Harmeet Dhillon: The Term ‘Assault Weapons’ Is ‘Just a Made-Up Category’

During an interview with Washington Gun Law, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon noted that the term “assault weapons” is “just a made-up category.”

Dhillon began by talking about Denver’s ban on “so-called assault rifles, including the most popular rifle in the United States, the AR-15.”

She added, “That’s a made-up category, this concept of ‘assault rifles’ or ‘assault weapons.’ It’s just an epithet applied to an effective and popular firearm or a category of firearms.”

On September 14, 2014, Breitbart News pointed to a New York Times (NYT) article, which explained that the very term “assault weapon” is one the “Democrats created” in the 1990s in order to ban “a politically defined category of guns.”

According to the NYT, America was “suffering from a spike in gun crime…in the early 1990s” so “Democrats created and banned [an entire] category of guns.” The ban lasted from 1994 to 2004 and although crime fell during that time, a “detailed study found no proof” the decline was due to the ban.

Breitbart News noted a Washington Times report on the federal “assault weapons” ban wherein University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper was quoted saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.