On May 3, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., published a frothing op-ed in USA Today. His directive? “Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters.” In the wake of Friday’s school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, others are reiterating a call to ban assault weapons. A somewhat prominent congressman making an earnest claim for gun confiscation has certainly gotten him attention, but the question it really raises is this: What would more-restrictive “assault weapon” laws actually look like in the United States?

Swalwell’s article contains basically all of the typical talking points associated with the gun control crowd. An odd, misinformed obsession with muzzle velocity; the phrase “weapon of war;” a fixation with Australia’s costly and ineffective gun control strategies; and an ill-founded assertion that banning weapons used in a tiny fraction of murders would save swaths of lives in the United States. Those claims are nothing new or interesting, and have been debated and mostly debunked time and time again.