The Assault Rifle
For the last few years, there has been a lot of ink sprayed around on the subject of assault rifles. Unfortunately, most of the writers in the 'news' press are not really familiar with what an assault rifle really is. The term 'assault rifle' has only been in use since the late 1940s, but they are as old as the art of rifling itself.
Definitions are constantly changing, depending on the actual use of the word by the general public. Because of that, an assault rifle is currently considered to be anything that anyone cares to assign the name to. Webster's defines it as "1. An AUTOMATIC rifle that fires high powered ammunition and has some features of a submachine gun, and 2. A non military, usu. semiautomatic weapon MODELED on an assault rifle." (Emphasis mine)
The simplest logical definition would be to consider any rifle (or any other weapon) an 'assault ***'only if it had been used in an assault. This isn't very useful for anything, though, because you can't tell by looking if a weapon has been so used or not. Being military, I prefer to use a definition that identifies a tool by function. The whole purpose of the assault rifle, originally, was to mass adequate firepower to successfully mount an assault on defended field fortifications. Anything with less firepower couldn't reasonably be given the same name, because it would not complete the assigned mission.
The original rifles could not be considered assault rifles for their time, because their rate of fire was painfully slow. Firearms on the whole were only secondary weapons. When they finally began to be effective, it was musket type weapons that took the fore, rather than rifles. Muskets could be loaded and fired at the rate of about three rounds a minute. Early rifles could take a full minute to load, particularly after it had been fired for a number of rounds and the bore became fouled with powder residue. The essence of an 'assault rifle' is rate of fire. Accuracy is certainly nice, but as long as the bullet is going in the general direction that it's sent off in, rate of fire is far more important.
Muskets could be reloaded rapidly because the bullet didn't have to fit the bore tightly. A wad of cloth or paper held the powder in, and another held in the projectiles. In a rifle, the bullet had to fit tightly into the rifling grooves to achieve accuracy. This required significant force when loading the weapon, and slowed down the process. Rifles continued to be used as secondary weapons, primarily for sniper use, until the advent of the Minie' ball just prior to the American Civil War.
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