What is the worlds most powerful assault rifle?
OK, I’m going to take a crack at this one. First things first, and this is important: I am a gun collector and a firearms historian. I am ALSO a journalist, and this is a pretty rare combination. Words are important and how we define those words also is important. And words are my profession. How you and I USE them has a great deal to do with how we LOSE arguments sometimes…. and, just once in a while, win an argument. Now let’s look at your question, friend. To start off there is no such thing as a “high-caliber assault rifle”. They don’t exist; they are a figment of the imagination of a lazy journalist who was looking for a cheap headline. Just like “semi-automatic machine-gun”: no such thing exists. Or the really lazy writer who couldn’t be bothered learning to spell “rifle” and thus came up with the media term “assault gun”. So let’s look at the words. An “assault gun” (in German, that’s “sturmgeschutz”: they invented the word) is an artillery piece which has been mounted on a ta
