Selective fire has been a standard feature on individual battle rifles in the U.S. The first true “assault rifle” is often said to have been the Wehrmacht’s STG 44, and it is to this rifle that the term itself was first applied – the Germans called the rifle the “Sturmgewehr” which translates roughly to “assault rifle.” Like all battle rifles today, the Sturmgewehr was a select fire weapon. The National Firearms Act calls these weapons “machineguns”, and they have been heavily regulated since 1934, and even more strictly controlled since 1986. This is the single, essential feature that makes a military firearm more useful in combat than its civilian counterpart. In modern warfare, the sine qua non of the military battle rifle is selective fire – that is, the ability to fire more than one round with each pull of the trigger. But however intuitive it may seem at first glance, the fact is that the President’s proposal is not only not commonsense, it is actually rather arbitrary, and obviously so to anyone who cares to investigate the matter.īefore going further, it might be useful to point out what makes a gun a military firearm. Given the visual similarity between civilian rifles popular today and their military counterparts, it is not surprising that this proposal would seem reasonable to many who are unfamiliar with firearms and unfamiliar with infantry tactics. Many other groups do as well, including the Brady Campaign. The President is hardly alone in supporting such a ban. In his 6 December 2015 speech addressing the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, President Obama took the opportunity to float, yet again, a proposal that he has been pushing at least since his reelection campaign against Mitt Romney – a ban on so-called “assault” weapons, which President Obama, and others, characterize as “weapons of war,” and which he characterizes as a “commonsense gun safety” proposal. My experience in the infantry tells me that gun control proposals to ban firearms with so-called “military” features are misguided at best, cynical at worst, and accordingly I categorically oppose them. I also understand the difference between combat and crime, including mass shootings like those that have plagued us recently. But I do understand small-unit infantry tactics, and I understand how firearms are employed in combat. I don’t claim to be Sergeant York or Audie Murphy. I spent much of that time as an infantry officer, serving as an infantry platoon leader, as a rifle company commander, as an ROTC instructor, and as the head of a military advisory team embedded with a Kurdish Iraqi Army brigade. I am an Army veteran with nearly 25 years of service.
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