Although a favourite of gun control advocates, the term is notoriously bad at determining the actual deadliness of a firearm

As gun control tops the political agenda in both the United States and Canada, two terms are getting thrown around a lot: “Assault rifle” or “assault weapon.”

The March for Our Lives, which just launched demonstrations in cities across North America, is calling for an “assault weapons ban.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised a crackdown on illegal “assault weapons.” And even the grocery store chain Kroger recently promised to stop selling any periodicals about “assault rifles.”

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The terms often rankle firearms enthusiasts, and for good reason. For pro-gun and anti-gun camps alike, the terms often convey very little useful information about what makes a firearm dangerous.

For starters, assault weapons are technically already illegal across North America. As defined by most militaries, an assault rifle must be capable of fully automatic fire. This means that if the trigger is pulled, the weapon keeps firing like a machine gun until it is empty.

The Colt C7 used by most Canadian soldiers, for instance, is capable of “full auto” firing.

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But fully automatic firing is illegal on civilian firearms in both the United States and Canada (although some U.S. gun manufacturers have used loopholes to get pretty damned close ). It’s also possible to own a fully automatic rifle in Canada if the gun has been “grandfathered” in as a result of having been owned prior to the 1978 legislation that deemed it a prohibited firearm.

However, generally the fastest firing rate of a North American gun is semi-automatic, meaning that a cartridge is automatically reloaded into the gun’s chamber after every pull of the trigger.

This is compared to a bolt, lever, pump or break action rifle, in which the cartridge must be manually loaded into firing position after every shot.

When activists and media refer to “assault rifles,” however, they are often referring to firearms like the AR-15; semi-automatic long guns bearing features originally designed for use in combat.

These features typically include a pistol grip, elevated sights and a thick barrel shroud to dissipate heat, all of which are designed to make the gun better at directing large amounts of fire.

Photo by Springfield Armory National Historic Site Archives, United States National Park Service

Their most signature feature, however, is that they are often painted all black, which is why these types of guns are often known in the shooting community as “black rifles”.

But the problem with the definition “assault rifle” is that it all too often focuses on aesthethics, and ignores a wide variety of guns without these features that can be just as deadly in a mass shooting scenario.

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The gun below is a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch. To the layman, the rifle looks like a standard hunting gun — and it is indeed a popular rifle for hunters. In Canada the gun is even non-restricted, meaning that it is not subject to the much-stricter regulations surrounding firearms like handguns. This technically means it’s legal to open-carry a Mini-14 in any Canadian public place, provided that it is unloaded and the action is open.

However, the Mini-14 fires bullets that are as powerful and as fast as the bullets being shot out of most generally accepted “assault rifles.” And while the gun rarely shows up at U.S. mass shootings, it has an infamous pedigree elsewhere. Both the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre and the 2011 Utoya massacre in Norway were perpetrated with wood-stocked Mini-14s.

The United States gun control debate has zeroed in on so-called assault rifles in recent years largely because they keep getting used in mass shootings. AR-15 variants in particular appear to be a favourite of mass murderers, having been the primary weapon used at Sandy Hook, Orlando, Parkland and Sutherland Springs, among others.

Several media reports have focused on the particularly devastating injuries wrought by AR-15 style rifles. A radiologist who treated victims of the Parkland shooting told the Atlantic that they came in with dramatically less survivable wounds than what is usually seen in handgun shootings.

“One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15,” she wrote

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But this isn’t due to the gun, but rather the ammunition it’s configured for.

The weapon used in the Parkland shooting was likely configured for .223 ammunition, a cartridge that is indeed more powerful than the ammunition typically loaded into handguns.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

However, .223 is also a pretty common kind of cartridge for all kinds of long guns, including the Mini-14 mentioned above. Scroll through the Cabela’s catalogue for Canadian long-guns , in fact, and it’s far from the most powerful ammunition on offer. Many Canadian hunters shoot a 30-06 (pronounced 3o ought six), which is more powerful (and more damaging, at least according to this Canadian test comparison ).

Conversely, there exist extremely scary-looking semi-automatic rifles that only fire .22 cartridges, the absolute weakest type of commonly available rifle ammunition. Although .22 ammunition was used in the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, it’s generally only loaded into rifles for the purpose of shooting rabbits or small rodents.

It’s also worth noting that the AR-15 is one of the most common guns in the United States, with the National Rifle Association dubbing it the “most popular rifle in America.” With more than eight million of the rifles in circulation, it’s possible the murderers were just picking the most generic option; the equivalent of buying a Honda Civic for use as a getaway car.

Experienced shooters, in fact, have made the chilling observation that if most mass shooters actually knew anything about guns, they would equip themselves with something far deadlier.

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“Thank God they don’t know any better because if they did they would use much more effective weapons,” Illinois firearms instructor Dean Hazen told USA Today last month

The arbitrariness of the “assault rifle” label gets even more ludicrous when it comes to handguns.

Handguns are by far the most deadly kind of firearm in the United States. Of 9,616 U.S. gun murders tracked by the FBI in 2015, 6,447 (67 per cent) were committed with handguns . Only 252 murders were definitively committed with “rifles,” and it is unknown how much of that category included military-style guns.

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s even possible to pick up a handgun that shoots bullets just as devastating as anything that comes out of an AR-15.

The Belgian-made FN Five-Seven looks like a regular handgun and is named for its 5.7-mm ammunition, a powerful cartridge also used by many guns that would be called assault rifles. This includes the Five-Seven’s cousin, the particularly fearsome-looking P90.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

An FN Five-Seven was used in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, where the pistol’s power made it particularly difficult to stop the shooter. A number of victims tried to rush the gunman, but were killed with single shots to the chest. Had the bullets been a more conventional 9mm pistol ammunition, these wounds might have been survivable. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it has the added danger of being concealed, the Five-Seven is often left out of gun control debates that are singularly focused on “assault rifles.”

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A gun may also be called an “assault rifle” due to a design that facilitates large-capacity magazines and easy reloading. But here again, singling out “assault rifles” glosses over whole categories of firearms that can spit out bullets just as quickly.

The Mini-14 mentioned above can be reloaded with a new magazine in about one second. And in the hands of an experienced shooter, any semi-automatic handgun can be reloaded almost instantaneously. Take a look at the video below, which shows a shooter performing a drill in which he reloads his pistol in less than two seconds.

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The vagueness of the “assault rifle” terminology may be why a number of pundits and outlets are abandoning it in favour of a more accurate term: “Military-grade.”

Statements accompanying the March for Our Lives, for example, read “we believe there is no valid reason for military grade weapons to be accessible to the public.”

However, even this suffers from the pitfall that absolutely every kind of firearm in existence has at one point been used by a military to kill people. It’s a rare firearm, in fact, that wasn’t designed for such a purpose.

In Canada the most obvious example is the Lee-Enfield .303. A bolt-action rifle that has been a popular deer gun for generations, it has rarely made anyone’s list as a candidate for a firearms ban.

Nevertheless, the Lee-Enfield fires a bullet that is larger and more powerful than the .223, and was the primary Commonwealth infantry weapon at the height of the British Empire. The gun has almost certainly killed more people than any other mentioned in this article.

Photo by The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

A more extreme example would be smoothbore muzzle-loading flintlock black powder rifles. These were the world’s choice infantry weapon at the time when the United States enshrined gun ownership in its constitution.

Two centuries later, and the technology is so comparatively harmless that even Canadian authorities don’t consider it a firearm anymore.