How dangerous are assault weapons?

How dangerous are assault weapons?

Paul Helmke (President, The Brady Campaign) gives expert video advice on: How dangerous are assault weapons?; What is a semi-automatic assault weapon?; What's the difference between an assault weapon and a semi-automatic firearm? and more...

Assault weapons, semi-automatic weapons, are a lot more of dangerous than guns that go a chamber at a time. When a lot of folks think about hand guns or guns, they think about the old revolver; you take a shot and the chamber has to move and put another bullet there. A semi-automatic weapon, an assault weapon if you will, all it takes a finger twitch, basically, to get the bullet in the chamber ready for firing again. It's that speed of discharge, the number of bullets that you can fire off in a short period of time, really differentiates between an assault weapon - a semi-automatic weapon - and a standard hand gun or a standard long gun, and that makes it dangerous. They are more dangerous because of the number of rounds you can get off before you have to do any sort of reloading, before you pause at all.