From The Washington Times:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/15/tom-gresham-why-hillary-clinton-cant-ban-ar-15-rif/

She should learn something about the guns and the fear she clings to

By Tom Gresham – –
Sunday, May 15, 2016

At every opportunity, Hillary Clinton attacks, denigrates and marginalizes roughly a third of the American population — the 100 million who own firearms — with her promises to “do something” about this country’s “gun culture,” to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case that individual citizens have the right to own guns, to remove the protection from junk lawsuits Congress gave the firearms industry when it was faced with an organized assault (30-plus lawsuits) designed to put all gun companies out of business, and to bring back and expand the Clinton ban on the most popular firearms in America — semi-automatic rifles, best exemplified by the AR-15.

The problem is that neither she, nor Congress, can ban this ubiquitous rifle, which is owned and used by millions of Americans for hunting, competition and recreational shooting.

Before getting into the “why” she can’t ban these rifles, it’s critical to review exactly what the AR-15 model is, as well as what it is not.

The largely-ignorant media still willfully misinforms the public by calling this rifle an “assault weapon.” Duped by the gun-ban industry into repeating a term with no definition, but which was created with the express intent of confusing and misleading the public into banning this gun, the media becomes part of the gun-ban movement each time it repeats the scary-but-meaningless term “assault weapon.”

Josh Sugarman, executive director and founder of the Violence Policy Center, a tiny gun-ban group, is credited with creating the term as part of the effort to ban yet another slice of firearms, when he famously said, “Assault weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

Note the admission that these rifles are not machine guns. Ask almost anyone who is not firearms knowledgeable, however, what guns the now-defunct Clinton Gun Ban (the so-called “assault weapon” ban) of 1994 banned, and the response likely will be “machine guns.”

So, what was included? Basic, auto-loading (also called semi-automatic) rifles. They fire only once with each pull of the trigger. President Teddy Roosevelt hunted with a semi-automatic rifle. My first deer hunt, in 1962, was with a semi-automatic rifle, when I was 11 years old. There is nothing new, nor sinister, about self-loading rifles. What was new, however, was the interest in the semi-auto version of the M-16 rifle used by the military, and the opportunity to confuse the public because of these similar looks.

Continue reading at:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/15/tom-gresham-why-hillary-clinton-cant-ban-ar-15-rif/