Obama mischaracterized ‘assault weapons,’ but he had a point

In President Barack Obama’s recent address to the nation, one line stood out: “We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones used in San Bernardino.”

While the president mistakenly refers to the AR-15 as an “assault weapon” (assault rifles by definition can fire in a fully automatic mode and all civilian AR-15s are semi-automatic) and also calls them “powerful” (most standard hunting rifles are far more powerful than AR-15s), he does have a point in a more general sense.

AR-15s and other semi- automatic rifles like them are more easily used for mass killing sprees than other conventional pump action or bolt action rifles due to the simple fact that they are easier to reload.

This is due to the fact that they use an external magazine that is inserted into and out of the lower receiver of the rifle. Therefore, they are faster to reload and thus easier to fire more rounds in a shorter amount of time.

One solution to this issue is to ban all semi-automatic rifles. Australia did this several years ago and many gun control advocates attest to the effectiveness of that country’s actions.

This is a controversial subject that is too complex to get into here, but it should be said that Australia is a far smaller nation than the United States in terms of population, and there were far fewer guns there to begin with, so it would be extremely difficult to implement this drastic type of measure in this country.

Another reason it would be very difficult to go after all semi-automatic rifles in this country is the fact that semi-automatic rifles have been around since at least World War II (the M1 Garand was adopted by the U.S. military in the late 1930s and has the distinction of being the first standard-issue semi-automatic rifle to be adopted by an army as its primary infantry rifle) and there are millions of semi- automatic rifles all over the country.

So what to do? One possible idea that may provide a compromise for both sides of the gun debate would be to simply ban all high-capacity magazines for rifles. Hawaii did so for pistols many years ago and anyone owning a handgun in Hawaii can only possess magazines that hold 10 rounds or less. The state stopped short of banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds for rifles and shotguns.

But the question remains, would limiting all rifle magazines to 10 rounds stop a determined assailant from murdering large numbers of people? In the hands of a trained user, a rifle magazine can be pulled out and replaced in less than five seconds. It’s highly debatable, but one thing is certain — this restriction did not deter the two terrorists in San Bernardino.

California has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds were banned there 15 years ago. Experts estimate that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of high-capacity magazines in the country, and obviously a few of them found their way across the California border to the two killers.

Finally, the FBI statistics from 2007 to 2011 that list the types of weapons that were involved in murders in the U.S. listed 1,874 Americans murdered by rifles; handguns accounted for 33,034 during that same time span.

And just for context, Americans murdered 4,058 other Americans with their hands, fists or feet for the same period.