Uncle readers know that
Via insty, comes: When an AK47 Is Not an AK47. The answer for the US press is usually always. But, the article:
The existence of this manual may be a sign that there are some unexpected strategic benefits to American journalists’ chronically deficient grasp of the basic issues they’re supposed to be covering. The AK-47s that you see Third World soldiers brandishing and the AK-47s you can buy in Seattle are completely different weapons. The former are fully automatic weapons, which have been tightly regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934. The Gun Control of 1968 outlawed importation of foreign-made fully automatic weapons for sale to civilians, and a 1986 amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act banned the domestic manufacture of fully automatic weapons for civilians. It is possible for a civilian to legally obtain a fully automatic AK-47, but it is extremely difficult: Before you can even begin to navigate your way through a maze of state and federal regulations, you’ve got to find someone with a weapon either made in the U.S. before 1986 or imported before 1968.
The AK-47s that you can buy at the average gun store are semiautomatic rifles; you only get one shot per trigger-pull. How did the assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 affect the availability of these? It didn’t, in any meaningful sense. The differences between the rifles that were legal before the ban, during the ban, and now are entirely cosmetic.
I’ve said that hundreds of times.
October 17th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Perhaps we need to refer to all the semi-auto Kalashnikovs as MAKs, or something.
We call the Stoner rifles “M-16” and the semi-auto ones “AR-15”. When someone asks what an AR-15 is, we say it’s a semi-auto version of the army’s primary rifle. If their eyes glaze over we further state that it can not shoot a stream of bullets with one trigger press.
A “MAK-90” is already a term for the generic “Bend over backwards to comply with the discriminatory appearance, so called Assault Weapons Ban”