Spacekiwi wrote:So what about the 30 plus round magzines then? thats not a modification, thats a required part of the gun in that you need a magazine to fire. it has a inbuilt pistol grip, as a standard on some variants. It is semi auto. it has detachable magazines. the last two are standard on every AR15, autoatically making it an assault weapon as it only requires two from the list to be an assault weapon according to the wiki page.
and its still a tank, just a half built one, as the last parts that are supposed to be added havent been yet. its like being sold a house missing windows. still fully functional, but designed to work best with the last parts added, and there are people who will add that last part.
'30 plus round magazines'? A 'required part of the gun'? Hyperbole much? You're still in SAWOOIAGSWBBI mode. (scary assault weapon of OMG it's a gun so we'd better ban it) I can drive down to my weekend gun range and buy an assault weapon right now. (Okay, maybe not right *now* because they've been sold out since the day after Sandy Hook, but you get the idea.) I could get a 10 round magazine with it, since anything bigger is already illegal here. As I said before, I could then buy a 20 or 30 round metal box of ammunition from a private party, free spring included. I wouldn't want to buy one of those fancy 50 or 100 round magazines (Your 30+ types) because they tend to jam like crazy. Your magazine ban is obviously not very effective.
You know what else could be a SAWOOIAGSWBBI with just the slightest creative tweaking of the definition? A regular pistol. The in-grip magazine certainly detaches. By definition it has a pistol grip. It's almost certainly semi-automatic. It's a SAWOOIAGSWBBI!
Do you begin to see why the term 'assault weapon' is a bad one? There is no technical, accepted,
functional definition. It depends entirely on the current law, and as we're seeing right now, that's easy enough to change. You've shown us that's it's very confusing too, since you can't tell the difference between a military-type gun like the M-16 and a SAWOOIAGSWBBI like the AR-15 even after it's been explained to you by multiple people. That's really bad, since one of them is already banned while the other looks very, very similar but functions differently.
There are better ways to deal with this issue than picking a scary-looking gun and banning it. Your own research has pointed towards some of them. Shall we discuss that, or shall we flail about in mindless, uneducated panic a little while longer?