Elizabeth Rosenthal has it right in her Washington Post commentary, I was a teenage gun owner, then an ER doctor. Assault-style weapons make me sick.:
“…the United States has undergone a cultural, definitional, practical shift on guns and what they are for.
Once mostly associated in the public mind with sport, guns in the United States are now widely regarded more as weapons to maim or kill — or to protect from the same. Guns used to be on a continuum with bows and arrows; now they seem better lumped in with grenades, mortars and bombs.”