Despite what the gunmaker Bushmaster would have customers believe, feelings of anger and inadequacy are a terrible reason to buy an assault weapon. One print ad features a picture of the gun next to this slogan: “Consider your Man Card reissued.” If you feel unsure about your masculinity, in other words, just buy this rifle to restore it.
The Newtown, Conn., shooter got his Bushmaster AR-15 from his mother, and there’s no evidence he ever saw the ad. But rarely has a publicity campaign played as transparently to disaffected young men. The Man Card campaign website, which stopped working Monday, featured a quiz mocking the manhood of guys who can find cilantro in the supermarket and those who fail to act on road rage.
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Now I know why the NRA is so fervently opposed to national databases that concentrate on limiting gun ownership for those with mental orders -- because most NRA members have mental disorders.
The "Bushmaster" .223 is not actually an assault weapon. Because the caliber is too small and because of some other (pointless, meaningless reasons) according to Michael Graham of WTKK FM. But it sure looks menacing and appealing to the kid who feels inferior.
Odd. That's Graham's definition? Does he know anything about firearms at all? The Bushmaster .223 is the 'street-legal' version of the old M-16. Carbines in general were designed as assault weapons since before firing in automatic mode existed. They were designed to be easy to fire, reload, and fire again. The small caliber is desirable in an assault weapon because (1) a high-velocity .22 bullet (or 5.66mm if you prefer metric) is more than capable of incapacitating or killing an opposing soldier, and (2) because the small caliber rifles have very little recoil, hence can be fired repeatedly. The argument that a semi-automatic rifle is not an assault weapon because it does not have an automatic mode is an exercise in semantics so as to sell the weapon.
JLErwin is exactly right. An AR-51 is practically the definition of an assault weapon. The problem is the term has been so deliberately obsfucated by the NRA and the gun manufacturors that a ban on assault weapons is meaningless.