What is a military-grade weapon? Can we classify any of the firearms on the civilian market as military-grade? To the heart of the matter, is the AR-15 a military-grade weapon? These answers are challenging to answer because “military-grade weapon” is another term in a long-list of terms gun control advocates use that have no specific, relevant meaning in commonly used firearm jargon. But what about full-auto weapons?
The firearm feature that most can agree makes a weapon military-grade is the capacity for full-auto fire or the ability to simulate or approach full-auto fire. That’s because a full-automatic weapon is what the military calls an area weapon. This means the weapon’s design allows it to saturate an area with gunfire, instead of firing at a precise point, in a way far beyond what’s possible with manual pulls of the trigger. There is no self-defense purpose for such saturation of fire. This allows us to class Light Machine Guns, Assault Rifles, and Sub-machine Guns as military-grade weapons (they are all classed as machine guns by federal law). This also allows us, more or less, to class semi-automatic weapons modified in some way to simulate or approach full-auto fire as military-grade weapons.
However, defining military-grade based only on the option for full-auto fire doesn’t help the cause of gun control. A ban has been in place on the production of full-automatic weapons for general civilian use for some time now. And, current laws highly control the sale of extant full-automatic weapons.
To manufacture or own a newly manufactured full-automatic weapon, or machine gun, you first must obtain a Federal Firearms License and then fulfill the terms required to become a Special Occupational Taxpayer. You would also have to register each machine gun you obtain with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. ATF keeps track of the exact number of machine guns (512,575 as reported in 2015).
The current laws surrounding machine guns have proven sufficient to prevent them from being used to perpetrate crimes. There have only been three reported incidents of machine guns used in crimes since 1934. None of these were mass shootings. The Vegas Shooting was the first occurrence of a mass shooting where the shooter modified semi-automatic weapons to simulate or approach automatic fire by use of external devices. The ATF has since banned those devices (bump-stocks).
So, we would have to include another feature in our definition of a military-grade weapon to have it cover any of the firearms on the general civilian market. But what would that feature be?
In the next article, I’ll begin breaking down the features of the weapon that gun control activists most commonly accuse of being military-grade: the AR-15. We’ll see if it is at all possible to find a feature that helps in creating a definition of military-grade that aids in their designs.
Go to: Part 2
Justin Stapley is the owner and editor of The Liberty Hawk. As a political writer, his principles and ideas are grounded in the ideas of ordered liberty as expressed in the traditions of classical liberalism, federalism, and modern conservatism. His writing has been featured at the Federalist Coalition, the NOQ Report, and Porter Medium. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.