When talking about our own current gun debate, I’ve maintained that the real problem with so-called “assault rifles” is that they look scary. It’s the reason they don’t hold up a Mini-14, for example, as a terrifying piece of military hardware despite it chambering the same round as the AR-15. It’s also why someone like Shannon Watts would hold up a bolt-action .22 as an example of a weapon we shouldn’t let 18-year-olds buy.

Well, we have another data point to consider. This time, it’s from Australia, that country anti-gun activists look to for guidance and hold up as a shining example of how guns should be handled.

It seems that despite letting a handful of guns into the country, authorities are now demanding owners turn them in. Why? Because they look like AR-15s.

Now, bear in mind that these weapons only resemble the AR-15 in appearance. They’re not semi-autos in the least. You have to work the bolt after each shot.

But it’s scary looking.

And that’s really what the problem most anti-gunners have with the AR-15. It looks like a military rifle, so they simply assume it’s the same thing. That’s the reason why so many people keep on and on with it supposedly being a weapon of war. They think that because it looks like a weapon of war.

Looks can be deceiving, though. In fact, this particular rifle is only similar to an M4 in the vaguest sense of the word.

Yet Australian authorities are now quaking in their boots because some citizens have a rifle that looks like something that’s fully-automatic.

“But it can probably be made full-auto easily enough,” someone might say.

If they did, I’d laugh.

If you look at the video and pay attention to the barrel, you’ll notice that there’s no gas tube running above the barrel. Within that rail system is nothing but the barrel.

This makes sense. After all, it’s a glorified bolt-action. It doesn’t have any need for a gas system because the gasses aren’t needed to work the action. Without that, it doesn’t matter what you do to the weapon, it’s not going to function as a semi-automatic, much less a full-auto.

In order to convert the weapon, just looking at a glimpse of the weapon from a video, you’d need a gas system before anything else, and that would mean a completely different upper receiver and components since that particular upper receiver is built to not have a gas system. Since I suspect those are restricted in Australia too, I don’t see it being an issue.

And that’s without even touching any internal mechanism in the lower receiver.

In other words, this gun is about as dangerous as any other non-semi-automatic rifle is. There’s nothing of benefit to the Australian public by banning these, but the gun is scary, so authorities want the guns.

Make no mistake, this is our future if we’re not very careful. This is what anti-gun zealots want for us all, and then some. If they get their way, we’ll be reduced to weapons like this, only to find out that we can’t have them because they look too scary.

Which is why we fight and we fight hard.