Here's my take on assault weapons.
An assault weapon has a selective fire switch and is capable of firing in semi-auto, bursts and fully automatic. Assault weapons were banned for civilian use in 1934. You need to possess a Class III firearms license to own an assault weapon, and those permits are rarely granted, except occasionally to serious gun collectors. Since 1934 there has only been one reported murder committed by a civilian with a legally owned assault weapon.
Gun grabbers use the term "assault weapon" to demonize guns that have a military style appearance. They know when they call a gun an "assault weapon," the average person congers up a vision of prohibition era gangsters mowing people down with a Thompson sub-machine gun or a soldier spraying a machine gun in a World War II movie. It's pure propaganda to call a semi-automatic gun an assault weapon and it's an outrageous lie to say that a semi-automatic gun is capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute. The truth: the guns that are being classified as "assault weapons" by gun control propagandists are semi-automatic guns and all semi-automatic guns, regardless of their appearance, shoot exactly the same. A Remington hunting rifle shoots exactly the same way as an AR-15, an AK-47 or a Tec-9. They all have the exact same rate of fire; one trigger pull, one bullet. What makes a gun an assault weapon is its function, not its appearance.
Passing laws banning the ownership of semi-automatic rifles based on their appearance will have no effect on the criminals and the insane who misuse them. Like all gun laws, the only people who will obey a falsely called "assault weapons ban" are law abiding citizens who don't commit crimes with their guns and pose no threat to society. Whenever there is a mass shooting like the one that occurred in Connecticut, there are two things that are almost always present. 1) The shooter is seriously mentally ill. 2) The shooting occurs in a location where the victims are unarmed and cannot defend themselves. If we want to stop these tragedies from happening then we need to focus our efforts on keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill and providing people the liberty to defend themselves. Banning rifles because they have a pistol grip, a folding stock or a flash suppressor will do nothing to stop mass shootings. The assault weapons ban that was in effect in 1999 did not stop the two shooters in Columbine High School.