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Originally Posted by fatty
My only question is, what is the prevailence of assault weapons? How many Americans own assault weapons? What is this expressed as a percentage of all gun-owning Americans?
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For real Assault Weapons (Fully Automatic), only the rich own them. Unlike what you would think, as a civilian, you can have a fully auto weapon if you meet 3 criteria -
1. The Assault rifle were made prior to 1986's machine gun ban.
2. You register it with the ATF.
3. You don't live in one of two states (Kalifornia, and some other, forgot which)
They probably number in the 10's of thousands and you need to meet a 3rd requirement - You have to have the cash since an M-16A2 will run you $12K easy since it's a registerable receiver.
As far as military look-a-like sporting rifles like an AR-15, those are fairly common. If you walk into any gun shop, there are probably 10 to 20 of them in various forms hanging on the wall. You can buy a good AR-15, like a Bushmaster for about $1100 or so. These are kind of expensive for a plinker, so they would not be as common as say an AK-47 sporting rifle or an SKS sporting rifle. As far as going anywhere to plink, I have 'never' seen anyone head up to the mountains to shoot and not have at least 1 sporting rifle like this. THey are so cheap and cheap to buy ammo for. You can probably get an SKS for $200, to maybe $300. An OK AK-47 from maybe Romania or so will run you $300 to $400. Expensive AK's will run you maybe $500 to $550, but are largely a waste of money since all you may get is a forged instead of stamped reciever.
Basically, all plninkers have at least an SKS in their inventory, so I'd say extremely common if that answers your question.
-S
PS. By the way, a registered fully automatic Assault Rifle has never once been used in a crime by an owner - ever. Only one was used once to commit suicide.