Jay wrote:
I really don't want to have this argument again...
There's nothing special about 'assault weapons'. They, for some reason, strike fear in peoples hearts but that's simply due to ignorance and emotion. The M-16 platform that the AR-15 is based on fires a .223 round. This round was selected by the military for two reasons: 1) the bullet loses little accuracy and inertia out to ranges of 300-400 meters and 2) it's dirt cheap to produce compared to larger caliber rounds. If the attacker had used a round that actually had stopping power, rather than the wounding power of a .223/5.56mm round, many more than 12 people would've died. Ask any hunter and they will tell you that the only real use for a rifle firing a round of that size is to hunt small game like rabbits or the occasional coyote. Anything larger than that and the animal will probably not go down, and if it does, it means miles of following a blood trail before you find the animal. At the range he was using the weapon at, he would've been better served simply using two pistols.
The M-16/AR-15 is largely a shitty platform used because it's a very easy to use and user friendly system. It's cheap to build, the ammo is cheap to manufacture, and it's saving grace is that it is generally easy for novices to hit the targets they aim at from range. That's it. The same largely goes for any other military 'assault weapon' in the world except for perhaps the AK-47 which trades accuracy and ease of use for volume and stopping power. I really don't want to speculate about what I would use in a situation like his, because fuck, that's morbid, but I can say that there are about a thousand or so rifles I would prefer to use over an M-16/AR-15 that would perform better. Obsessing over the fact that the weapon is used by military's is pure silliness.
I am several pages behind, but reading up, so sorry if this is behind. I wanted to add something to this:
Contrary to popular belief (because, you know, it
is a gun and all) the M16/.223/5.56 was not designed to kill people. It also was not simply developed en masse because it was cheap. It had a designed purpose. To wound. If you go find the original design requests and initial design notes (assuming they are out there... I had a professor who's dad helped design it and he had copies of a lot of these notes/requests/conversations), you would see that they specifically requested it for this purpose.
The idea was: If you kill an enemy soldier, he falls and his buddies move on. If you
wound an enemy soldier, it takes him out of the fight, plus two of his buddies to drag him to safety, plus attrition as several people are now required to transport and treat him.
So with that being said, it isn't a great choice for either personal defense or for killing lots of people.
Now here is the problem: If you start limiting the weapons that are great are killing people, then you start limiting the weapons that are great at stopping people in defense.
