Assault Weapons: What Are They?

I’ve noticed when talking about gun control that there seems to be some confusion about what an assault weapon is and why it should or should not be banned. I thought it might be helpful to provide people with a side-by-side comparison of two semi-automatic firearms, one an assault weapon, the other not.

The gun on the left is an Intratec DC-9. The gun on the right is an Intratec AB-10. If you think they look a lot alike, that’s because they are basically the same gun. I mean that literally. The AB-10 is a DC-9 with a few cosmetic changes that don’t have much effect upon the operation of the gun. Both are cheap, mass produced weapons that fire the same caliber bullet from the same magazines and both guns are equally easy to convert to full automatic fire with the exact same parts. Yet one weapon was banned as an assault weapon and the other wasn’t. Why?

The Intratec TEC-9 was based on a prototype of a 9mm submachine gun developed for military applications. When they were unable to find a government buyer the company began production of a semi-automatic version for the US market where the gun proved popular with those wanting a cheap gun with an intimidating look.

Following the Cleveland School Massacre of 1989, California took measures to define and then ban assault weapons. Their definition was largely based on cosmetic factors in the apparent belief that guns are somehow more dangerous if they look dangerous. For example, one of the criteria for determining if a firearm is an assault weapon is if it accepts a detachable magazine outside of the pistol grip.

In order to circumvent California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, which banned the Intratec TEC-9 by name, Intratec modified the TEC-9 into the TEC-DC9, the “DC” standing for “Designed for California.” The only difference between the TEC-9 and TEC-DC9 was that rings for a sling were moved from the side of the gun to a detachable metal clip on the back of the gun. That, along with a name change, was sufficient to circumvent California’s ban on assault weapons.

The TEC-9 and it’s variants such as the TEC-DC9 were also banned by name in the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. Again the ban was based largely on cosmetic factors that had little to do with the actual functioning of the gun. To circumvent the AWB Intratec merely removed the barrel shroud, eliminated some threading on the barrel, and renamed the gun the TEC-AB10.

If this gives you the impression that assault weapon bans are useless, well, that’s because they are. Bans on guns simply because they look dangerous plays well in the press because politicians can pose with dangerous looking weapons and pretend they are doing something about violent crime. The reality is that bans based on cosmetic factors are easily circumvented by simply changing a gun’s appearance without making it any less lethal.