Sometimes I just feel embarrassed for the left.
There was a time when these people were actually capable of mounting formidable arguments. Now 99% of it consists of shouting stupid things at stupid people. And backing up the shouting with the power of the media corporations under their control. The stupid thing they're shouting now is that the "assault rifle" is evil because it's a Nazi weapon.
Here's a sample of this hysterical stupidity from a Virginia Democrat
The AR-15: The Weapon of Choice for Mass Murderers
Used in Florida, Las Vegas, Newtown, Colorado theater, Pulse Nightclub, Texas Church, and many, many other places. Will be used to kill a large number of innocent people again very soon,
in some other place in the USA...Original version created by Nazi Germany; Modern version legalized by the GOP. You want a military weapon originally used by the Nazis That murders quickly, painfully, and with precision.
The AR-15 was developed by the Nazis? Who knew.
Media scare stories make the connection in a slightly more sophisticated way. But not by much.
THEY'RE LIGHTWEIGHT, relatively cheap and extremely lethal, inspired by Nazi infantrymen on the Eastern Front during World War II. They're so user-friendly some retailers recommend them for children, yet their design is so aggressive one marketer compared them to carrying a "man card" -- although ladies who dare can get theirs in pink.
The Washington Post which, these days, specializes in loudly shouting stupid things at people who want to pretend they're smart, was much less subtle about it. "The AR-15: 'America's rifle' or illegitimate killing machine?"
"The AR-15 — its initials come not from “assault rifle” but from its original manufacturer, Armalite — is a descendant of the machine guns Nazi infantrymen used against Soviet forces in World War II. In the United States, the weapon traces its origins to a contract the Pentagon gave in 1957 to Armalite,"
The New York Times is only a little better. "The weapon was to be a conceptual copy of the sturmgewehr, which Nazi Germany had fielded late in the war.In the evaluations and field trials that followed, Senior Sgt. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, a wounded veteran of tank warfare on the Soviet Union’s western front, was credited with developing a prototype for a medium-powered rifle capable, like the sturmgewehr, of both automatic and semiautomatic fire.The AK-47, with an effective range beyond the length of a pair of football fields, was accepted in 1947."
The AR-15 is a Nazi rifle the way that the jet plane is a Nazi plane. Germany very aggressively pushed forward into new forms of battlefield technology. That allowed it to initially dominate Europe.
The United States, the USSR and the UK tried to catch up. If we outlaw everything that came from that arms race and the subsequent Cold War fought between the winners, we would be living in a 30s world.
The AR-15 has nothing Nazi about it. Unlike the favorite vehicle of lefty hippies whose original logo resembled a Swastika, it's an American product. The Volkswagen was an old effort by Hitler to socialize car ownership. Even its name testifies to its Nazi past.
If the left really hates Nazism, maybe it ought to give up on its national socialism.