Often times we hear buzz words thrown about in the news, but what do they really mean? Is a word really all that bad, or is it actually a red herring?
| Buzz World | Reality |
| Assault Weapon | The term assault weapon has no
actual universal definition. It is not
considered a technical term for weapons,
and is often applied by politicians to
elicit a sense of fear. Most commonly, the term is used to refer to semi-automatic rifles or pistols with larger magazines and caliber bullets. These weapons are not military weapons. Fully automatic weapons (like the kind used by the military) are illegal for civilian ownership under the Gun Control Act. Additionally, assault is an verb, not an adjective. The term "assault weapon" doesn't even make grammatical sense. |
| Assault Weapons Ban | An assault weapons ban is a ban on certain types of weapons arbitrarily considered to be "not needed" for civilian ownership. Definitions range widely between bill drafts. Statistical studies have found that assault weapons bans do not really affect crime levels. |
| Offensive Weapon | A term used by politicians to make a gun seem more dangerous than it really is. Almost all weapons, from knives, to forks, to guns are considered offensive weapons because they are used to kill or subdue an enemy. |
| Defensive Weapon | The opposite of an offensive weapon. Such a weapon would typically be used to defend a base of operations. |
| AK-47 | Avtomat Kalashnikova 47. A type of rifle. AK-47 is not a class of weapon, or a term for rifles. AK-47 is a specific model of a gun. Very few AK-47's are under civilian ownership in the USA. |
| "Blood in the streets" | Blood in the
streets is a phrase commonly used to
describe what some people feel would
happen if gun laws were liberalized. The
phrase is commonly intended to involve a
image of the wild west, and wild west
showdowns such as one at the OK Corral.
States that have liberalized gun laws, and provide civil immunity for lawful self defense have seen the opposite of blood in the streets. They have seen reductions in crime. |
| "Are the British coming" | There are
several variants of this phrase you may
see, but the basic effect is to suggest
that the 2nd amendment is a relic of
revolutionary war days. While there are many problems with this argument, the main issue would be by suggesting this right is a relic, it implies that other rights may be relics. By this logic, we could just as easily assert that the freedom of the press is a relic of when the British censored colonial publications. |
| "Illegal Gun" | This is a bit
of a misnomer. There is no such thing as
an illegal gun. A gun is an object, it
cannot be legal or illegal. You can have
illegal ownership of a gun (For example,
it would be illegal for a felon to own a
gun), you can have an illegal type of
gun (For example, a sawed off shotgun is
illegal to own with a permit) but there
is no such thing as an illegal gun.
Illegal Gun is a term designed to vilify guns and make it seem that guns are the problem. Guns are not the problem, criminals owning guns are the problem. Lack of enforcement of current gun laws is the problem. But there is no such thing as an illegal gun. |
| "Unregistered gun" | This is nothing more than a scare term. In Maryland, gun registration is voluntary and not required. Politicians use the term unregistered gun to scare people, when in fact there is no mandatory gun registration in Maryland. |