Any gnashing of teeth you may hear through the keyboard as I type the below is entirely coincidental.

Anyway, the story starts in Stockton, California, in 1989 with the Cleveland Elementary School shooting. The perpetrator used an AK-47-derived rifle. This quickly resulted in the Roberti-Roos assault weapons ban of 1989 in California which listed approximately fifty firearms by name which were declared to be prohibited.

The problem was that a name is, well, just a name. If you can’t buy an FN-FAL, you can buy a DS Arms SG58. Or if you want an AR15, buy a Stag Arms STAG-15. Exactly the same design, just the label is different.

So, plan B was necessary. By the time the Federal assault weapons ban of 1994 was being drafted, it had come to the attention of the politicians that folks were still purchasing weapons they would prefer to have banned. As a result, in addition to a list of names, they also added a ‘features’ criterion, in order to ensure that what they considered to be military weapons did not slip through the cracks. They deemed the following features on magazine-fed weapons to be particularly suited to military use and not so much for civilian use: Pistol grip, folding/telescoping stock, flash suppressor, pistol grip, bayonet lug. The Federal ban of 1994 permitted one of those items, the California one of 2000 did not.

So, basically, it wasn’t because bayonet lugs were particularly dangerous, as there has neither been a spate of bayonettings, nor does it affect the function of the weapon, but instead that it was considered that there is no civilian merit to the things and it added to what was perceived to be the military nature of the rifle. It also happened to be a feature common to rifles they wanted banned, so would be a further way of ensuring* that such weapons would be prohibited.

*Due to the nature of what they are trying to do, and the method being used to do it, the success of this ensuring is... questionable... as any trip to a California rifle range will demonstrate.