 The ASSAULT RIFLE: FACT and FANTASY 
 (A look at the history, the myths and the realities of the 
 true assault rifle)...by Jim Thompson in GUNS Magazine 1990 
 Annual. 
   
 If the assault rifle hadn't been produced in Germany or 
 Russia first, it might have come from France, Hungary, or 
 the United States, and perhaps twenty-five or so years 
 earlier.  The Frommer long recoil design was originally 
 concocted for what might have been the world's first "short" 
 rifle cartridge, but accepted in 8mm Lebel by the French, it 
 was instead developed into the abominable Chauchat.  John T. 
 Thompson's first efforts at a "trench broom" were built 
 around cartridges very like the 401 Winchester SLR necked to 
 .30, but the Blish lock couldn't deal with the cartridge, so 
 what actually happened turned into the Thompson Submachine 
 Gun. 
   
 It was too early for the assault rifle to develop...there 
 was no tactical role prepared for it until the world 
 urbanized, and an observer could fairly say most military 
 recruits had never handled a firearm.  The assault rifle is 
 a military concept.  What it very decidedly is not is a 
 weapon, as the hypists of the antigun crowd claim, "designed 
 only for killing people". 
   
 The assault rifle arouse because its predecessors were too 
 difficult for raw young men to handle well.  Its conception, 
 birth, and maturation accompanied the general purpose 
 machine gun.  Obviously, like any other military weapon, 
 killing or disabling the enemy was its ultimate purpose, but 
 the assault rifle in fact is less efficient than its 
 predecessors at that job, owing to the reduced power of its 
 ammunition.  The assault rifle evolved to expedite training. 
   
 An assault rifle---forget the AP Style Book definition, its 
 dead wrong---is a reduced power rifle caliber, selective- 
 fire, reasonably compact weapon smaller in size than a full- 
 caliber rifle, capable of a reasonable degree of accuracy 
 out to 400 yards.  Generally, an assault rifle accepts a 
 magazine of a least 20 rounds.  One can construe certain 
 full caliber rifles to meet this specification, but 
 submachine guns can only loosely border on any definition of 
 the true assault rifle.  Beretta's M38A, the Hungarian 39M, 
 and long-barreled versions of the Finnish Suomi come very 
 close; at the other end of the spectrum, the U.S. Carbine 
 M1 and M2 come very close, but in fact fall into their own 
 very special category.  In every case, the "pure" assault 
 rifles replaced or supplemented much more powerful 
 rifles...in U.S., M16 replaced M14, in the USSR, AK an SKS 
 replaced the Nagant and Tokarev in 7.62x54R M91, and so on. 
   
 Reanalysis of what is now accepted as excessive zeal for 
 assault rifles in military establishments is creating \j\

 interesting reversals of the rigorous "one unit-one weapon" 
 trend of the 50's and 60's.  A puffed up AK called Medvyed 
 and various clones of the Russian original use Kalashnikov's 
 basic system, "steroided" to older full caliber M91 
 loadings. The famous FAL was first prototyped in 7.92x33 
 Kurz, but saw service only in 7.62xS1 NATO...and now, via a 
 "shrunken" version commercially known at the CAL, has 
 reverted to the original style.  Assault rifles promised to 
 reduce small arms arrays, which had become complex in the 
 years between the World Wars. 
   
 Never realized, but approached in some armies, the ideal was 
 to replace every small arm below the general purpose machine 
 gun with a single weapon or system.  The Soviets almost 
 accomplished this, but very quickly backed off.  Now the 
 ubiquitous AK has borne offspring from the Medvyed-Dragunov 
 to the Hungarian AMD submachine gun and the RPK, all based 
 on a common system, but as specialized as the potpourri of 
 small arms which preceded them. 
   
 Most other assault rifles have spawned similar families. 
 The assault rifle began rather simply with a German 
 Luftwaffe requirement to provide a cross between a service 
 rifle and the Lewis Gun of World War I fame.  Developed by 
 Rheinmetall but actually built by Kreighoff in two versions, 
 FG.42 was not a true assault rifle in the purest, modern 
 sense, but it was a much better weapon than most texts will 
 admit.  Expensive and difficult to produce, perhaps 7-10,000 
 were built for the German LW Paratroopers.  FG.42 used a 
 full power rifle round, the potent 7.92x57JS German service 
 load, fully the equal of our own .30/06.  While the FG.42 
 was inspired by and many of its internal mechanical details, 
 including the gas system, indirectly copied from the Lewis, 
 its features were acquired direct from the M.1941 Johnson, 
 another underrated weapon which with some modification, 
 could easily have been the "first" assault rifle. 
   
