Government procurement reveals hypocrisy on ‘assault weapon’ terminology

“Who needs these military-style assault weapons?” Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked, setting the stage for her latest gun grab. “Who needs an ammunition feeding device capable of holding 100 rounds?

“These weapons are not for hunting deer -- they’re for hunting people,” she asserted.

“These are a certain class of weapons -- they are designed to kill, large numbers of people, in close combat,” she told Piers Morgan, who was giddy in agreement..

“These are weapons of war, and belong in theaters of war… not in our movie theaters, schools, colleges, grocery stores, shopping malls, churches or on our streets, Rep. Ed Perlmutter echoed.”

“[L]aw enforcement officials agree that there’s no reason for civilians to have weapons of war which end up on our streets and in our neighborhoods,” Rep. Scott Peters, who obviously also got the memo, chimed in.

“A weapon of war’ -- President Barack Obama’s term today for the semi-automatic assault rifle used in the slaying of schoolchildren and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a weapon that he is urging Congress to ban,” Mark Silva of Bloomberg “reported” in a meme-sharing post sure to please his boss.

“I also believe that a lot of gun-owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals -- that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities,” Obama told the Urban League.

That semi-automatic firearms are not used by the military on battlefields is hardly the point – although relying on confusing the public over that is a key weapon of propaganda used by the anti-gunners ever since Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center advocated the effectiveness of deception back in 1988 when he passed out talking points the anti-gunners and the media (but I repeat myself) have been using ever since.

Framing the terms has been -- and will continue to be -- a key strategy used to demonize guns and gun owners, and there’s been a natural push-back to try to reclaim both the emotional response as well as to try to inject some accuracy into the debate.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation coined “Modern Sporting Rifle,” but that’s hardly all-encompassing or even helpful, particularly for those of us warning against government divide-and-conquer tactics, such as Feinstein provides with the exempted firearms in her bill, as well as overt disarmament efforts based on “sporting purposes,” and especially noting where that term originated.

Ditto for those who promote the term “Sport Utility Rifles.” Many of us utterly reject that definition, and so would have these guys.

St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner Kurt Hofmann was one of the first to notice a trend to designate such firearms “patrol rifles” when in the hands of the “Only Ones.” More recently, he’s taken to calling them “regime change rifles,” a term sure to give “monopoly of violence” cultists the sputtering vapors, a happy, in-their-face side-effect I’m sure he was counting on when he coined it.

But now a very useful term has been provided to us, and this time by the very administration that bemoans “weapons of war” when they’re privately owned.

“If ‘assault weapons’ are bad…why does DHS want to buy 7,000 of them for ‘personal defense’?” Jason Howerton of The Blaze asked, referencing a Department of Homeland Security “Personal Defense Weapons Solicitation.”

That’s just beautiful. When in the hands of We the People, they’re disparaged. When in theirs -- and these are the same people who can’t tell Congress whether or not it’s OK to kill U.S. citizens on American soil without due process – they magically transmute into “personal defense weapons.” Like we’re not persons and they are.

Of course, these are the same people who tell us guns don’t belong in schools. Except for select school district and Department of Education elites…

Still, Big Sis & Co. have done us a favor here, and given us a term I intend to start exploiting. And I encourage you to do so, too.

What do you mean “weapons of war”? What do you mean “assault weapons”?

No less an authority than our own federal government, under Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama, officially designates these “personal defense weapons.” Why would you want to ban those?

You’re not against personal defense, are you?

Yeah, of course we know they are, but not too many will publicly admit it.

And oh gosh, looky here: These aren’t those Feinstein-targeted one-shot-per-trigger-squeeze lookalikes the hoi polloi aren’t to be trusted with. The specs on these babies call for select fire.

No less an authority than our own federal government calls that appropriate for “personal defense.”

And they’re right.

UPDATE: Reader Tony Kammerer (see "Comments," below) properly takes me to task for neglecting to mention "that the request specifies full capacity magazines (STANAG and PMAG) as well for these personal defense weapons." That's an excellent point. Don't let the antis get away with calling them "high capacity magazines" when the administration, through this DHS solicitation, clearly regards them as "personal defense capacity magazines."

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