Why it’s a ‘modern sporting rifle,’ not an ‘assault weapon’

An article in Slate, dripping with disdain for gun owners who purchase anything that’s not a small handgun (note: handguns are used in nearly all gun murders in the US), attempted to explain why the weapon used in the Orlando terrorist attack is referred to as a “modern sporting rifle.”

The article is well-researched and detailed, I’ll give author Justin Peters that. And he’s right that the term was coined as a marketing ploy to sell the guns to civilians. But the insinuation is that these guns are actually being sold for the purposes of assaulting other people.

“The term is a genius act of marketing, meant to bring these deadly weapons into the mainstream and keep them there,” Peters wrote. “It’s also disingenuous hokum that exists to cloud debate, like calling a used car ‘pre-owned.'”

It’s not disingenuous though, because no credible gun seller in America is selling these weapons for the specific purpose of murder. By Peters’ own estimates, there are something like 10 million weapons of this kind in the US There have been 81 mass shootings in the US since 1982. Assuming arguendo that every single one of those killings involved what Peters and the rest of the media love to refer to as assault weapons, that still means that 99.9999 percent of these were used for things other than mass shootings.

And if you want to look at all murders, there were only only 248 homicides were committed with all varieties of rifle in 2014, accounting for 2.1 percent of all US homicides, according to the FBI. Assuming even more ridiculously that every single one of those was committed with a “modern sporting rifle,” that means about 99.998 percent of these rifles were used for something other than killing people.

I don’t know what they were all used for. Probably “sport,” the hence the label “modern sporting rifle.” I know the variations I’ve shot were used for target practice, a form of “sport.” Maybe others use them to shoot prairie dogs at a distance, or hunt coyotes, but they’re not powerful enough to kill big game.

Either way, those non-murdering reasons fall squarely in line with calling them modern sporting rifles. It’s what they’re sold for. They’re not being sold to assault people.

None of this matters to the gun-hating media (especially to those who don’t even do as much research as Peters did for his article). This is the same media that wrote no less than a dozen “think pieces” on AR-15s after the Orlando shooting, before they even learned that the weapon used was not an AR-15 nor even a variant of the AR-15. It was a Sig Sauer MCX. (By the way, because many in the media don’t seem to know this, but the “AR” doesn’t stand for “assault rifle,” it stands for ArmaLite.)

To call these guns “assault weapons” is just an attempt to instill irrational fear in people with little knowledge of guns. And again, never mind that blunt objects such as clubs and hammers kill more people each year than all rifles put together. We’re far too busy for facts, we’re trying to scare people into this terrorist watch-list proposal, which obliterates not just the Second Amendment, but also their Fifth Amendment right to due process of law as a prerequisite for the loss of liberties.

Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.