 Far more modern in concept and still an effacious weapon 
 today if an ammunition supply can be secured, the MP.43/44 
 weapons were the first assault rifles intended for general 
 issue.  There are three versions of the basic rifles, all 
 essentially the same save for sight accommodations and 
 fittings and often simultaneously marked MP.43, MP.44, and 
 STG.44.  The last abbreviation---supposedly straight from 
 Hitler himself---means literally SturmGewehr or assault 
 rifle.  Too heavy at 11.3 pounds, unloaded, the weapon still 
 proved immensely popular where introduced.  Armies were 
 beginning to understand that soldiers felt outgunned---and 
 noise and tactical factors meant that was most of them--- 
 would not fire their weapons.  So a selective-fire weapon 
 with some accuracy out to 400 meters or so could contribute 
 to column fire, even if bullet weight and energy per shot 
 was far below the old M98 Mauser turnbolt.  And these 
 weapons were cheap to build, easy to train with.  MP.44 saw \j\

 very heavy use in Russia, and figured in the Ardennes 
 "Bulge" offensive of 1944. 
   
 MP.44 had been preceded by prototypes from Walther and 
 Haenel as early as 1944.  The Haenel gun was eventually 
 developed.  But these prototypes saw actual service.  By 
 1942, specimens of the Polte-developed Kurz (short) round 
 were being studied by a convalescing soldier named 
 Kalashnikov.  Kalashnikov had worked on another "almost" 
 assault rifle, the Fedyerov, a selective-fire gun in 6.5x50 
 Japanese, and his ideas meshed neatly with the German round. 
 Like the Germans, he opted to retain the same bore size as 
 the older, full-sized service rifle, 7.62mm. 
   
 He called the new cartridge the M43, after the year of its 
 adoption.  Today we call it 7.62x39mm., or 7.62 Kalashnikov, 
 and American ammunition for target shooting and hunting 
 replicates the little 123-grain pellet he originally 
 executed.  The round is just a shade less potent that 
 Winchester's ancient .30/30, but much smaller and, like its 
 German forebear, rimless and sharply bottlenecked. 
   
 The first rifle developed for the cartridge was the SKS, 
 produced in great numbers in the Soviet Union, even more 
 prolifically in China to this very day.  SKS or the Chinese 
 Type 56-1 is analogous to the American M1 Carbine, and is 
 not a true assault rifle.  By 1947, th AK was complete in 
 principal, though four years' testing was necessary to allow 
 major introduction to the Red Army. 
   
 What we today call the "original" AK47 is probably at least 
 the third major version, and the modified AKM is at least 
 the tenth major production variant.  Despite much doubletalk 
 in the firearms media about the original forged receiver 
 being superior, the newer versions are in fact stronger and 
 lighter, and their stamped receivers.  Latest standard 
 rifles weigh a little over nine pounds. 
   
 The United States came late and bleeding to this particular 
 arms race.  Gene Stoner's AR15 was purchased by the Air 
 Force in small lots as early as 1962-3, only after Colt 
 bought exclusive U.S. rights to manufacture the little .22. 
 Using sophisticated alloys, the weapon was expensive and far 
 more delicate than the original military briefings 
 indicated.  But during the entire period of research into M1 
 derivatives, all outside designs, especially Stoner's, had 
 been rejected and no research of any serious dimension was 
 done on intermediate cartridges. 
   
 Many who like the M16 dislike the cartridge, and find only 
 nominal improvement in the recent H-BAR M16A2 fixes.  It 
 would have been more convenient to use the well-developed 
 Soviet 7.62x39 round, whose bore diameter was, conveniently, 
 \j\

 useably identical with our own .30/06 and 7.62x51 rounds. 
 But this was given no consideration whatever. 
   
 Still, the 5.56x.223 round is handy in fully automatic fire, 
 and especially so in the little CAR-15/XM177 guns and 
 Smith's M16K submachine gun.  However, as any ballistics 
 student can attest, most of the "tumbling" effect and the 
 "bone shattering" from the high velocity .22 pellet used to 
 hype the rifle in its early years is either exaggerated or 
 merely a natural byproduct of any pointed bullet of nominal 
 stability in any cartridge, under similar conditions of 
 tissue penetration and velocity.  Show a .223 round to 
 someone who hasn't followed firearms or has been in 
 suspended animation for a while and he'll correctly identify 
 it as a "first class woodchuck round".  Provided the range 
 isn't too long.  Even with the latest "improvements", I have 
 not yet gotten a presentable group at 400 yards. 
   
 On the international arms market---read that, between 
 nations actually equipping troops---M16 sells for 2 to 4 
 times the price of an AK.  The AK is generally somewhat more 
 highly regarded and has lost all its politics along the way. 
 It appears at least as often in the hands of rightwing 
 insurrectionists and troops as it does among the left.  Sam 
 Cummings of Interarms said recently on CBS' Nightwatch that 
 the Kalashnikov had become "the world's predominant military 
 small arm." 
   
