I'm only unclear about your last point of "old-media fearmongering over Scary Black Guns™". Could you give an example? I'm not clear if you're referring to white conservatives whipping up a false spectre of blacks with guns, or referring to media liberals bemoaning an unfair characterization of blacks as scary.
"assault weapons" = Scary Black Guns. The AR-15 is functionally identical to innumerable nondescript hunting rifles of equivalent lethality, but because it has a composite stock and rubberized grips rather than the wood furniture associated with "civilian" guns (because nobody knows shit about guns outside of what they see on TV and in movies), it's inherently scarier simply because it looks more like what a military weapon is supposed to look like. There's nothing about an AR-15 that makes it one iota deadlier than, say, the Ruger Mini-14 Anders Breivik used in a mass shooting years ago, but the Ruger looks like a hunting implement and the AR-15 looks like the M-16 the media has associated with the utmost of human evil all the way back to Vietnam. Assault weapons bans inevitably get bogged down looking at cosmetic features of guns because they're floated by well-intentioned imbeciles with no influx of information on firearms outside of mass media.
