<sirens, alarm bells, flashing lights>
A crime! A crime, I tell you! Using the anti-gunner and government terminology!
ASSAULT WEAPON!?! There is no such thing!
Citizen, I have long been sympathetic to your above opinion re. taxonomy.
Yet having considered many members of this forum's viewpoints on this and related issues of grave social import for several years now, I am now very confused as to what to call this catagory of weapons.
I used to think that something like "Black, Ugly, Semi-Automatic Carbine" ["BUSAC"?] would suffice, but my only one is actually colored green, and I have seen pictures here of the "Hello Kitty AR-15" which is pink.
And "ugly" is really not a good descriptor either: while some are ugly, others are kind-of attractive.
I think that they are almost always semi-automatic carbines, but I am not positive: is (for example) the TEK 9 a carbine? The Uzi?
It gets especially confusing here when one considers the law: for example, my 1944 Underwood M-I carbine would not have been covered by the Clinton AWB, except that I went to a gun show a few years before the AWB went into effect, and bought a $10 banana magazine for it, to allow for longer, uninterrupted plinking at cans. My understanding is that because I did that (and I could be wrong) if I still had the magazine when the AWB went into effect, my M-1 suddenly would have been illegal, and would have had to be buried with me if I died back then -- unless before I died I threw away the magazine, in which case everything would be hunky dory for the funeral.
But this problem never arose. Strangely, I lost the $10 banana magazine for a while in a tragic boating accident. Mysteriously, on exactly the tenth anniversary of its loss I found it again, fishing one day. It came up snagged to a lure.
Which begs the question: what should these things be called? The best I can come up with now is something like "Repulsive -- Yet Often Cool -- Semi-Automatic Carbines:" "RYOCSACs"
Seems kindof clunky for an acronym.
PS: Besides, I have always been a fan of the Average White Band (AWB).