Y’all are out of your mind if you think she didn’t perfectly validly explain the core of her position.
A gun is a tube where things explode, launching pieces of metal, in a process designed to destroy animals, a category for which humans decidedly qualify.
“If it goes boom and kills people, I want it banned.”
That’s it. There’s nothing to nitpick. In fact, there’s nothing to discuss at all.
It’s adorable how every single person defending her has ignored the part where guns don’t fire smaller tubes, and she deliberately chose not to clarify what she meant by “the ones that shoot fastest”.
This is a woman whose literal job is communicating facts effectively.
And when people want to support laws which will influence hundreds of millions of people, people with visibility and influence such as, for instance, a New Yorker factchecker, I’d say precision and clarity is very important.
Also, many guns are designed and built specifically for target and sport shooting, and equating “hunting animals” to “murdering humans/killing in self-defense” is wrong.
Especially since most legal guns aren’t used to harm people at all, and the ones that do harm people are mostly used for suicide, and the ones used for murder usually aren’t even legal in the first place.
Motherfucker, the shape of bullets is entirely besides the point she is making. you seizing on it is itself a confirmation of her point.
And “fires bullets the fastest” obviously refers to semi-autos. Literally, guns that allow you to put the highest volume of shots downrange in the shortest amount of time. She is obviously not talking about muzzle velocity or some weirdo who’s really good with a revolver.
Also, bull the fuck shit. Almost every gun in wide circulation on the planet today, especially the ones used in the majority of crimes, were designed for the sole purpose of facilitating the killing of humans by other humans. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anybody EDCing olympic target rifles, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone trying to ban them.
It is one thing to say that money isn’t good or bad because what you purchase with it is up to the goodness or badness of the person. It’s retarded to say that the purpose of money isn’t to be a store of value or a unit of exchange because some people use coins to drive screws or settle games of chance.
And “fires bullets the fastest” obviously refers to semi-autos. Literally, guns that allow you to put the highest volume of shots downrange in the shortest amount of time.
….please read a book about firearms.
Tell me, exactly and in your own words, why exactly the development of semi-automatic firearms in the beginning of the 20th century was important for warfare. Why did the militaries of the early 20th century adopt them for line infantry? Why did the west phase out the use of bolt action rifles, which often fired larger, more powerful rounds?
They didn’t though. If we want to go for the early 20th century weapons, let’s go for WW2:
As an example, the Mosin Nagant bolt-action rifle (which still finds use today in rebellions and civilian conflicts around the world ‘cause the reds made so many of the damn things) fires 7.62x54R, at a max of 2800 FPS if you handload it, but an average of about 2550 in 29″ rifles, like the Mosin.
Compare it to the semi-automatic Garand, that fires .30-06 Springfield, which can have a speed of 2600 fps 100 yards downrange of the gun while still being weighty enough to penetrate armor, and has 2800 fps at the barrel, standard.
I’m guessing you’re thinking about bolt-action rifles in video games, like the AWP in Counter-strike.
OK, is that your final answer, that semi-automatics were adopted by infantry because they could fire more powerful rounds?
Semi-automatics were adopted by infantry because with the invention of the automatic weapon (Thompson, prototyped as “The Annihilator”) in WW1, a soldier might not have the opportunity to operate the bolt-action on his gun given he missed his first shot. Being able to fire 7 times in sequence without having to operate any sort of action versus having a 3-step half-second process between shots, is an immense and obvious advantage in the eighth of a second that the conflict might happen in. It allows for user inaccuracy, as while you might be fully trained and plan on hitting with your first shot, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Strategically, it places a middle ground between long-range capability and short-range immediacy, and practically, there’s nothing in war that one bullet can do that two bullets can’t. Likewise, when the technology exists as a straight-up upgrade, you take it before your enemy does.
To address your point earlier in the conversation about Semi-autos being designed to put the most amount of rounds downrange at once, that’s also not true. Fully Automatic weapons, like the 1928 model of the Thompson, were capable of putting 600-700 rounds per minute downrange. To put that into perpective, here’s a metronome at that rate:
Semi-automatic weapons require individual trigger pulls for each bullet fired, whereas fully-automatic weapons are capable of unloading their entire magazine with a single trigger pull. For a semi-automatic weapon to fire reliably at this rate means that the operator’s finger would have to pull the trigger of his gun at this speed, while accounting for recoil.
Firing any semi-auto gun of any caliber at this speed is, as you can imagine, incredibly uncomfortable and ill-advised, as you’d almost definitely sprain your finger. If and when you need to fire at this rate, it’s far easier to hold down the trigger.
Would you like for me to explain why we didn’t use only automatic weapons in the early 20th century?
that actually sounds very interesting, yes i’d love to hear more @thej-key
What I’d consider the first man-mobile automatic weapon is “The Annihilator.” The prototype thompson fired .45 acp, which is a pistol cartridge, and was intended for use in clearing out trenches. Unfortunately for it, world war 1 had drawn to a close. It’s the first Sub-machine gun, as while automatic weapons had existed, they were massive and mounted in pillboxes to mow down unfortunate people passing through certain areas within which no man should be. You know, nobody land. Death valley. One of those.
