Letters: AR-15 an ‘assault rifle’? Not by a long shot

An assault rifle is capable of fully automatic fire — one pull of the trigger discharges the whole magazine. An AR-15 requires you to pull the trigger once for every round. Gary Parker and others like him are afraid of the AR-15 because it looks scary (“It’s past time to ban assault weapons,” June 23).

An AR-15 in the hands of a fully qualified weapons expert is capable of firing 600 to 700 rounds a minute. But there is no way to pull a trigger that many times in one minute. Even if you could, there aren’t magazines that will hold more than 600 rounds of ammo, so you swap magazines a lot. Firing that fast overheats and jams the rifle. So the AR-15 isn’t an assault rifle.

An uninformed, uneducated public cannot be trusted with our Second Amendment rights.

This story was originally published June 30, 2016 at 4:59 PM with the headline "Letters: AR-15 an ‘assault rifle’? Not by a long shot."