Good observation. My generation lugged the Garand 30-cal M1 around, About 10 lbs fully loaded.
Not glamorous but an extremely deadly weapon.
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The article does not go into the physics but does a good job explaining the sort of damage an AR-15 does to soft tissue. The difference between a 5.56 cal AR-15 and older infantry rifles and assault rifles is that the AR-15 projectile is obviously smaller and therefore has less mass. A bullet from an old army rifle goes straight through a human body, including bones, because it has a lot of mass. A high-velocity 5.56 projectile carries a lot of energy but on impact, it does not just keep going. It starts changing its trajectory, bounces off bones, and completely rips tissue apart. Thatās why the watermelons exploded so impressively.
Also very good point about the fact that removing full-auto does not make the weapon any less effective, on the contrary. In Vietnam, US soldiers spent incredible amounts of ammunition because they blasted everything with full auto fire. Full auto just wastes bullets and does not kill any more people, on the contrary.
Of course āonly in Americaā would someone claim with a straight face that an AR-15 should be sold to civilians, leave alone without any sort of license.
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It is bizarre reading an article entitled āA Biography of the AR-15ā with no mention of the gunās designer: Eugene Stoner.
Likewise the truly revolutionary design of the weapon is not discussed.
Discussion of what the essential characteristics assault rifle are, and how they led to the rise of the assault rifle in dominating the worldās battlefields would have been very valuable, as well to provide some essential context about why the U.S. sent these weapons to Vietnam to face off against the Soviet assault rifle, the AK-47. (It would also be useful to point out how a few thousand assault rifles in the hands of irregular soldiers, even child-soldiers, has been able to destabilize entire nations in Africa.)
This is like half an article, based on (quite clearly) reading exactly two books written about the gun, but with little knowledge of the subject by the author.
(I do not own a gun, I hate the NRA, and the arms lobby, and think assault weapons should be banned like they are in Australia. But still, this is a poor piece of work.)
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That is correct. The use of the AR-15 in massacres is employing the gun exactly in the role for which it was designed: to kill a large number of people, easily and accurately, at relatively close range. This is what assault rifles do, the reason why they were invented (by Germany, towards the end of WWII, the Sturmgewehr 44, which means āassault rifle 44ā for the year is was deployed).
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even in semi-auto, loaded with armor piercing bullets and a really big magazine, you can still have a very fine massacre.
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To take up a point I made earlier, but did not expand on, it is helpful to explain what exactly defines an āassault rifleā - by this I do not mean āin U.S. lawā or āin the minds of gun nutsā (āgun nutsā is a term they themselves use, many of whom claim that an assault rifle does not even exist as an identifiable weapon type). I mean in actual historical reality and in actual, world-wide, military use.
What was the innovation represented by the StG-44, the very first, and so-named assault rifle?
The characteristics are these:
ā The gun is auto-loading (not āautomaticā), i.e. there is no manual bolt
ā The gun has a large capacity magazine (the StG carried 30 rounds)
ā The gun fires intermediate power rounds - less powerful than then-standard military rounds, but more powerful than even powerful handgun rounds
ā Its design was optimized for accurate fire out to about 250 m, but not farther.
ā The gun is relatively short
ā The gun was light weight (I list this last because the StG-44 was not lightweight, but all later assault rifles were, this was a key Kalashnikov innovation)
These traits are all somewhat synergistic - that is, they tend to support each other. For example guns that use less powerful rounds, and provide accurate fire to shorter distances, can be shorter. Shorter, less powerful guns can be lighter. Lighter guns, with less less powerful and thus lighter rounds can carry larger magazines more easily, and so forth.
Increasing the military usefulness of a weapon by reducing the power of its round and reducing its range is really radical thinking so marked the key breakthrough in many ways.
The article completely fails to realize the key point about the power of the round, for example it makes the glaring error of implicitly equating the AK-47 7.62 mm round with the identical caliber of the M-14.
