Yeah, but look at Vietnam. They didn't have much more than machine guns. Face it, The US government with all of it's technology and high powered weapons, couldn't tell 250 million armed people what to do. Yeah, they could nuke or carpet bomb the whole country, but a huge wasteland with no economy is worthless, so it would defeat the purpose of their quest for power. The only way they could win is by killing the opposition, and the more Americans that are armed the greater our chance is of staying in control. And their weapons for man-on-man combat won't be superior to ours, that is unless they manage to take our guns away.





That gun is an AR-15 style rifle, and in terms of it's function and legality, isn't much different from this rifle:




That gun is a Remington .22 caliber semi-auto. The AR-15 is a .223 caliber semi-auto. The main differences is the AR-15 was designed in the battlefield, so it is easy to disassemble and clean, is very accurate, has little recoil, very rugged, has a pistol grip, and it looks like a badass machine gun. The law sees no difference between the Remington and the AR-15, and the differences in the way someone would use either to hunt would be minor, except maybe the hunted animal would a little intimidated by the looks of the AR-15....

Banning either of these semi-auto rifles isn't going to happen anytime soon, and I won't be surprised when a court rules the assault weapon ban unconstitutional. Keep in mind that the Crime BIll of 1994 had nothing to do with fully-automatic guns; it basically only banned certain accesories from legal semi-automatic "assault rifles". In other words, put a bayonet and a pistol grip onto that Remington and it suddenly becomes an illegal "assault weapon" under the law.

Fully-automatics are legal but it is a pain in the ass to register it and you have to pay a $200 fee, and it is a felony to possess an unregistered automatic.. Not an ideal route for a criminal, but they could (illegally) buy parts off of the black market (and I say on the black market because it is a felony just to own these parts as unregistered) and modify a semi-auto gun like the AR-15 to fire auto.