Also an AR-15 is an assault weapon as opposed to what the military uses, which is called assault rifles. Those are fully automatic and much more powerful.
Assault rifles are already banned and the AR-15's you can buy in gun stores don't fit into that category, unless legislators invent things to be considered military... like "military grips" which is basically a pistol grip. Which often doesn't make the gun any more lethal.
The assault weapon rhetoric is politically defined. A AR-15 is nearly the same weapon as a Mini-14, which just looks like a normal hunting gun. The features that define a 'assault weapon' were just made up from some committee. The stupid thoughts on that are, if you add a bayonet lug to the gun below, it becomes a assault weapon.
In the US, the AR15 used to be (for ten years) an assault weapon. It still is in some states.
If you ask combat veterans of OIF/OEF how often they use anything other than semi auto on issued M4/M16 rifles, you'll find the frequency is almost zero.
3-round burst was fairly commonly used (less than semi, though). Most issued rifles only had safe/semi/burst, not safe/semi/auto. Mainly from vehicles or in room clearing. SAWs have largely replaced the full auto rifle, though.
(actually, I think something like 95% of troops never fired a weapon at all. There were 1% of troops responsible for most of the combat, and then a few more percent who got engaged by IEDs, etc.)
I can think of only two situations where I ever used full-auto on an M4; clearing a trench and clearing bunkers; i.e. suppressive fire. I would absolutely not use full-auto to clear a room. Room clearing requires highly disciplined and discrete fire; hostages, non-combatents, POWs etc. My friends and I would rather take a bullet than wound or kill a non-com.
I was under the impression that 3 round burst was a waste and rarely used. The increased fire rate dramatically reduces accuracy compared to firing three rounds quickly. The army's recent RFP got rid of the 3 round burst requirement:
The big problem with it in the M4 IMO is that it degrades the semi-auto trigger pull.
Firing from vehicles was basically suppression, or very close at a large target from a supported firing position. Contractors were limited to rifles under most contracts, generally (although .30 cal machine guns were allowed in some cases, so the RPK was quite popular), so that's the main reason they used rifles that way rather than what the US Army would do (an M249, M240, or better, M2 or mk19).
The greater argument here that semi auto is adequate for almost all rifle/carbine use, I fully agree with, but there were both US military people and contractors (and most of the indigenous security forces) who used full auto or 3 round burst.
Ah ha! I've heard that, but never gotten confirmation. What I've heard is that on semi-auto mode, the weight of the trigger increases with each pull in a three round cycle.
If true, it again tells us how little the Army cares about individual rifle marksmanship ... which I suppose is another causality of the McNamara DoD regime.
[Military M-16s and M-4s] are fully automatic and much more powerful [than civilian AR-15s].
This is slightly misleading. The military weapons fire the same ammunition: the same bullet, at the same velocity. In terms of kinetic energy of the bullet, the weapons have the same power. The fully-automatic capability of the military weapons simply allows many more shots to be fired in a given amount of time.
"Assault weapon" is a term invented by Brady et al. because they wouldn't be taken seriously if they said "scary black gun". Assault rifle, battle rifle, these terms have meaning. Assault weapon is not a real category.
The term has been attributed to Josh Sugarmann, head of the gun control advocacy group the Violence Policy Center. Going by this quote of his, he likely came up with it to intentionally confuse people who aren't knowledgeable about firearms.
"The semi-automatic weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase that chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons."
Unless you define "power" as rate of fire, in this case as noted elsewhere an option for 3 round bursts, there's absolutely no difference in power. You shouldn't put 5.56 NATO rounds in a .223 chamber, that's likely to result in excessive pressure, but besides that the details matter only to those wanting the most in accuracy.
In fact, not being limited by the Hague convention, we civilians and stateside police can use rounds that are loaded with much more effective expanding bullets.
> In fact, not being limited by the Hague convention, we civilians and stateside police can use rounds that are loaded with much more effective expanding bullets.
That has always really bothered me. I get the point for hunting, having the animal die as fast as possible is good, but I don't buy the argument that they are important for police because they have less penetration power. If we want to reduce the number of people accidentally shot by police, I think we would be better served by training police to actually hit what they shoot at, not giving them bullets that hopefully won't go through as many walls or people.
What if you have to shoot someone and there are "pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders" behind him? I.e. even if they get injured or killed, fewer will die?
Now, that's not likely to happen, i.e. ideally you can follow Rule 4 by changing your angle, but ... well, in the real world your alternative just isn't going to happen. Unless they take personal responsibility (and in anti-gun places like NYC that's very hard since there aren't many places to shoot), most police aren't good shots, don't have to shoot very often, and aren't well trained. At the Connecticut legislative hearing on this, the anti-gun police officer giving testimony had to admit training was on the order of a few hours a year. And then there's fire discipline, you have seen the picture of the pickup truck, wrong model, color and with two Hispanic ladies delivering papers, that was perforated by LAPD cops who were ... concerned that one of the own was hunting them?
However, that's not the main reason for using expanding ammo in self-defense. We, civilians and the police, are not allowed to kill per se, nor is that our objective. If in such a situation, we desperately want to stop someone, and for handguns "stopping power" scales with the diameter of the bullet, including expansion if that occurs, lethality with the number of holes you punch in someone.
For .223/5.56 NATO, Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) rounds have very iffy stopping power (details on request), so using them in self-defense if you have an alternative is a very bad idea.
Either way there are tradeoffs. I would be interested in seeing someone actually work out some numbers.
I figure innocent bystanders who get shot are hit by fewer bullets than the people who are actually being aimed at. Pulling numbers out of my ass, say innocent bystanders that are hit are hit by 1 bullet on average, and crims that are hit are hit by 3 bullets on average.
