IMO, that's where the whole thing falls apart. Once you're on the slippery slope that admits that you want access to battlefield weaponry to protect you from a gummint that could kill you, if it wanted to, via joystick from a bunker in Nebraska, you're in a logically untenable position.
I think there is some confusion about what a battlefield weapon is. The picture below shows the selector on an M-16, an actual battlefield rifle:
The three options are for semi-auto fire (1 shot with 1 pull of the trigger), burst fire (3 rounds with one pull of the trigger), and automatic fire (the gun shoots non stop with 1 pull of the trigger, and is empty in about 2 wildly inaccurate seconds.)
Below is a civilian rifle based on the frame of the M-16, known as an AR and often lumped together as an AR-15, whether it is actually an AR-15 or not:
The two options are for safe (don't shoot even if I pull the trigger), and fire (1 shot with 1 pull of the trigger.)
This is what many gun control enthusiasts and media are misidentifying as an assault weapon, or lately as a battlefield weapon. Please note that they would never mis-characterize the gun below as an assault or battlefield weapon, even though it is also a semi automatic rifle:
The difference is that one looks like a military rifle and the other does not.
Here is another one that frightens people with its appearance:
This one, of course, is a BB gun, not scary at all once you get past those military looks and judge it based on what it actually is.
Here is another fun experiment. These guns are both semi-auto shotguns:
The first one obviously looks meaner, but their rate of fire and magazine capacity is the same.
This is one of the things that I find really frustrating about this entire debate, and Julio I know you're a good dude who isn't being dishonest. But the people in politics and media who are framing this as an "assault weapons" or "battlefield weapons" issue either lack sufficient knowledge to comment on the issue, or are being deliberately dishonest. There is no other explanation. We already have an assault weapons ban, it's called the National Firearms Act, and our politicians set that one up so that if you can both afford the prices and pass the screenings then you are either a politician or someone with a politician in their pocket.
What they are pushing for now is a semi automatic rifle ban, and yes, there are plenty of legitimate uses for semi-auto rifles. Watch youtube videos of hog hunting in Texas or any of the other southern states where the hog population is out of control. Think of hunting in the Rockies and coming between a mother grizzly and her cubs, or just of squirrel hunting for food. This idea that they only exist to kill people is just mind boggling when one considers that hundreds of thousands of them have been sold in this country, and less than a dozen have been used for evil purposes.