Please, stop embarrassing yourself.
Reference §HRS 134-1
"Assault pistol" means a semiautomatic pistol which accepts a detachable magazine and which has two or more of the following characteristics:
(1) An ammunition magazine which attaches to the pistol outside of the pistol grip;
(2) A threaded barrel capable of accepting a barrel extender, flash suppressor, forward hand grip, or silencer;
(3) A shroud which is attached to or partially or completely encircles the barrel and which permits the shooter to hold the firearm with the second hand without being burned;
(4) A manufactured weight of fifty ounces or more when the pistol is unloaded;
(5) A centerfire pistol with an overall length of twelve inches or more; or
(6) It is a semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm;
but does not include a firearm with a barrel sixteen or more inches in length, an antique pistol as defined in this section or a curio or relic as those terms are used in 18 United States Code §921(16) or 27 Code of Federal Regulations 178.11.
Keltec,
No offense, but you have fallen into using anti-gunner terminology.
Nobody ever considered an AR or any other semi-auto firearm an "assault weapon" until the anti-gunners used the term to sensationalize.
An assualt rifle was and still is a military arm with certain characteristics.
It helps in understanding if we go back in time to a point prior to assault rifles. Lets go to the turn of the century. At that time there were full-size bolt action battle rifles. For example, the Mauser K98 (1898), and the 1903 Springfield. Battle rifles fired bullets of a certain weight at velocities that made them effective out to what? 900-1000 yards. Lets focus for a moment on the 1903 Springfield. It used the .30-06 cartridge. (That's right, the .30-06 started life as a military cartridge).
Move forward in time to WWII. The US had the M1 Garand, a full-size battle rifle and semi-automatic.
Across the same period, submachine guns came into use. These were fully-automatic, but fired pistol ammunition. An example would be the Tommy gun which fired .45 ACP cartridges. I don't recall the designation or caliber of the German submachine gun, but I imagine it was 9MM.
So, up to WWII you had full-size battle rifles firing cartridges of a certain size, and submachine guns firing pistol ammo.
Then, along about 1942 German engineers realized it would be handy to have a fully automatic rifle. So, they invented the Sturmgehwer (sturm-guh-vair). They made it with intermediate ammo--stronger than pistol ammo, not as strong as battle rifle ammo. Which meant they could put more cartridges in a magazine, and a soldier could carry more ammo. Fortunately for the Allies, this German rifle did not make it onto the battlefield in sufficient quantities. It caused real problems where it was used. It was fully capable of full-auto fire, had plenty of ammo capacity, and a much longer reach than a submachine gun's pistol ammo. It was the first assault rifle.
Then, along comes a short, self-taught Russian engineer named Kalashnikov. He decided the Motherland needed an answer to the Sturmgehwer. He invented the AK-47, adopted by the Russian army in 1947.
In the 1950's an American engineer named Eugene Stoner used his experience with materials from the aircraft industry to invent the M16.
So, there's the rough history of assault rifles. An assault rifle is a military weapon, capable of fully automatic fire, firing an intermediate cartridge. Being military weapons, they have bayonet studs for affixing bayonets, or a bayonet already hinged on the gun.
The anti-gunners wanted to sensationalize, so they stretched the meaning to cover all sorts of non-military semi-automatic weapons. This back in the 1990s. The truth is that there are relatively few genuine assault rifles in civilian hands in this country; being full-auto they require ATF paperwork and are fairly expensive. Last I read, an M16 in good condition runs somewhere between $10K-15K. And, with the closing of the full-auto registry to new additions in (1986?), there are no new full-auto weapons coming into civilian hands.
And, for what it is worth, the last I heard, the only crime committed by a legal privately owned full-auto weapon was by a cop in the northeast, or maybe New York who murdered someone with his privately owned full-auto weapon.
