On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 04:19:04 GMT, Adam Smith wrote:
What is the definition of an assault weapon? This week? Next month? In 2
years?

A weapon intended for military use, in combat. The particular specs will
change continuously, and there is always going to be a grey area and
disagreement on where exactly the lines are drawn between personal
defense weapons or historical collectible weapons and contemporary
battlefield weapons.

Ah..Adam? There is only one meaning for the term Assault Rifle
" a select fire (meaning machine gun) military rifle firing an
intermediate cartridge"

Whose definition is this you are quoting? Is it a definition from
current US laws, an encyclopedia of guns, the dictionary? I'm asking for
clarification because I'm not a gun enthusiast (as you already know) and
I've just never heard Assault Rifle defined so exclusively.

The Sturmgewehr 44 was the first assault rifle. The Germans organized
their infantry around machine gun teams in the first world war and for the
first years of the second world war. But modern blitzkrieg (lightning war)
moves too fast for effective use of heavy machine guns in the assault.
So they developed the Sturmgewehr 44 as the rifle for assault troops.

Capable of full automatic fire, it supplied the rate of fire of a machine gun,
but in a light and much more portable package. To achieve that lightness,
the assault rifle had to be designed for a low power cartridge so recoil
wouldn't make it uncontrollable in auto fire, and so an individual infantryman
could carry the relatively huge amounts of ammunition automatic weapons
tend to expend.

All following assault rifles have been modeled on this original sturmgewehr
(assault rifle). The two best known examples today are the Soviet AK47
and the US M16. So the class of weapons gets its name from the original
German weapon which served as the prototype for all other weapons of
this class.

The idea of the assault rifle is a light weapon capable of a large rate of
*automatic* fire. Its primary tactical purpose is to give the advancing
infantryman something to hold onto so his hands wouldn't shake quite
so much. It wasn't designed primarily to kill, that's the job of artillery. It
was mainly intended as a "spray and pray" way to keep any remaining
enemy's head down while troops advanced over ground already well
plowed by artillery.

The light cartridge is designed primarily to wound rather than kill. That's
because the military calculated that a wounded enemy takes two of his
buddies out of line to carry him back to an aid station while a dead man
only occupies the efforts of the graves registration unit after the battle
is over. Thus it is militarily more valuable to wound a man rather than kill
him.

(Previous generations of military rifles, called main battle rifles, were
designed to a different philosophy. They were designed to achieve one
shot kills. So they used full power rifle cartridges, as did heavy machine
guns, and troops were trained to actually *aim* at the enemy rather than
simply spraying shots in the enemy's general direction.)

The original Sturmgewehr 44 fired the 7.92mm Kurtz (short) version of
the German main battle rifle round. The AK47 fires a 7.62x39 short
version of the Soviet main battle rifle round. A similar US round would
be the .30 carbine cartridge. The M1 carbine doesn't qualify as an assault
rifle, though, because it doesn't have the capability of fully automatic
fire.

(The M1 carbine was developed by the US as a replacement for an
officer's pistol. The idea there was that the pistol is a nearly worthless
combat arm for anything but very close quarters fighting, but they didn't
want to load an officer down with a main battle rifle, so the MI carbine
came to be as a light and handy replacement for the pistol. There is a
variant, the M2, which is capable of fully auto fire, and was issued to
some paratroopers in WWII, but the US didn't adopt that as its primary
assault rifle.)

Instead, in the 1960s, the US adopted what troops immediately dubbed
the "Mattel Toy" because of its plastic stock construction. The M16
carries the low power round concept to an extreme by adapting a civilian
woodchuck hunting cartridge, the .222 Remington, turning it into the
..223 or 5.56mm NATO round. In other words, they used a cartridge
originally designed for hunting 20 pound rodents.

(In the 1970s, the Soviets copied that idea, and came out with the
AKM74 assault rifle, which also fires a low power .22 cal round.)

As noted above, the assault rifle isn't intended primarily to kill. It is
intended to wound, and the little .22 cal round does this nicely if a
soldier manages to achieve a hit with it. (The spray and pray tactics
employed, however, mean many many rounds expended for every
hit achieved, a logistic nightmare with which the world's armies are
just now coming to grips.)

Gary