It is now legal to purchase many kinds of semiautomatic weapons that were for sale only to the military and police in the United States for the past ten years. A 1994 ban on those weapons expired at midnight Monday. It had outlawed 19 types of military style assault weapons. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry says that President Bush made a bad choice by letting the ban expire.

President Bush said he supported the ban and would sign a renewal if Congress voted for one. But the Republican Party-controlled Congress made no move to specifically reauthorize the 1994 assault weapon ban, and the President did not try to force them, so the ban expired. The National Rifle Association, a powerful lobby of gun owners in the United States had indicated it would support President Bush if the assault weapon ban was allowed to expire.