Gun Control & RKBA

That's exactly how 75% of civilian firearms sold annually work---you pull the trigger, they fire once and only once, and use some of the energy to reload the chamber.

The AR is unique in its modularity and accuracy, although other designs are catching up. It is not unique in its velocity (it's slower than a .270 or a .243, never mind a .22-250), or its power (compare .243 and .270, never mind fast .30's), rate of fire (same as any other civilian semiauto, one shot per trigger pull), or its terminal ballistics (same as any other centerfire rifle starting with a ".2&quot .

As to semiauto prevalence, if you look through the BATFE annual sales figures, about 75% of civilian firearms sold annually are semiautomatic, and this has been true since at least the 1980s.

The overwhelming majority of handguns have been semiauto since the early 1980s, both centerfire and rimfire. Revolvers were "old school" even when I was a teenager; I'm 44 now, and learned to shoot exclusively on semiautos owned by my parents. Most popular .22LR's are semiauto (Marlin Model 60, Ruger 10/22, Remington 597...heck, a 1966 Remington Nylon 66 semiauto was my first gun, handed down from my great-uncle to my dad to me). Bolt rifles still hold a majority of deer hunting, but only because they are the best way to pack >200% of an AR's power into a package that weighs less than an AR, and deer hunters are a small minority of gun owners.

"If that's been the gun control lobby's 'downfall', why has the public kept up majority support for banning or proscribing assault rifles & hi-cap mags? if not majority, parity; it seems to have plateaued out recently to parity, which is a push. "

Ostensible support for an AWB has declined from >90% in the early 1990's (when most people had bought the lie that it was about automatic weapons and the "weapons of choice of criminals&quot to barely 50% now, and a lot of that 50% is still based on confusion between popular civilian non-automatics and military automatic weapons. I've talked with people here on DU who think AR's are vastly more powerful than deer rifles and would "blow a deer to smithereens" if you tried to hunt with one, or that they are full auto or a cinch to convert thereto, or that they are useless for civilian target shooting or hunting or defense of home, or that they are involved in a large percentage of murders. All of those beliefs are demonstrably, provably false.

The VPC's bait-and-switch on rifles brought the gun control lobby a couple of Pyrrhic victories, but devastated it in the long run; most of the big players all but folded in the two decades after the AWB, and today, probably 90% of the gun control lobby is a single Wall Street billionaire in his 70's.

And for what did the gun control lobby expend all that political capital? Requiring AR's and AK's to have smooth muzzles and nonadjustable stocks 1994-2004, while blowing annual sales through the roof 1994-present? Requiring AR's in a tiny handful of states to be sold with funny-looking stocks and smooth muzzles? Fact is, Josh Sugarmann conceived the AWB fraud as an easy "win" that would build momentum for a ban on handguns, but he miscalculated badly, and the backlash gave us 50-state CCW and changed "assault weapons" from expensive enthusiasts' guns to the most popular civilian rifles on the market (and vastly improved the breed too, I might add; I wouldn't trade my middle-of-the-road Rock River AR for any AR on the market 1961-1994).

Fact: Rifle homicide is lower now than when the AWB expired. And rifle homicide is half or less of what it was when the head of the U.S. gun control lobby said that rifles weren't a crime problem and would never be targeted by the gun control lobby...

You don't like AR's, and semiautos in general. I get that. But in this country, I have the right to own them, and I choose to do so, lawfully and responsibly. I'll retain that choice, thanks.