> The Mini-14 (for example) has a wooden stock, and looks like something out of Little House On The Prairie, in part because it was brought to market at a time where the M-16, a descendant of the Stoner AR-15 design, had acquired a reputation for dreadful unreliability. In an urban environment, it's just as problematic as an AR-15; what's your point?

That you don't see pictures of the Mini-14 on the evening news as an exemplar of something to be prohibited when they're trying to drum up support for new laws.

> The original AWB proposals were sane and straightforward: they intended to regulate any semi-automatic long gun with a detachable magazine.

Which is to say the significant majority of all rifles. So straight forward but not sane, because it would be enormous overreach rather than anything that could actually pass or survive judicial review.

But then the compromise is inherently ridiculous because there is no meaningful distinction to be made between an ordinary hunting rifle and a "military" rifle, and instead of accepting that they proceeded to insist on meaningless distinctions.