Aurora Colorado Violence

No, it says "arms" which is an even more inclusive category than "handguns and assault rifles." In US vs. Miller, the Supreme Court was very clear that the arms made permissible by the Second Amendment were precisely those that were of a "military order", when they ruled that a sawed-off shotgun by virtue of its inaccuracy and unreliability would not be a weapon used by an orderly military or that could contribute to the general defense.

A pistol grip is the grip of a pistol. If we're talking about a rifle, then the grip of a rifle is a rifle grip, by definition. How can a rifle have a pistol grip if a rifle is not a pistol?

Ok, but this rifle has a grip where you hold it more or less at right-angles to the way it's pointing:Is this a "pistol grip"? Why or why not? And what makes a "pistol grip" on a rifle unacceptably dangerous on a rifle but not on a pistol?Isn't this part of the law a regulation on nothing more than the appearance of the weapon?

Do they? Here's a pistol (a Luger) with what you specified before was a "semi-pistol grip": But the bill doesn't consider pistols to be "unacceptably assault-weapon-ish." That's the point - despite banning rifles with pistol grips, pistols with pistol grips are perfectly OK provided that they lack other identified "dangerous" features. But if a pistol grip is dangerous on a rifle, I fail to see by what basis a pistol grip is any less dangerous on a pistol. But this is a military weapon:The US military issued over 1.5 million such rifles to servicemen between the rifle's introduction in 1959 to the present day; as DA noted in the other thread, the M14 assault rifle is still in widespread service.Yet it has no pistol grip, no flash suppressor, no forestock grip, nor any of the other characteristics identified in the "assault weapons" ban with the result that the rifle was not banned by the 1994 law.So is it the military, here, that doesn't know what it's doing - equipping servicemen with a rifle no more dangerous than a varmint gun - or is it maybe the lawmakers who don't know what they're doing?Here's another pistol-grip-lacking military weapon, the famous P90:A truly tremendous gun, but this weapon certainly lacks a "grip that allows you to hold it at more or less right angles to the direction it's pointing". This gun didn't exist at the time of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, and aside from the high-capacity magazine and select-fire mode (both of which are options, not intrinsic to the rifle) it's difficult to see any basis on which a singlefire version of this rifle would have been blocked by that law.But is that because it's a less dangerous gun? I don't see how that could possibly be the case, and again, this is a rifle in military use. So, again, is it the world's militaries who don't know what they're doing, or might it have been the lawmakers who wrote the Federal "assault weapons ban" without having any relevant criteria for what actually constitutes a "dangerous" rifle?