The “AR-style” semi-automatic rifle, the weapon law enforcement officials have said was recovered from the scene of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, is one of America’s most popular, recognisable and notorious weapons.
Closely related to the fully automatic military combat M-16 rifle, the AR-15 has been used in a number of recent mass shootings in the US, including the Las Vegas attack in October 2017, which killed 60 people, and the anti-LGBTQ+ attack that killed five people in Colorado Springs in November 2022.
In the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, attention will inevitably turn to the ubiquity of the weapon in US society. An AR-15-was recovered near the shooter’s body, according to sources, which his father had reportedly bought legally.
Gun control groups have long argued that the rifle – the initials of which are taken from the ArmaLite small arms company that developed it – has no place in civilian hands.
“It is a weapon of war that is really only suitable for soldiers in a combat zone,” Lindsay Nichols, the policy director at Giffords Law Center, which pushes for gun regulations, told NBC last year. “Its ability to kill a lot of people quickly is the reason why we want it banned.”
But the weapon has been seized on by many as a symbol of the right to bear arms.
In February last year, the Republican congressman Andrew Clyde, who owns a gun shop, handed out lapel pins in the shape of AR-15s.
“I hear that this little pin that I’ve been giving out on the House floor has been triggering some of my Democratic colleagues,” he said in a video at the time. “Well, I give it out to remind people of the second amendment of the constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties.”
Cameron McWhirter, a journalist and the co-author of the book American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, said the rifle had come to occupy a potent place in the US’s popular consciousness.
“This gun has become a symbol that people are focusing on,” he told the Guardian in November last year.
“Everyone knows the silhouette of that image; we’ve seen it a million times all over the place. If you’re for it, you put it on your bumper sticker on your car; if you put a symbol of it with a line through it on a sign, then you know what you’re saying right away without even having to use words.”
Background checks for gun buyers are required at the point of sale in Pennsylvania, where there are more than 2,500 federally licensed firearms dealers.
The state also generally allows the open carrying of firearms without a permit, but one is required to carry a firearm in a vehicle. A licence is required for concealed carry.
In April this year, the Biden administration moved to close the so-called “gun show loophole” that allows people to buy guns from unlicensed dealers at shows, on the internet and in private homes, without the need for a background check.
