Ban the AR-15 Rifle
The AR-15 came into being because military experts figured out after World War II that GI Joe wasn’t a particularly good shot. “Contrary to the public perception of soldiers as coolheaded marksmen,” Elinson and McWhirter wrote,
many fighters in battle were frightened young men pouring lead not at specific targets but in the general direction of the enemy. Combat was often at fairly close range—several hundred yards…. [W]hoever fired the most lead at the enemy in a battle won.
The AR-15, which Stoner developed in (of all places) Hollywood, California, solved this problem by allowing soldiers to fire many rounds at once with minimal kickback, and by rejecting the military’s bias for large-caliber bullets. True, the AR-15’s smaller-caliber bullet made a smaller hole in the human body. But on contact it “became unstable,” Elinson and McWhirter explained, and “tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones.” In an interactive Pulitzer-prizewinning series, The Washington Post showed using graphic (perhaps too-graphic) animation exactly what projectiles from an AR-15 did to the young bodies of Noah Pozner, a six-year-old killed at Sandy Hook, and Peter Wang, a 15 year-old killed at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. “A single bullet,” the Post reported, “lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.”
As mass shootings mounted in the late 1980s, politicians started calling the AR-15, the AK-47, and similar military-style semiautomatic weapons “assault weapons.” (The term derives from a mistranslation of the name for a rifle the Nazis developed during World War II.) President George H.W. Bush considered an assault weapons ban and then, under pressure from the National Rifle Association, rejected it. But his successor, President Bill Clinton, enacted one in 1994 that specifically banned civilian sales of the AR-15, which was manufactured by Colt.