The questions to me then become:
1) how many innocent bystanders are being killed by those single bullets, and how would that number change if they were FMJ instead?
2) Given the average number of times crims who are shot at are hit, how likely is it that they would still be killed if the police were using FMJ?
I suspect these two factors work out such that FMJ would be slightly more dangerous to police, but vastly safer for the general public despite the increased penetration power. Police are signing up for it, so I am okay with putting them in more danger to keep the public safer; I am sure police unions would throw a fit over that though.
(I think it would also be revealing to examine if perhaps the lower penetration power of fragmenting rounds make police have a more relaxed attitude towards accuracy.)
You should study the history of NYC after they adopted Glocks firing 9 mm. For quite some time they used FMJ, but eventually changed to hollow points despite great political pressure.
The raw facts I've just outlined don't disprove your thesis, but as I understand it the details do. It's also the fact that outside of situations where politics are in play, expanding bullets are the universal choice, all things considered.
Note this includes civilians who carry, there's 7.5 to 8 million as independently estimated last summer by scholar Clayton Cramer and the GAO respectively, plus those who can carry concealed without a license in the handful of states that allow that (Vermont, Alaska, Arizona and Wyoming). Unlike the police, we don't have legal or political protection from accidents, we own every bullet we fire, and a loved one could easily be one of those too close bystanders (or on the other side of a wall or the house, whatever).
Maybe we're wrong, but using hollow point ammo is what almost all of us have decided to do.
Having been through police training, I absolutely agree that better training for police is important, but there are several problems with your argument.
First of all, accurately firing a weapon requires one to relax, breathe slowly, reduce the heart rate, hold still and concentrate. Almost all situations that justify shooting at people involve imminent danger of death to the shooter, the shooter's allies or innocent bystanders. That pressure produces a physical response exactly the opposite of what's required to shoot accurately. Good training can partially compensate, but it's impossible to replicate the psychological and physiological effects of the possibility of imminent death without a significant risk of actual imminent death.
Secondly, non-expanding ammunition will easily penetrate through a person and retain enough power to kill a second person. In most cases, a single bullet could kill three or four people if they were properly aligned. Ideally, the shooter will try to make sure the bullet will stop safely after penetrating the target, but circumstances that require shooting people are rarely ideal. Using bullets that are easier to stop is better for bystanders.
Finally, bullets do a surprisingly bad job of instantly physically incapacitating people. There are a number of cases on record of violent criminals continuing their attempts to murder police officers after being shot multiple times, even after receiving wounds that aren't survivable even with immediate medical treatment. Most people stop fighting when shot for psychological, not physiological reasons; they didn't like being shot and don't want it to happen again, the pain is too severe to continue resisting or they hope that giving up will lead to medical treatment and a better chance of survival. Barring that, there are three ways a bullet can incapacitate a person: damage the brain or spinal cord enough to prevent movement, cause enough blood loss that the brain shuts down, or damage the heart enough that it can't pump blood to the brain. Expanding bullets have a higher probability of causing these effects than non-expanding bullets.
Fair point about the difference between immediately incapacitating and unsurvivable. I think the different amounts of danger presented to a bystander that is only hit once is still worth at least investigating though.
I think it is definitely worth considering if reliance on expanding rounds that are not perceived to penetrate has an effect on the tendency to take risks in situations where there are people behind the target. As I see it, considering the number of shots often fired by police and their poor accuracy, it doesn't really matter that the rounds won't go through multiple people. The more accurate police are, the more fragmenting rounds start to seem sensible to me.
Being concerned about bullets going through badguys and hitting innocents or hitting multiple innocents in a row instead of just one seems like... premature optimization.
It's worth looking at. The standard introduced by the FBI and used by many law enforcement agencies is 12-14" of penetration. That's enough to penetrate most people front to back and still be dangerous to someone behind them. It would be unreasonable for anyone in law enforcement to assume that such bullets don't present a risk to bystanders. If anyone does believe that, they need different training.
The issue here, which was introduced by the FBI after their infamous 1986 Miami shootout, is that at worst case you have to shoot through someone's arm and then penetrate to the vitals (especially heart). Obviously that's going to over-penetrate front to back, and it's occurred to me the worst case that way is if you only hit a lung, plus of course whatever happens with the ribs. I would expect most self-defense expanding rounds to go right through with a lot of retained energy depending on what happens around the ribs.
From Wikipedia on the FBI shootout, matching my memory of various accounts:
"As Platt climbed out of the passenger side car window, one of Dove's 9 mm rounds hit his right upper arm and went on to penetrate his chest, stopping an inch away from his heart. The autopsy found Platt’s right lung was collapsed and his chest cavity contained 1.3 liters of blood, suggesting damage to the main blood vessels of the right lung. Of his many gunshot wounds, this first was the primary injury responsible for Platt’s eventual death."
He was functional for quite some time after that, including killing the two agents who died in the shootout. Here's some illuminating details from the end of that section:
"[...] The bullet penetrated Platt's chest and bruised the spinal cord, ending the gunfight.
The shootout involved ten people: two suspects and eight FBI agents. Of the ten, only one, Special Agent Manauzzi, did not fire any shots (firearm thrown from car in initial collision), while only one, Special Agent Risner, was able to emerge from the battle without a wound. The incident lasted under five minutes yet approximately 145 shots were exchanged.
Toxicology tests showed that the abilities of Platt and Matix to fight through multiple traumatic gunshot wounds and continue to battle and attempt to escape were not achieved through any chemical means. Both of their bodies were drug-free at the time of their deaths."
Yikes. And there are more incidents like this one.
Assault rifles are already banned and the AR-15's you can buy in gun stores don't fit into that category, unless legislators invent things to be considered military... like "military grips" which is basically a pistol grip. Which often doesn't make the gun any more lethal.