Here are the stats of the round that the M-14, the AK-47, and the M-16 fired:
Bullet weight Bullet velocity Kinetic Energy Recoil
M-14 ------- 9.53 g --------- 833 m/sec ------------ 3304 J -------------- 7.94 kg-m
AK-47 ----- 7.90 g --------- 730 m/sec ------------ 2108 J --------------- 5.77 kg-m
M-16 ------- 3.56 g ------- 1008 m/sec ------------ 1808 J --------------- 3.59 kg-m
(Geez, TPMās super-clever āwe know better than youā formatting software makes it tough to construct a decent table it appears, tabs donāt exist, it deletes extra spaces, indentation, etc.)
The AK-47 round was less than 2/3 the power of the M-14, with 28% less recoil. The M-16 was even more radical in reducing power and recoil further, but by greatly reducing the bullet weight while increasing its velocity.
Also the issue of āautomatic fireā is a greatly misunderstood and exaggerated issue.
The reduced recoil of the gun does not make āit more accurate when fired on automaticā.
No assault rifle has ever been controllable under sustained fully automatic fire. Not ever. They have never been useful for this, only a mounted light machine gun (the M-60 for example) can do this successfully.
What reduced recoil does is make it possible to fire accurate shots more quickly, since you arenāt fighting the gun (and suffering from it) on every shot. It also makes it easier to do point-and-shoot firing on the move in close combat.
What āfull autoā actually does (or did) was make it possible for fire a short 2-4 round bursts at a specific aim-point, allowing multiple rounds to strike a single target. Reduced recoil did not make this any more accurate (except perhaps to reduce the bullet group size), but it did reduce the recoil punishment from the rapid fire. This required excellent training and strict discipline under-fire for this to work though, and it rarely did in combat. Thus fully automatic fire has been dropped from almost all modern assault rifles, replaced by a 3-round burst mode, or even just dropped entirely.
You will see gun-nuts asserting that the civilian AR-15 is not an āassault rifleā since it lacks fully automatic fire. But by that (completely wrong) standard the U.S. Army no longer uses āassault riflesā since the two issued weapons, the M16A4 and the M4, both lack fully auto fire.
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Eradicating feral hog populations is better done using corral type traps. Youāre more guaranteed to get the entire sounder. Shooting them is for people who like to kill things.
Australia outlawed all semiauto long guns except for law enforcement, military, and licensed pest controllers after the Port Arthur massacre. Their worst massacres since have been via arson.
From Wikipedia:
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) restriction
In 1996, Congress added language to the relevant appropriations bill which required ānone of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.ā[46] This language was added to prevent the funding of research by the CDC that gun rights supporters considered politically motivated and intended to bring about further gun control legislation. In particular, the NRA and other gun rights proponents objected to work supported by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, then run by Mark L. Rosenberg, including research authored by Arthur Kellermann.[47][48][49]
This amendment is named after the GOP NC congressman who pushed it, although now that heās out of Congress he says he regrets having done so. Canāt think of his name off the top of my head.
I count myself as a very progressive liberal who also wants to defend the Second Amendment. I scratch my head when I see āliberalsā arguing that we should consolidate the power of the firearm into a government controlled monopoly and depend upon an ever-militarizing police force to āprotectā us. Particularly at this moment in time, when we have a clear despot with authoritarian tendencies as President and thousands of brownshirts eager to do violence in his name. I would think the intent of the 2nd Amendment, as a check against the potential tyranny of the state, the majority, or even a well-armed minority would be obviously prescient.
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I suspect the Founding Fathers found it difficult too, which is why they wrote that one so specific.
Personally, I believe the framework of the Constitution can be carried forward to modern times, but it means relegating much greater control ā including perhaps much freer access to better guns ā but at the local level. Perhaps down to the neighborhood. Unbelievably, that seems to run counter to "less government " conservatives.
Considering our nationās historic independence battle against England, the only hope for a corrective force against an armed government military lies in the guerrilla tactics of a widely dispersed, organized citizenry.
These militia amateurs we have couldnāt find their asses with two hands : - )
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