Illinois Just Banned ‘Assault Weapons’ Because Their ‘Only Intent’ Is Mass Murder

This week Illinois became the ninth state to ban “assault weapons.” What are those? Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s triumphant press release about the new law does not say, because the explanation would reveal the futility of trying to reduce gun violence through arbitrary restrictions that leave mass murderers and other criminals with plenty of equally lethal alternatives.

In Pritzker’s press release, Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch (D–Westchester) describes the guns targeted by H.B. 5471, a.k.a. the Protect Illinois Communities Act, as “weapons of war.” That phrase suggests Welch is talking about selective-fire rifles like those carried by U.S. soldiers, which can fire automatically.

That is clearly not true. Such rifles are strictly regulated under federal law, which has forbidden sales of newly manufactured machine guns to civilians since 1986. H.B. 5471 does not deal with machine guns; it deals with semi-automatic firearms, which fire one round per trigger pull.

“This new law begins the pushback against weapons whose only intent is to eviscerate other human beings,” says Illinois Senate President Don Harmon (D–Oak Park). That claim is harder to check, because it is not clear what Harmon means.

Harmon’s attribution of “intent” to inanimate objects implies that certain kinds of guns are inherently malevolent. According to this view, the firearms that Illinois has banned are not tools that can be used for good or ill but forces of evil that must be eradicated.

Based on the references to mass shootings that surround Harmon’s statement, we can infer that he means “assault weapons” are suitable only for killing innocent people. But that also is clearly not true, since Americans own some 20 million rifles that fall into that legislatively defined category, and only a tiny percentage of them are ever used in homicides.

Handguns account for a large majority of firearms used in mass shootings, and they account for an even larger share of weapons used in all gun homicides: more than 90 percent in cases where the type of firearm was specified, according to the FBI’s numbers. Rifles of any sort, only a subset of which would qualify as “assault weapons,” were used in less than 3 percent of those cases.

In a 2021 survey, 30 percent of gun owners said they had bought rifles that are covered by the Illinois ban. Two-thirds of those “assault weapon” owners said they used them for recreational target shooting, while half mentioned hunting and a third mentioned competitive shooting. Sixty-two percent said they used the rifles for home defense, and 35 percent cited defense outside the home.

Even as Illinois legislators insist that “assault weapons” are good for nothing but mass murder, they acknowledge that the guns they damn have legitimate uses. H.B. 5471 allows current owners of these allegedly intolerable firearms to keep them, provided they register the guns with the state police.

Since unauthorized possession of an “assault weapon” is a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $2,500 fine, Illinois gun owners might want to find out if that registration requirement applies to them. They would be ill-advised to assume it does not simply because they do not own “weapons of war” or because they do not think their firearms harbor a homicidal “intent.” Instead they must consult the legal definition of “assault weapon,” which does not hinge on either of those fanciful factors.

H.B. 5471 emulates the approach embodied in the federal “assault weapon” ban that the House of Representatives approved last July. It applies to a long list of specific models, along with firearms that meet certain criteria. A semi-automatic rifle qualifies as an “assault weapon,” for example, if it accepts detachable magazines and has any of six features:

1) “a pistol grip or thumbhole stock”;

2) “any feature capable of functioning as a protruding gr