The Act included a number of exemptions and exclusions from its prohibitions : In 1989 , the George H. W. Bush administration had banned the importation of foreign-made , semiautomatic rifles deemed not to have " a legitimate sporting use . " It did not affect similar but domestically-manufactured rifles . ( The Gun Control Act of 1968 gives discretion to the Attorney General of the United States to choose whether to " authorize a firearm or ammunition to be imported or brought into the United States , " under what is known as " the sporting purposes test . " ) Following the enactment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban , the ATF determined that " certain semiautomatic assault rifles could no longer be imported even though they were permitted to be imported under the 1989 ' sporting purposes test ' because they had been modified to remove all of their military features other than the ability to accept a detachable magazine " and so in April 1998 , it " prohibited the importation of 56 such rifles , determining that they did not meet the ' sporting purposes test . ' " Under the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 , the definition of " semiautomatic assault weapon " included specific semi-automatic firearm models by name , and other semi-automatic firearms that possessed two or more from a set certain features : The law also categorically banned the following makes and models of semi-automatic firearms and any copies or duplicates of them , in any caliber : Gun control advocates and gun rights advocates have referred to at least some of the features outlined in the federal Assault Weapon Ban of 1994 as cosmetic . The NRA Institute for Legislative Action and the Violence Policy Center both used the term in publications that were released by them in September 2004 , when the ban expired . In May 2012 , the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence said that " the inclusion in the list of features that were purely cosmetic in nature created a loophole that allowed manufacturers to successfully circumvent the law by making minor modifications to the weapons they already produced . " The term was repeated in several stories after the 2012 Aurora shooting and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting . Senator Marco Rubio cited that issue during a town hall forum , responding to questions from survivors of the 2018 Stoneman-Douglas High School shooting in Parkland , Florida
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
Federal Assault Weapons Ban