For restrictive gun laws to gain the public support needed for passage, the public has to be misled, their emotions manipulated, and their fears exploited.  The single greatest obstacle to passage of such laws is an informed public.  The forcible citizen disarmament lobby is well aware of this, of course, and tries to dominate the discussion with its own version of the "truth."

The Violence Policy Center provided what is perhaps one of the best known examples of this kind of deceptive practice back in 1998, in suggesting that gun prohibition advocacy groups exploit the public's ignorance of the difference between machine guns and so-called "assault weapons."

The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.