 As this is written, virtually every firearms manufacturer on 
 the planet who can legally do so is building or planning an 
 assault rifle for an intermediate cartridge.  The guns all 
 look wicked and forbidding, for their technology is mostly 
 borrowed from light machine guns, and their approach is no 
 nonsense.  Yes, despite their current popularity as a focal 
 point for antigun hate literature, they are not particularly 
 handy, even for the dopers and loons among whom they have 
 become some kind of status symbol.  Shotguns are easier to 
 handle, buy, and murder with, for suitable civilian 
 miscreants.  And the across-the-counter guns sold in this 
 country---if indeed there is such a thing by the time this 
 piece sees ink---are not even real assault rifles.  They are 
 not selective-fire.  And guns so modified after May of 1986 
 cannot be registered and are, therefore, already contraband. 
   
 In most large cities, few actual crimes have seen assault 
 rifles used.  Here in the Phoenix area, a much publicized 
 cop killing was executed with an illegally modified KG-9 
 submachine gun/machine pistol.  Yet, on the boob tube, the 
 local Ted Baxters have all dutifully droned on about 
 "assault rifle murders" and used that killing as their sole 
 example.  And there is not other local example...To them, 
 it's got a big magazine, it's an assault gun.  Not one local 
 media source has noted that the weapon used was already 
 illegal, nor has anyone in the local media noted the \j\

 enforcement dichotomy implicit in that weapon's use, namely 
 that the gun's user was neither caught up front nor 
 prosecuted afterwards for the firearms violation. 
   
 What, then, prompts the conclusion of easy virtue that 
 making "assault rifles" specifically unlawful would, could, 
 or can make any meaningful difference?  Druggies and other 
 lunatics find assault rifles handy primarily for "showing 
 off".  Even Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates' tortured, 
 much prolonged broadcast admonition---clueing us all that he 
 seeks higher office---is mostly fiction.  He's lost very few 
 officers, if any, to assault rifles, and if he'd read a form 
 4473, checked his own hot sheets, and reviewed some of the 
 alleged incidents, he's realize criminal use of otherwise 
 legal "assault rifles" is extremely rare. 
   
 The fiction of "special kinds of wounds" resulting from 
 "assault rifles" flies in the face of what every hunter has 
 seen.  Real trauma from a .308 softpoint or .45 ACP 
 Silvertip greatly exceeds anything encountered with the 
 hardball spitzers usually loaded in .223 and 7.62x39 ammo. 
 Close range shotgun wounds are downright grotesque. 
   
 I know right now of the whereabouts of over 2000 semi- 
 automatic assault rifle clones and about 100 legal, 
 registered fully automatic real assault rifles.  The most 
 serious crime of which any of their custodians has been 
 accused probably ranks up there with smoking on an elevator 
 or red zone parking.  Yet, whenever the owner of such a 
 firearm is depicted in the general media, I see a slobber- 
 mouthed moron who resembles no one I know personally. 
   
 I am not especially fond of assault rifles.  I own several, 
 but I own them because I want to study their operating 
 systems and durability.  They are fascinating plinkers in 
 their semiautomatic pseudo-assault rifle form, and shooting 
 fully automatic has given me considerable insight into 
 military tactics and their application. 
   
 If I had to dispose of someone or something, it probably 
 wouldn't be with any long gun.  With my life in danger, 
 though, a shotgun would ride my palms.  If for some 
 incredibly impossible, tangled, Armageddon-type reason I had 
 to take up arms, you'd find an M1 Garand or M14 swinging at 
 the end of my arm, a 10mm. Springfield Omega at my belt, and 
 a .32 PPK, preferably suppressed, in my boot.  None of this, 
 except the suppressor, is legally restricted as this article 
 goes to print. 
   
 If such a disgusting scenario of necessity ever does happen, 
 and I pray it won't, it'll probably happen because society, 
 as a whole, forgot that random suppressive measures usually 
 only affect the lawful.  Assault rifles aren't causing 
 insanity and they aren't causing the drug problem.  If \j\

 prohibiting drugs has merely made the business of the 
 unprincipled more profitable, how can a different 
 application of the same principle make us less violent?  As 
 a society, we need to respect ourselves and each other 
 deeply.  Just developing that attitude would cause a 
 downturn in crime.  Picking out a nonvocal minority like 
 shooters and then dumping all over them is an inappropriate 
 use of suppressive powers. 
   
 In 1934, our parents and grandparents were told the National 
 Firearms Act would cripple organized crime and stop violent 
 back robberies.  It was, at best, a miscalculation.  In 
 1938, same place, same speakers, and then it became a lie 
 with the Federal Firearms Act.  In 1968, we were told GCA 
 '68 would reduce violence in society, reduce crime, and 
 somehow make us safer.  That, too, was a lie.  It is true 
 that there are probably more illegal automatic weapons on 
 the streets of major American cities than ever before.  So 
 we're told that a fourth or fifth or sixth set of lies and 
 legislation will reverse that.  As usual, if it happens, 
 those of us who always obey the law will grudgingly comply. 
 And those who never do never will. 
   
