Many people have commented on some pro-gun-control speakers’ tendency to claim — explicitly or implicitly — that the “assault weapons” they seek to ban are machine guns (also known as fully automatic weapons, defined as guns that fire more than one round per trigger pull). That’s not true, though it is a convenient way to turn the public against assault weapons. Civilians are already banned by federal law from possessing fully automatic weapons, except about 100,000 that are grandfathered in. All modern “assault weapons” bans prohibit mostly semi-automatic weapons — normal guns that fire one round per trigger pull.
One common way of spreading this misinformation is to use the term “spray,” which conjures up images of the fully automatic weapon; consider, for instance, Jesse Jackson speaking about assault weapons at the so-called Million Mom March a few days ago: “These are not guns for the marksman . . . . These are guns for those who spray and kill en masse.” (Thanks to Aeon Skoble for the pointer.)
Actually, assault weapons are generally not materially more adapted to “spray and kill en masse” than non-assault weapons. Either Jackson doesn’t understand this similarity between assault weapons and other weapons, in which case he doesn’t know what he’s talking about — or he understands it, in which case it sounds like he’s really trying to push towards a ban on a vast range of guns (since all semiautomatics and many non-semiautomatics are just as lethal as assault weapons) and is just pretending to be focusing on a small subset of especially nasty weapons.
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