Jay wrote:
I know that a rifle has a much higher muzzle velocity than a handgun, but I'm talking about stopping power. At close range, a .223 round will require multiple wounds in order to put someone down. At that speed, and with that cross sectional area, the bullet just goes right through the victim. At longer range, the .223 round will cause more grievous wounds because, as the bullet slows, it's more likely to tumble on impact. Ask pretty much anyone that has been in a combat situation and they will tell you that at extreme close quarters, a .45 cal is preferable. That, or a weapon on burst where you get multiple impacts, or fully automatic. A single shot .223 rifle is like trying to use a pipe wrench to disconnect the battery cable on your car, it can be done, but the tool simply isn't meant for the task.
Much of that is a quirk of the military mandating a cartridge which can penetrate armour at 600m, for a rifle not really intended for use beyond 300m, both of which are issued to troops for use in urban warfare at ranges rarely above 100m.
I don't know, I see many complaints about the M4 not having the muzzle velocity to be useful and the M16 having too much muzzle velocity.
Comparing like for like in a different way then, and a scenario maybe more likely for a civilian spree shooter who puts a bit of thought into it, 9mm softpoint vs .223 softpoint at point-blank range. The .223 is way ahead. You'd need .44magnum softpoint to be close.
A .223 semi-auto rifle is about as easy to shoot as a super-soaker, has the wallop of a .44 magnum and the capacity and rate of fire of a paintball gun.
Letting 18yr-olds fresh out of homeschool buy something like that no questions asked and no training is madness.
Pretty much all of the people I've talked to that are in favor of gun restrictions/bans don't know the difference between semi-automatic and automatic (in fact, I believe in GB that they call semi-automatic weapons automatic which escalates the confusion), and think they are the same thing. Our left-leaning media does a very good job obscuring the difference between the two while pounding on that fear button. Or you have people like the Australians who read somewhere that 'assault rifles' are easily converted to automatic, nevermind that you need a machine shop to do so, and that if you possessed a machine shop you could fabricate your own automatic weapon without a whole lot of effort...
'Semi-automatic' is a relatively new term.
Historically any firearm which rechambers a round has been called an 'Automatic', and fully automatic weapons called 'machine-guns', not just in the UK. For example the 1911 pistol
wiki wrote:
The M1911 is still carried by some U.S. forces. Its formal designation as of 1940 was Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911 for the original Model of 1911 or Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911A1 for the M1911A1, adopted in 1924. The designation changed to Pistol, Caliber .45, Automatic, M1911A1
Yo don't need a machine shop, just a file and a few other hand tools and patience if you know what you're doing.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2013-01-22 00:18:42)