From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Oct 10 2000 - 15:45:38 MDT
At 02:15 PM 10/10/00 -0700, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
>
> When you get right down to the nitty-gritty, an "assault weapon" is
> purpose designed to WOUND, not kill, in battle, as wounded enemy
> take up much more of the enemy's resources than dead.
This oft repeated myth is just that, a myth. Like many such legends,
this one has been difficult to kill. The military shoots to kill, not
wound. I have no idea who started this because it is contrary to any
military doctrine I've seen, and it has since then been refuted by top
echelon officers in the U.S. military. Maybe some country in Europe has
this as a doctrine (some countries, such as Sweden, have "interesting"
military doctrine histories that defy explanation).
Joe Dees wrote:
>Assault weapons are not just "ugly guns." Semi-automatic hunting
>rifles are designed to be fired from the shoulder and depend on the
>accurate shooting of one bullet at a time. Semi-automatic assault weapons
>are designed to be spray-fired from the hip and are designed to maximize
>death and injury from a very rapid rate of fire.
This paragraph here marks you as grossly ignorant. You haven't the
faintest idea of how these weapons are actually used by the
military. Even fully automatic (selectable fire) weapons such as the
M16 or AK47 are *virtually never* used in anything but semi-auto mode
by the military, and *never* "spray-fired from the hip". Hell, they
removed the "full-auto" capability from modern M16s because the
feature has almost no practical use for the military. You've watched
*way* too many really bad Chuck Norris movies.
"Maximizing death and injury" as you put it "depend on accurate
shooting one bullet at a time", not your idiotic Hollywood notion of
how guns are used. If you pitted three hip-firing yahoos with
full-auto weapons versus one marine with a semi-auto, you would have
three dead yahoos with empty magazines every time.
Despite your supposed gun owner status, you *clearly* have no
experience with military arms nor does it seem likely that you know
anything about shooting except perhaps punching paper at the local
range. I've never seen so much inanity and grossly unjustified
opinion packed in such a small number of words.
Joe Dees also wrote:
>Assault weapons are
>designed with military features such as silencers, folding stocks, flash
>suppressors, barrel shrouds and bayonets which are ludicrously unsuited
>for civilian use.
Function, not form is important. Cosmetics are irrelevant.
It just so happens that one of the much maligned "assault weapons",
the M16/AR15, is one of the most intrinsically accurate rifle designs
ever produced. Go to a rifle shooting match some time, look
around, and tell me what you see. When it was first introduced (in
the '60s) a military rack M16 shooting standard ball was as accurate
as most "precision" weapons of the time. To this day, it is still
highly favored by precision and competition shooters, and has largely
replaced everything except custom bolt actions for anything under
600 meters. Grandpa's lever-action will never be able to do 1/2"
groups at 200 meters, but this "assault weapon" can.
People who actually know guns appreciate many of the so-called
"assault weapons" for their own strengths, not because they look
"evil". An SKS is a tough and reliable shooter that is popular for
hunting because it holds up well to field use (quite popular with boar
hunters in particular, probably for that quick follow-up). The AR15 is
the gold-standard for ergonomic design and its extreme precision makes
it popular for target shooters and varmint hunters. These are all
clearly reasonable civilian uses for which the weapons are
particularly well-suited.
As for bayonet lugs, when was the last time anyone was murdered with a
bayonet (outside government sponsored action, of course)? Or
silencers (hint: none)? Barrel shrouds don't even have a function on
anything a person can carry, other than to look cool. Flash suppressors
don't do anything that has any applicability to criminal use (if you think
it does, you don't know what a flash suppressor is for) and falls under the
same category as barrel shrouds. Folding/collapsible stocks are good for
paratroopers and small statured people that can't use a rifle that has a
regular stock because of length-of-pull issues.
(And I was trying to ignore these gun threads...)
It is well-intentioned and poorly educated people like yourself Mr.
Dees, that pave the road to hell. It is too bad you can't see that,
but then those people rarely do.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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