Oh shit. Lol
AR-15s aren’t assault rifles’
One of the most common tactics used by gun culturists is to try to belittle their opponents’ knowledge of firearms.
By their lights, anyone who calls an AR-15 or one of its many variants an “assault rifle” is uninformed and not worth listening to.
They’ll tell you the only “real” assault rifles are “selective fire,” which gives the user the choice of shooting multiple bullets with one trigger pull, while the AR-15 fires only one bullet per pull.
And they almost always point out that AR doesn’t stand for assault rifle, but for Armalite rifle, after the company that originated it.
The AR does stand for Armalite, but that’s about as true as this myth gets. The gun was developed under a Pentagon bid specification — I’ve read it — specifically seeking a “semi-automatic assault rifle” for troops.
Armalite sold the design to Colt, which cranked out two versions — the military M-16 in selective fire and the civilian AR-15 in semi-automatic.
AR-15s and their copycats — along with cheaper Chinese knockoffs of the Soviet AK-47 — were called assault rifles in gun catalogs, gun magazines and by owners until well into the 2000s.
But the term got a bad reputation after assault rifles became the weapon of choice for random mass shootings, because they’re the most capable and formidable weapons a civilian can buy.
In 2009, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade association, coined a new and softer term — “modern sporting rifle” — and demanded everybody use it.
Gun magazines and lots of mainstream news sources, including the Associated Press which I ordinarily respect, have changed their style to refer to assault rifles by more warm-and-fuzzy euphemisms.
I won’t.