The Thompson, instead, had been an automatic weapon designed for individual soldiers to carry when clearing out trenches. Instead of aiming across long distances and carefully picking off people, it was more of a charge weapon, intended for use within a trench. It was shorter than the other carried guns, lighter than the other automatic weapons, and used smaller and weaker ammo than both of them. This was as a result of sacrificing weight and distance for being able to control the recoil from standing. Instead of having single, accurate shots, you could now sweep a room or a hallway with bullets, and instead of having to train for precise accuracy from 300 yards, you can now just hand a dude a thing at short or medium range, point them at the enemy, and reliably have about 12 rounds in your target, and about 15 in the walls around your target.
‘Cause fuck ‘em.
Unfortunately, this didn’t get much use in the war it was intended for, so instead it went to the civilian market, where it found popularity with what the thompson *is* known for; The Mafia!
Now, the thing is, while rifles like the Garand are really good at large open areas and overlooks, these machine guns are more effective in closed areas like hallways, rooms, and closed urban areas. 300 meters of accuracy don’t matter in a 20 meter long corridor, and all that unnecessary weight and size just means it’s more inconvenient to aim and maneuver quickly in tight circumstances. So you need a shorter barrel, shorter stock, smaller construction, and because you have a smaller gun and still need to manage recoil, now more than ever, you have smaller ammunition. (We compensated for that problem later on with new recoil-compensating training and stances, spring recoil mechanisms in the gun, and in the case of bullpup weapons, moving the mechanism of the gun into the stock)
THUS, THE BIRTH OF THE SUBMACHINE GUN, THE MAN-PORTABLE AUTOMATIC WEAPON.
(The Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) was meant to do this, but with .30-06, but in practice it was used more like an LMG. It sucked in regards to that, as well.)
Cool! Thanks 😊
Because I’m an asshole I think it’s funny that her Twitter photo shows her smoking when smoking has killed more people than BOTH world wars. It also kills more than murder in general in the US let alone gun related murder.
And the interesting thing is, fully automatic guns (both SMGs and LMGs) are less useful even in room clearing than a pistol. Yes even machine pistols like the infamous Uzi do a worse job than a semi-automatic or its cousin the revolver. It was meant as suppressive fire, getting the people in the trench, or later forts to keep their heads down and create chaos to use to your advantage.
Because thanks to Newton’s third law, recoil is a thing and it fucks shots up hard.
the thing is, a gun isn’t a magic wand that makes people dead, there’s a lot of physics at play in the act of firing. specifically, recoil.
recoil isn’t simple “gun goes bang, gun jumps,” it’s all the forces at play, some only barely contained, that cause the weapon to act in the way it does.
not only do you have the mass of the bullet being shoved down the barrel, you have the mass of the bolt and bolt carrier moving backward, then forward. sometimes you have the exhaust gasses being directed somewhere other than straight ahead. this has the effect of the gun being fairly difficult to hold on to, depending on the model. the easiest way to manage the recoil impulses is to just make the weapon itself heavier, giving more mass for the moving chunks of matter to push against, other methods include softening the recoil with buffers, longer travelling parts, or just reducing the cyclic rate so that instead of having to deal with 600 individual impulses per second you’re only dealing with maybe 60 or 120. all of this depends on the needs of the platform.
for example, the PPSH-41, nicknamed the burp gun, had a stupid high fire rate, to the point it was almost impossible for someone to control without a lot of practice, but, with only a quick pull of the trigger, it spat out enough .30 bullets to clear a room, which was its job, really.
the main argument is that guns that shoot fast are easy to kill with, when the reality is just the exact opposite. it requires a skilled gunner to make proper use of any machine gun. it also requires a skilled marksman to be effective with any gun, but machine guns in particular are pretty difficult to use due to their operational nature.
of course, all of this is moot, because “shall not be infringed” is pretty unambiguous.
Yup. I haven’t fired, but holy shit do I know that recoil is a thing and that it takes some training to not have it fuck up shots.
even how you hold a gun affects how it recoils.
and i’m not talking about simple grip, either.
there’s a practice common to novice shooters, called “limp wristing” where you don’t provide enough resistance to the recoiling pistol to ensure the slide cycles all the way, and almost always results in a failure to feed.
anyone who has shot a pistol one-handed knows that they always recoil up and to the left, or in the case of a southpaw, to the right. this is because the mass of your hand is in the way on one side, and there is less mass to stop the moving pistol on the side where there is only fingertips and your thumb.
the simple act of placing your off hand in that empty space to fully enclose the grip is enough to cancel out that left swinging tendency and make the gun only recoil up.
this same principle is the reason for the c-clamp, or Thumb-over-bore grip popularized by the magpul dynamics guys.
by placing your thumb over the barrel, the rifle is recoiling not only against the mass of your body towards the rear, but the mass of your arm above it, forcing it to have to overcome all that mass in order for it to move, which in most cases it simply doesn’t have the force to do so.
newton’s laws of motion apply to everything.
Exactly, but I expect folks thinking it’s like vidya are in the same camp as 100 lb sword idiots.
Moonlit Spires 