The ban expired September 13, 2004.

 

Unfortunately, the original ban was so weak that actually trying to gather data on the use of legit assault weapons in crimes has always been difficult, because the gun manufacturers rapidly created weapons that were slight variants on true assault weapons to get around the ban, and because assault weapons that were already in circulation continued to be sold in various legal ways. (I can still recall a 60 minutes bit a few years back about how the Kosovar rebels managed to arm themselves with heavy, .50 machine guns by simply buying them at gun shows and shops across the western U.S. and exporting them to that region, for example).

 

You can get these guns from all over the world. Russia is a major source to buy guns like this. So those Kosovar rebels were most likely going to get machine guns irrelevant of the US. I just don't think a ban of certain guns will do much to stop a terrorist attack.

Edited December 3, 200817 yr by mr_genius

The media also tends to be very inaccurate when it comes to any sort of gun report, so I'd be skeptical about their claim that full-automatic AK-47's are being purchased in significant quantities from the US. There is just a ton of red tape to buy one, and they are not sold at gun shows. Also, gun show guns account for about 1% of guns used in crime.http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fuo.htm -> acrobat file on the bottom.

Just to toss this in, I went to a gun show recently here in MD, and I saw some AK-47s and they were only semiautomatic. Same for the AR-15s I saw, both the rilfes and carbines. It was odd because I look at the selector levers and expect to see "auto" or "burst" from using M-16s for so long and it's just not there.