Quote Originally Posted by SomeOtherGuy View Post
I agree and I'll bet most on M4C also agree, but your position would be WAAAAY out beyond the fringes of sanity for the perspective of many people in our society. Probably more people than are on our side. Most people are neither smart nor capable of dealing with unpleasant things, no matter how obviously true they are. They will wish away any risk of bad things happening from bad people, and assume that some faceless but awesome LEO or soldier will miraculously handle any problems that require violence, due to that LEO or soldier's magic powers, and not recognize any possibility that the same individuals minus uniform and title can do some of the same things, for good.

Democracy barely works when it's limited to arms-bearing men of military age, as it was millennia ago. Even more tenuously when practiced as it was in 1789, and our current mob rule + Oprah does not work at all.
You are, of course, correct in what you are saying, but I'm just increasingly sick of playing these dumb word games with anti-gun types.
Kinda like this thing the gun community does now: "It's not an 'assault rifle' it's a 'modern sporting rifle'! An assault rifle is select-fire!"
Ok...a Colt 6920 is basically the same gun as an M4 "assault rifle" except it isn't select-fire and the barrel is 1.5" longer...the differences are minimal and the 6920 (and every other civilian AR) is more or less an assault rifle, and you know what? That's okay. For me the fight is no longer about quibbling over what minor technical specifications make an "assault rifle", it's about making it clear that assault rifles are legitimate, constitutionally protected firearms for civilians to own and use, for the purposes that they were designed to fulfill.

And as an aside, if anyone does want to blame someone for the popularization of the terms assault rifle/assault pistol/assault weapon, it wasn't the antis, we actually need look no further than our own community. If you peruse a lot of 1980s gun magazines the gun writers of the time literally used these exact terms to refer to military style semi-automatics.
It was only after the Antis glommed on to the terminology that the gun press backtracked and began playing semantics, eventually culminating in queer-ass euphemisms like "modern sporting rifle'".

I say "assault rifle" is our term, and it's time to take it back.