I dunno..

[docwebster]

Maybe it's the exposure to all that gunpowder?

Jeff Cooper On Inner-City Violence:
"…the consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition."
Cooper's Corner, Guns and Ammo

Ted Nugent on South Africans:
"Apartheid isn't that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man. I mean that with no disrespect. I say that with great respect. I love them because I'm one of them. They are still people of the earth, but they are different. They still
put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands … These are different people. (Me: I dunno, Ted, sounds like a pretty typical Aerosmith tour to me) You give 'em toothpaste, they fucking eat it ... I hope they don't become civilized. They're way ahead of the game."
--Detroit Free Press Magazine

Ted Nugent on homosexuality:
A "despicable act" performed by "guys that have sex with each other's anal cavities."
--Hannity and Colmes

Marion Hammer on police-maintained databases of gun buyers:
"We don't want government to know who has the guns. If the government knows who has guns and where to find them, they can ban them and then confiscate them."
--Miami Herald

"And Commander XOgswsk from the planet Feelldbub will sneak into our homes and eat our brains and steal all the pretty neon twinkies that go boing boing boing all night long and oh god where's my medication?" Hammer did NOT go on to say.

Comments

Re: Unbelievable

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Permit me to address a misconception:

Assault rifles are built to kill.

Actually, this may surprise you, but you are precisely wrong in that. Which is to say, your belief is not only wrong, it's actually the opposite of the truth. Assault rifles -- TRUE assault rifles -- were designed to wound, not to kill.

You see, one of the insights that led to the development of 'assault rifles', firing reduced-power cartridges (as most of them do), is that it is, from a military standpoint, better to wound your enemy than to kill him. Every time you kill a member of an opposing force, you reduce your enemy's effective strength by one. But wound him instead, and now your enemy has to leave another man behind to look after that wounded man, so each man you wound reduces his strength by two. Plus, he's now got to spare resources to medevac that man, and build and staff a field hospital to treat him. Wounding one of your enemy's men costs him MUCH more resources than merely killing one.

They have no other purpose. That's not necessarily true of other guns.

Well, in the first place, if your assumption about 'assault weapons' were true, it would be no less true of any other type of firearm. In the second place, it's actually considerably more true of, for example, a hunting rifle, the goal of which is not only to kill what you're shooting at, but wherever possible to kill it as instantly as possible with a single shot.

Historically, with certain exceptions (specialized target firearms, line-throwing guns, assault rifles), the primary purpose of all firearms is indeed to kill things. As you said, a gun is a tool, and it's a tool for killing.
That said, if all you want to do is scare away an attacker (which, frankly, is the first choice of just about anyone who carries a gun for defence), isn't that goal most likely to succeed if you have the scariest-looking weapon possible? The more overwhelming and obvious your firepower advantage, the less likely you'll actually have to unleash it. The armed intruder who might brazen it out against a .22 revolver is very much less likely to fancy his chances against, say, an Uzi submachinegun.

(NOTE: This is not to say that I think a semi-automatic rifle is a good personal defense weapon. It isn't. It's too unwieldy, too slow to aim as such short ranges, and too likely by far to overpenetrate and hit someone two or three houses away. A pump shotgun is a much better choice. Not only is it easier to aim and much less likely to penetrate a wall, but that's a hell of a big scary hole in the end, and Hollywood has made the SHA-CHINK of the slide on a pump-action 12-guage a sufficiently widely-recognized sound that just racking the slide should be enough to loosen any ne'er-do-well's anal sphincter. My first wife once broke up a domestic-violence situation in exactly this manner without having to fire a shot.)

Re: Unbelievable

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Actually, this may surprise you, but you are precisely wrong in that. Which is to say, your belief is not only wrong, it's actually the opposite of the truth. Assault rifles -- TRUE assault rifles -- were designed to wound, not to kill.

Utter myth. A wounded man is still capable of killing you.

Anyway, the M-193 5.56mm ball round actually is deadlier than a heavier round, according to studies. A heavy round like a 7.62mmN will punch through, leave a clean wound channel. A 5.56mmN will bounce around in soft tissue.

That being said, the point of any firearm is to kill. rats to elephants, the only point of a firearm is to drive bits of metal into a living object at high speed.

Re: Unbelievable

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The M16 is a third-generation assault rifle. I may not have made it sufficiently clear that I was talking about the original development of assault rifles, i.e the first generation German weapons developed late in WW2 (the MP43, MP44, StG44, and StG45[m] and StG45[w]). The key design insight made by Paul Mauser Waffenfabrik and Carl Walther Waffenfabrik when designing these weapons was that the 7.92mm Infanterie Patrone was not only more powerful than necessary, but more powerful than desirable. Development of a smaller, less powerful cartridge (the 7.92mm Infanterie Patrone Kurz) would have three benefits: It would allow the weapon to be more controllable in full-automatic fire, it would enable the infantryman to carry more ammunition to support the high rate of fire of a fully-automatic weapon, and it would be more likely to wound, rather than kill, enemy troops. This was indeed a very calculated decision; it was felt that leaving large numbers of wounded troops would force the enemy (specifically the Russians, as these new weapons were deployed almost entirely on the Eastern front) to either leave men behind to take care of their wounded, or force them to abandon their wounded to die, with attendant effects upon morale. Either way, the expected effect was a reduction in the combat effectiveness of enemy troops in the field, be it from attrition of their combat-effective numbers or from lowering of morale.

Granted, yes, a wounded man may well still be perfectly capable of killing you. A man wounded in the arm or leg, be he wounded with a K-98, an StG45[m], or an M16, may very well be still in the fight to some extent. On the other hand, a gut-shot trooper or one with a sucking chest wound is pretty much out of the fight, regardless of whether he got his wound from a shell fragment, a rifle, or a pungi stick. The MP43/44 and StG44/45 were intended to have a significantly higher probability than the K98 of leaving such men wounded rather than killing them outright.

The M16 is a special case. As you probably know, in its first generation the original 55-grain bullet was badly understabilized, and had a nasty tendency to tumble, producing massive wound cavities. I seem to recall that the bullet also had a nasty tendency to break in half after impact. Both of these effects were unplanned, and I'm sure you're aware the round has been redesigned several times to reduce this undesired "excess lethality", culminating in the current 69-grain bullet based on the Belgian SS109 NATO loading (the M193 ball you mention, iirc).

As for studies, well, I've seen studies going both ways on that. I think it largely depends who does the study, what methodology they use, and what they're trying to show with the study. Remember, though, that the 5.56mm round is a high-velocity microcaliber round, very different in its external and terminal ballistics from the .30-caliber intermediate rounds used in the first generation of assault rifles, the late-WW2 German designs, and the second generation, the Kalashnikov and its various spin-offs.

Full-caliber rifles such as the M14, the AR10, the FN FAL, the Heckler and Koch G3, and the SiG StG57, SG510 and SG542 properly aren't true assault rifles at all, and should more correctly be considered selective-fire battle rifles. So they really shouldn't enter into this discussion.