You are splitting hairs on a technicality. The public considers large magazine capacity military-style high powered rifles as "assault rifles", and they truly should. AR-15's and their military cousins were designed and optimized solely for efficiently killing large numbers of people. 

Not a lot of elk hunters out there firing AR-15's. 

The AR-15 is very close to the M-16 design used by the military for decades (other than being modernized), and which I shot during service during the Vietnam War. It looks much the same, fires the same round, has the same magazines, etc, the only difference being it won't fire full-auto without mods. 

Picture of military M-16 rifle: 
http://www.military-today.com/firearms/m16.jpg

Picture of civilian AR-15:
https://armalite.com/files/2016/01/Eagle-15.png