From The Federalist:

In Worman, district court judge William G. Young upheld Massachusetts’ ban not by disputing whether the firearms and magazines in question are “in common use,” but on the notion that semi-automatic rifles are close enough to fully-automatic rifles that they might as well be considered one and the same. That idea originated in the first chapter of a 2003 publication by the anti-gun activist group that in 1988 proposed that gun control activists adopt “assault weapons” as a “new topic” to “strengthen the handgun restriction lobby.” A representative of the group was one of the Democrat witnesses during Democrats’ House Judiciary Committee hearing on “assault weapons” in September. (See items 5, 8, and 9 here.)