I especially liked how they tried to imply a link between the Mexican drug cartels use of automatic weapons and explosives with the Assault Weapons Ban...
...even though the AWB has absolutely nothing to do with either one?
This is the whole reason that they got the so-called "assault weapon" ban passed. Ignorance. People think so-called "assault weapons" are fully automatic, and don't care enough to research. They don't own guns and probably think gun owners are a little bit crazy. Politicians play off their ignorance because it lets them look Tough On Crime and Willing To Do Something.
Remember the old epic poems from English Lit class? How Beowulf and Roland and all the epic heroes named their swords? And that Durandal or Hrunting were much more badass because they were the heros' swords? Or how frontiersmen in fiction (like Hawkeye in
Last of the Mohicans) named their rifles? Why?
Because to people who don't use them, a weapon is a talisman. It's what Carl Jung called an archetype. We have certain attitudes about very important things in our lives, like mothers, fathers, homes, etc. Weapons are one of those things. To someone who is familiar with weapons, they are tools. We understand their limitations and uses. But to a person who has never shot a gun, they don't understand that. They don't know why a deer rifle Dad used to hunt with will go through most body armor cops wear. Or why hollowpoint bullets are actually safer for bystanders than ball ammo. All they see is "Oh my god! He's got a GUN!" A gun to them is not an everyday part of their lives. It's a symbol of power and violence. It scares them because they don't understand how it is controlled. All they know is that people in the movies point it at someone, pull the trigger, and then the target dies. So they think that this is what goes on in real life. Terms like semiautomatic just scare them more, because they smack of jargon. They think that there are regular guns and semiautomatic guns, which are somehow more powerful.
This is why Congressmen who vote on an assault weapons ban think a barrel shroud is a "shoulder thing that goes up." (Google that if you want to raise your blood pressure) Why the Attorney General can talk about "cop-killer bullets," and why the term "assault weapon" even exists. People are trying to regulate things they don't understand, and which either scare them on a subliminal level, or which they realize they can use to gain power over the populace.
