Talking heads are talking about the glory days when we had an "Assault Weapons Ban" and all the evil assault weapons like the AR15 were banished from the land, and how the evil Republicans allowed it to sunset in 2004...
This picture was taken when the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was still in force. All three of those guns were very legal at the time. Two were legally considered "assault weapons" but were grandfathered in because they had been made prior to 1994, which made them valuable commodities at the time. One is not an "assault weapon" and was perfectly legal to buy in 2003.
All three of those thirty-round magazines ("high capacity bullet clips") had been made prior to 1994 and were thus grandfathered. They weren't terribly expensive, because there were literally millions in circulation, and those millions are a fraction of what's out there now.
At the time, I owned one AR-type weapon. Now I have several. And what I have is a tiny fraction of an electron in one atom in a water molecule of a drop in the civilian-owned AR15 bucket. Conservative estimates have the number of these things in circulation as closer to ten million than five. The horse is well and truly out of the barn.
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