You don't know what the side effects are because you don't know how an assault rifle is defined (it depends on which legislation you're talking about, there's no standard definition), and without proposing specific things to be banned, your proposal is just virtue signalling "I don't like assault weapons [even though I don't know what they are or how they're distinguished from handguns]."

Depending on the proposal, a ban on assault rifles is likely either:

- An ineffective nothingburger, targeting features that don't matter for lethality, that can easily be removed or changed, or features that can be built or re-added in a weekend in a garage (which only affects people who shoot recreationally, and not someone planning a shooting for weeks or months like mass shooters tend to do).

- A ban on most semi-auto guns including the vast majority of handguns people rely on for every day carry and self defense.

If you want to try to have an effective ban without nuking handguns too, you have to be fairly knowledgeable about guns and machining and very specific about what you're proposing, and there are likely still holes big enough to drive a falcon nine through.

And then, if you come up with such a proposal that actually might work, you have to run the gauntlet of:

1. It's unconstitutional.

2. Semi-auto long guns are actually better for self defense than handguns, the main reasons people use handguns are that long guns are less mobile/concealable and louder.

3. What exactly are you going to do about the tens of millions of banned guns and maybe hundreds of millions of banned magazines for those guns? Confiscation? Do you want a civil war? No confiscation? Then nefarious people will have no trouble getting them on the black market.

(chimeracoder's reply is completely right, but I didn't want to take the detour of getting into the technical definition of assault rifle when it makes no difference in this discussion.)

> You don't know what the side effects are because you don't know how an assault rifle is defined (it depends on which legislation you're talking about, there's no standard definition)

To clarify:

"Assault rifle" is well-defined with a standard definition. Assault rifles have been illegal for non-military, non-LEO use for decades (with a grandfather clause for rifles purchased before a certain date - these are incredibly expensive due to their rarity and belong mainly to collectors).

"Assault weapon" is completely undefined with no common consensus around what it refers to, and plenty of inconsistent or self-contradictory definitions in use.

I would argue that none of the potential harms you talked about are either realistic or of the same magnitude of closing the online dating industry to new entrants, forcing discussion forms of all sizes to adopt automated censorship programs to defend their owners against a credible threat of jail time if anyone is found posting anything about trafficking on the platform, and a plethora of other side effects better described in the original article above.

I think you’re right when you say the technical detail of the assault rifle definition is irrelevant. Just because I don’t know as much about gun types as you does not mean that I can’t see that banning a particular type of firearm will not lead to civil war, but weakening 230 will lead to the centralization of censorship of the internet.

What do you think about banning high capacity magazines?

It is much easily defined and codified than "assault weapons".

Personally I'm surprised the anti-gun people don't go after magazines, instead fighting the same battle over and over again.