Guest post: The AR-style rifle

The Other Whitey contributes this;

In the wake of the recent and ghastly events in Broward County, Florida, we have once again been subjected to the inevitable wave of finger-pointing, strawmanning, and cries for gun control. Politicians, media personalities, activists, and attention whores are going on ad nauseam, blaming the NRA, the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and every American gun owner for the actions of a bloodthirsty psychopath who slipped through the NICS background check process because the school and local authorities never bothered to log his troubling behavior into the system. These arguments, attacking the Second Amendment in general and the AR-15 rifle in particular, reveal a remarkable level of ignorance.

One of the most common refrains is that the AR-15 “is a weapon of war, designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.” Is that true in any way? No, and that claim indicates that the people making it have no idea of how wars are fought. They make it sound as if Eugene Stoner was sitting around one day and thinking to himself, “How can I make a gun that’s perfect for shooting a crowd of people just standing around?” i.e. “How can I make a gun that’s perfect for a mass murderer?” Yes, he did envision the design as becoming an infantry combat rifle. However, infantry combat hasn’t involved shooting into crowds of people since the American Civil War, after which infantry stopped lining up in crowds out in the open. No, soldiers of today—and the last 150 years—utilize cover, concealment, and fire&maneuver tactics to avoid being shot, while trying to accurately shoot an enemy who is doing the same thing. So, NO, the AR-15 is not, in fact, “designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible.” It is in fact designed to be a rifle that can easily and reliably be used to put accurate fire on one target at a time. There are very, very few firearms which were designed with “kill as many as possible as quickly as possible” as their driving philosophy, all of which date to the 1800s, when Napoleonic massed formations were the norm. The original Gatling Gun and Maxim Machine Gun are examples of this type of weapon, and it was because of these weapons that Napoleonic formations were giving way to skirmishers and trench warfare before the Civil War ended.
Without the other guys helpfully lining up in neat, orderly rows to get shot, that design philosophy didn’t make sense for infantry rifles. Instead, their design focused on accuracy, reliability, and ease of use. They were—and still are—designed as much to keep their users alive as to kill the enemy. This was the purpose of repeating rifles with tubular magazines, for internal box magazines loaded by chargers/stripper clips, and eventually detachable box magazines: outgun the enemy so he can’t do the same to you. This is because when you get right down to it, infantry combat for the last 150 years basically boils down to rifle duels between infantrymen. Sure, that’s a major simplification of something quite complex, as there’s suppression fire, artillery, air support, grenades, and whatnot, but the essential principle is to shoot the other guy so he can’t shoot you. So once again, the AR-15 family of rifles are designed to engage one target at a time, and do so accurately and reliably. The military derivatives of the AR-15 family do indeed have some kind of full-automatic capability, but full-automatic fire is badly misunderstood. Hollywood loves to depict crowds of bad (or good) guys being cut down by spraying bullets on full-auto at long range, or the scenery being sprayed with lead while the hero runs by, but that doesn’t work very well in real life with a rifle. It works with a machine gun, but the AR-15 is not a machine gun. A machine gun is a specialized heavy weapon used in a supporting role (frequently emplaced). A rifle is the weapon that’s issued to your basic infantryman. Around WWII, the major superpowers were in love with the idea of making a rifle with a machine gun’s firepower, but that idea proved to be impractical, as rifles are simply to light to be controllable in full-auto. Ammunition is wasted as the muzzle jumps uncontrollably, with bullets going God-knows-where. Even the M16, firing its small-caliber rounds with its compensated muzzle and recoil buffer system, is far too imprecise in full-automatic to be useful at the ranges at which combat usually occurs. This is why most of the M16s and M4s used by the military are limited to three-round bursts of full-automatic fire. Firing in bursts is useful in close-quarters fighting, where survival can depend on split-second reactions that may not allow enough time to aim the weapon as precisely as one would like.

So how about the AR-15 being a “weapon of war?” Well, that depends on which member of the AR-15 family of rifles you’re talking about. The XM16, XM16E1, M16, M16A1, M16A2, M16A3, and M16A4 could rightly be described as such, having been issued to the United States military and those of our allies in numerous conflicts since 1962. The same could be said of the XM177, XM177E1, GAU-5, M4, and M4A1 carbines for the same reason. These weapons also possess full-automatic, or at least burst, capability, which is not legally available to the overwhelming majority of civilian gun owners. A civilian AR-15 is only capable of semiautomatic fire: pulling the trigger fires a single round, cycles the bolt, and chambers the next round from the magazine, but DOES NOT fire that next round. So what is the real difference between the civilian semiautomatic AR-15 and the military full-automatic-capable M16 or M4? After all, they share most of the same parts! But the military components that give the M16 and M4 full-auto capability will not fit in a civilian AR-15 receiver. Besides, let’s look at a few examples of some other things that are, by definition, “weapons of war:” the M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle, the Lee-Enfield family of bolt-action rifles, the Colt M1873 “Peacemaker” single-action revolver seen in every western movie ever made, the Springfield M1861 .58-caliber muzzleloading percussion rifle (loaded with black powder) that equipped the Union Army at Gettysburg, the crossbow, the recurve bow, the longbow, the javelin, and the shotput that high school students compete with in Track & Field events. Human hands also meet that definition.

For the final part of this long-winded rant, let’s address the fallacy that the Founders of the United States of America who wrote its Constitution and attached Bill of Rights could never have imagined repeating weapons with a high rate of fire. There were in fact dozens of gun designs capable of some kind of rapid fire that were in production at the time, were widely-known, and were in use by private owners (including some of the Founders themselves) in the original 13 states. A simple Google search can find a wealth of information on this topic. The late 18th Century was a time of innovation, as such contrivances as the cotton gin, the steam engine, the first functional electric battery, and dozens of other technological marvels were rapidly changing the world. Additionally, many of those men, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were inventors who literally specialized in thinking of things nobody had thought of before. The idea that men who were envisioning vehicles that didn’t require draft animals to pull them, “candles” that ran on gas or electricity rather than a potentially-dangerous burning wick, or corrective lenses for people with poor eyesight would be bound to the idea that firearms would never be anything more than single-shot muzzleloading flintlocks charged with loose black powder is ridiculous. Both the breechloading firearm and the idea of fast-loading cartridge ammunition predated Leonardo da Vinci (who, incidentally, is widely believed to have designed, built, and used the first sniper rifle), even if the technology hadn’t yet matured enough to produce modern metallic cartridges (though that development wasn’t even fifty years away), preloaded paper cartridges which drastically reduced the time and skill needed to reload a muzzleloading gun had been in common use for centuries, and multi-shot revolvers were invented in Germany in the 1580s. All of these technologies were well-known to the men who wrote the Bill of Rights.

The gun control lobby has been using fake and/or obfuscated numbers and statistics, accused people and organizations of responsibility for things that they didn’t do and had nothing to do with, and misrepresented numerous facts. My question to the activists, media, and the rest of those screaming for gun bans is this: if you are right, then why do you have to lie to support your position?

Category: Guns