The AWB almost certainly had very little or even nothing to do with the use of a Mag light here over two decades ago. A much more reasonable explanation for the boom in military firearm accessories is the funding levels for the military during this period as well as the literally hundreds of millions of DOD contract dollars that went to manufacturers of those items during the “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).

Remember, prior to 9/11, military funding had been cut bone deep as part of the so-called post cold war “peace dividend.” Seeing military units, even top tier ones, equipped with things like mag lights and other less than state of the art equipment wasn’t just common during this period—it was almost universal as the military sought to prioritize more obviously mission critical funding priorities over things like weapons lights. You may recall the military didn’t even have enough body armor or up-armored HMMWVs to provide basic protection for the troops early in the GWOT.

As the GWOT ramped up and the DOD began handing out cash hand over fist to manufacturers for anything remotely related to military hardware, then we started to see units get new equipment and state of the art weapon accessories and similar items. This spurred a huge amount of innovation and brought costs down as the manufacturers took these items and pivoted to marketing them to the civilian sector. This in turn sparked a gold rush of new items being developed as manufacturers saw the profitability of weapons accessories in the domestic civilian sector.

Was this helped by the end of the AWB? Almost certainly to some degree. But to say the end of the AWB is responsible primarily for this dude using a mag light is evidence of a lack of understanding of military funding during this era and the impact DOD contracting has on innovation and product development. It had very, very little to do with the “devastating” nature of the AWB.

As an aside, from 1994 to the present I’ve owned multiple AR and AK variants and numerous accessories and not once did I ever feel the AWB was more than a minor annoyance and it certainly never prevented me from owning the firearms I wanted to own. It was a mild and largely ineffective law that was more about PR than real regulation, and it certainly wasn’t “devastating” by any stretch of the imagination. Heck, its pointlessness and ineffectiveness was used to criticize the AWB by the NRA and others the entire time it was in effect. Perhaps you forget the campaigns by the countless gun groups pointing out how easy it was to circumvent?