 Assault rifles are probably the least "evil" of all 
 firearms, at least in their semiautomatic configuration, for 
 they attract attention all out of proportion to their real 
 firepower.  The lady who said on Geraldo these guns could 
 deliver "100 rounds in 20 seconds" was not only lying, she 
 was being irrelevant.  Even the reduced power intermediate 
 rounds won't allow accuracy at high semiautomatic rates, 
 which more realistically hover around .5-1.3 rounds per 
 second.  As usual, the visual bark---which is what's being 
 used fake to cynically manipulate this crisis by a power- 
 hungry, wealthy elite---is far worse that the assault gun's 
 genuine bite. 
   
 ASSAULT GUNS '89   A GLOSSY GLOSSARY IN ORDER OF FICTIONAL 
                    IMPORTANCE FOR THOSE DISCHARGING VERBAL 
                    BULLETS IN THE BATTLE OF EASY VIRTUE. 
   
 ASSAULT GUN---literally, a German or Russian tracked, 
 armored vehicle capable of destroying an enemy tank.  In 
 advertising agency or antigun jargon, a vague term used to 
 refer to more or less any firearm with a large magazine (20 
 or more rounds), usually semiautomatic, but usually 
 construed in the media to mean easily converted to fully 
 automatic fire.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and 
 Firearms, however, has been empowered to and certifies that 
 none of the "assault weapons" currently on the U.S. market 
 can easily be converted to fully automatic configuration. 
 This term can, has, and frequently is used to describe 
 relatively innocuous .22 "plinker" rifles such as Ruger's 
 10/22. 
   \j\

             ASSAULT RIFLE, real---a carbine-type weapon, generally 
 smaller and always less powerful than the full-caliber 
 rifles which preceded this generation in military service, 
 weighing roughly between six and twelve pounds, and 
 utilizing magazines between fifteen and sixty or so rounds' 
 capacity.  Real assault rifles are always selective fire--- 
 that is, capable of fully automatic or semiautomatic fire at 
 the shooter's option.  These guns are accurate to rough 
 service levels to 500 yards or less in the hands of an 
 experienced rifleman, but are not as accurate as traditional 
 semiautomatic rifles. 
   
 AUTOMATIC FIRE---a mode of fire repetition in which more 
 than one round may be fired with a single pull of the 
 trigger. 
   
 ASSAULT RIFLE, civilian---a rifle physically similar to an 
 assault rifle, but modified internally extensively, such 
 that a sear/disconnector mechanism and appropriate lockwork 
 on the bolt and/or related parts prevents fully automatic 
 fire without very significant modification---welding, 
 remachining, insertion of new or altered illegal parts, 
 etc., etc.  REAL assault rifles must be registered, are 
 taxable under the 1934 National Firearms Act, and are very 
 heavily regulated, as are all automatic and selective fire 
 weapons.  Civilian assault rifles modified to fully 
 automatic status are unlawful unless registered prior to May 
 16, 1986, and are contraband subject to prosecution and 
 confiscation. 
   
 SEMIAUTOMATIC FIRE---a mode of fire repetition in which one 
 shot may be fired with each trigger release, but in which 
 the physical operation of reloading is performed by the 
 firearm's mechanism using residual gases, barrel recoil, or 
 blowback of the cartridge casing in physical contact and 
 synchronization with the bolt.  Semiautomatic sporting 
 firearms have been available to the public worldwide since 
 the 1890's, have been used in matches since the 1930's, used 
 by hunters in the U.S. since 1908.  Their use by civilians 
 in both short and long guns preceded military use 
 everywhere by many years.  Semiautomatics, in fact, are not 
 a military idea applied to civilian firearms, but are a 
 civilian idea applied to military firearms. 
   
 CLIP---A rail or rail-like device used to contain cartridges 
 before loading into the magazine of a firearm. 
   
 MAGAZINE---a box-like container, fitted to a firearm during 
 shooting, which contains the gun's ammunition supply. 
 Magazines are often tubular, commonly rectangular on assault 
 rifles and their semiautomatic clones.  Magazines can 
 usually be quickly detached. 
   
 \j\

 BULLET---a projectile, usually at least partially lead, but 
 in assault rifles almost always jacketed with copper sheet, 
 which has the effect of improving feed reliability, reducing 
 bullet expansion, and reducing bore fouling. 
   
 CARTRIDGE---One round, complete with all components, namely: 
 bullet, powder, primer and casing 
   
   
   
 
 
 

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