Faustling:

>>That's the thing that I keep getting back to -- mechanically, there's no difference between the "hunting guns" and the "assault guns."

There is a very important difference, which I have already pointed out above: Civilian weapons (and old military weapons like the M-1) lack the "second sear" or similar mechanism which allows selection for full automatic. Converting my old M-1 to full auto would have been a big project for a professional gunsmith: Simply filing down the sear would have produced a gun which fired a single brief burst and then was empty . . . as a weapon, it would be next to useless. Adding components to make it selectable (and ideally for 3-round bursts) would be almost like building a new gun. Because there are no such components available, you would have to invent and machine-tool them yourself, assuming you could find space within the gun . . . this would probably require manufacturing a new stock. Also, the receiver would probably jam under such rapid fire, for which it was not intended, and this would require further modification. Added to this, there is no way of adding a "banana clip" or larger magazine. The M-1 is an excellent weapon, when used in the way intended, and you can find them anywhere, but not in the hands of a gangster or terrorist.

So they could have simply banned guns based on the ease of convertibility rather than features. They didn't do that. The reason -- the production of easily-convertible guns was _already_ banned. In order to sell semi-automatic versions of the AK-47 manufacturers had to design and produce a new receiver that was incompatible with the standard model's full-auto parts. And the BATF remains the ultimate authority and dictator as to what sort of changes are sufficient to preclude easy convertibility.