How the Term “Assault Weapon” Came to Be & you can thank Josh Sugarman for it.
Gun control advocates adopted the term “assault weapon” from the military in an effort to deliberately confuse the public and advance the political cause of gun control. They now use it to mischaracterize a broad range of firearms used by law-abiding civilians.
The origin of “assault weapon” stems from the term “assault rifle,” which the U.S. Army defines explicitly as a selective-fire rifle chambered for a cartridge of intermediate power. The term “assault rifle” only applies to automatic firearms rather than the semi-automatic firearms that gun control advocates are focused on banning today.
The key difference is that semi-automatic firearms, such as AR-15s, only fire a single round each time the trigger is pulled. Automatic firearms — including military assault rifles — discharge continually when the trigger is pulled. Although they are often used in the Armed Services, these firearms are not readily available for sale to the general public. To purchase a fully-automatic firearm requires an extensive FBI background check including fingerprints and photographs, as well as registration of the firearm at the federal level.
However, gun control advocates refer to semi-automatic and fully automatic firearms interchangeably — in a deliberate effort to confuse voters and advance their broad agenda.
In 1984, a group called Handgun Control, Inc. first used the term “assault weapon” in reference to a rifle in a newspaper advertisement.
A few years later, in 1988, the term rose in prominence after Josh Sugarmann, a gun control advocacy group’s communications director, stated in a Violence Policy Center paper [1]:
“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons - anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun - can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
This statement by a prominent gun control lobbyist outlined their intentions clearly. The goal behind popularizing the term “assault weapons” was always to deliberately mislead the American people in order to pass anti-gun legislation.
The use of the term "assault weapons" exploded in the years to follow, eventually catching on in the mainstream media, who used the adopted phrase to cause further confusion.
It helped gun control advocates garner support to pass the 1994 federal “assault weapons” ban — and the plan succeeded. The ban lasted for ten years until it expired in 2004 after Congress determined the ban had no impact on reducing crimes committed with guns.
Since then, gun control advocates have continued to push for additional bans. However, they now struggle to agree on a definition for their made-up phrase.
