Violence Policy Center: “The public’s confusion over fully- automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is presumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” Smoke and mirrors indeed.
Gun owners must stay vigilant to keep our rights, even when that right is protected by the Constitution.
