After all, perhaps there is a reason that Barack Obama has been branded the world's greatest gun salesman.

That's the feeling that gun dealer, historian and author Martin KA Morgan has developed – after watching Americans turn feverishly towards buying up semi-automatic "assault weapons" in the wake of Clinton's 1994 assault weapons ban.

Before that? Hardly anybody was focused on or buying these guns, and there wasn't much to say about them.

via the London Guardian:

US author and historian says allure of the taboo may explain why measures such as the 1994 assault weapon ban led to an explosion in popularity

When Martin KA Morgan was a kid in the 1970s, military-style rifles were only a "small sliver" of the firearms market in the United States.