Weak compromise bans let the gun industry relabel weapons to dodge regulation.

Evidence

The original federal assault weapons ban of 1994 listed several accessories of military rifles, including a pistol grip, detachable magazine, grenade launcher, and flash suppressor. In this compromise bill, a rifle was legal if it included only one of those features, so it was easy to circumvent the law. Semiautomatic firearms are vigorously protected by the gun industry because they are the most profitable items. As a result, heated semantic battles are fought over what a militarized rifle in civilian life should be called (Goode, 2013). Those who try to tighten gun laws call them “assault weapons.” Gun advocates call them “modern sporting rifles.” It is ironic that the gun industry itself advertised these rifles as “assault weapons” before linguistically sanitizing them as “sporting rifles.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1073

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the mechanism of policy capture and linguistic reframing as a moral-disengagement tactic, connecting to the vault’s authoritarianism and social-conservatism claims about how harmful policy is legitimated and sustained.
• DEFINE: Illustrates ‘linguistic sanitization’ — renaming a harmful object to erase its morally loaded identity — as a concrete moral-disengagement device.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1073