As the owner of a Mini-14--which fires .223 rounds--I think this comment is disingenuous. There are certainly rifles that fire more powerful rounds. But they are typically heavier, more unwieldy, and are bolt action and thus have a lower rate of fire.
Even a stock "hunting rifle"-type Mini-14 can shoot 10+ high powered rounds accurately in a very short length of time. With a pistol grip, an amateur could easily shoot and kill a bunch of people with one, essentially combining the ease of use of a pistol with the power of a long gun.
Common sense dictates that a AR-type rifle with a pistol grip and large capacity magazine is far more deadly for killing people than a technically more powerful .308 rifle.
> ease of use of a pistol with the power of a long gun
Tell me you have near zero experience with pistols or long guns without actually saying it. XD
> common sense
No. You’re inconsistent in your comparison: they make AR pattern rifles in .308. A .308 is more destructive than a .223. The military adopted .223/5.56 for logistic reasons, and you’ll find plenty of debate in the military about the inadequacy of the .223 round both in terms of effective range and penetration. This balancing act is a debate in the military going back ages. I can show you Ordnance Dept. memoranda from over a hundred years ago where this exact balancing act was being debated.
People like the AR pattern (in any caliber) because it’s highly customizable, made of modern durable materials, and is easy to maintain. That the military adopted the pattern for the same reasons shouldn’t come as a surprise. A good design sells itself.
Today, if you want a semi-auto .223 you’d be nuts to buy a mini-14 instead of an AR unless you’re into the mini for aesthetic or collector sentiments (which are valid reasons). But with the mini you’re getting a rifle you’d need to put a lot of custom work into to free float the barrel, you’d always be worried about protecting that wood stock and metal finish, and you’d find limited (by comparison) after-market mods. Also, you’d lose so many options for caliber interchangeability that you get with an AR. Hell, they even make a crossbow upper for the AR. Try turning your mini into a crossbow. :D the AR pattern is the most popular rifle for very good reasons and not because it’s somehow “more deadly” than another semi-auto of the same caliber.
> Tell me you have near zero experience with pistols or long guns without actually saying it. XD
This is a childish comment I would expect in a Reddit thread. I've gone to the range a number of times with my firearm, and more importantly, I've taken friends who've never shot anything before. Shooting a stock Mini-14 is incredibly easy for even a first timer. But, for a first timer, it still requires sitting and resting the barrel on something to get decent control.
A pistol grip makes it much easier to accurately shoot multiple rounds from a semi-automatic, especially free standing. That's been my experience and the experience of those I've brought to the range with me.
And that's where you have completely missed the point. This thread isn't about which gun can beat up which in a fight. It's about whether semi-automatics like the AR-15 enable novices to easily kill large numbers of civilians. The answer is obviously yes.
> A pistol grip makes it much easier to accurately shoot multiple rounds from a semi-automatic
In the military they require you fire from the hip a long gun and hit your target multiple times within a time limit before qualifying. There was no pistol grip.
We're not talking about soldiers with military training here. We're talking about untrained criminals, or people with mental illness, being able to easily shoot and kill a large number of civilians. (i.e. people without body armor, etc.)
Despite the fact that Republicans make fun of the arbitrary nature of what constitutes an "assault rifle"--semi-automatic fire, large capacity removable magazines, pistol grips, etc.--those qualities do make it easier for untrained people to quickly kill a bunch of people.
if they make it easier for untrained people to kill, then how come the military doesn’t use them when training? How come you can still find service weapons without pistol grips? The argument is that pistol grips don’t in fact make it easier it makes it more accurate. We don’t want less accurate, this argument wanting less accuracy was already tried in court and failed muster.
Also if you read the regulations why does it state where the location of the webbing of the thumb need to be if the important part is no pistol grip? In reality they are trying to ban AR pattern rifles, not weapons with pistol grips.
Everything else you mentioned makes the gun easier to operate for both criminals and law abiding citizens. Why do the minority get to ruin things for the exhaustively overwhelming majority when these rifles with these characteristics aren't even the problem?
What military are you talking about? I'm unaware of this being used by the any of the US branches since it's incredibly inaccurate compared to either prone firing, kneeling, or standing.
In fact, the only place I've ever seen people firing from the hip are Schwarzenegger and Stallone movies...
Navy, and the point of the drill is to show you taking a quick shot from the hip is better than delaying to aim. It’s also quite a lot more accurate than one would believe, which is another point of the drill.
USN doesn't train M16 usage in basic; they use a shotgun instead. They DO train you to fire it from the hip, but firing a shotgun from the hip is very different than firing an auto/semi-automatic rifle from the hip.
Yup, a shotgun. And difficulty hitting your target depends on what your loaded with (slug or shot shell). And you’ll hit your target just the same with a rifle. Will you be as accurate as aiming down the sights? Certainly not. Will you hit your target center mass? Oh yea unless your eye hand coordination is real off. And the original argument was that pistol grips make you more accurate than firing a weapon without. There’s still rifles and other long guns without pistol grips used in service. If this were true of pistol grips then we’d retire these guns out of national security.
Your statements just illustrate an off-hand lack of exposure/knowledge is all.
The mini-14 is patterned off of an actual full-auto military service rifle (with no pistol grip, fwiw), the M14, to sell to the civilian market. This is different than the AR, which was sold to civilians years before the military adopted a similarly patterned service rifle. So if we're talking about the evils of modeling rifles after full-auto military versions, your mini-14 is carrying more moral baggage than the AR. I think the M14 is still in service or was until very recently in the ME, again as a select fire weapon with no pistol grip.
So for small arms, I think the pistol grip matters far less than you're portraying it to in your comments. While valuable for control in a crew-served full auto, it really has two more "pedestrian" advantages in an individual rifle. It allows the receiver to transfer force in a more direct line to the shooter's shoulder and avoid/minimize the structurally weak point of the "dip" in the traditional stock's neck between the receiver and the butt. This makes the rifle far more durable and not coincidentally, cheaper to fashion. It also minimizes physical contact with the rifle along the bore axis which is valuable for aimed shots. You can basically fire the rifle with only the finger on the trigger and a little bit of thumb if that, with no danger of exerting downward or lateral pressure on the stock. Precision rifles in .300 WIN MAG, 338L and higher also use a pistol grip and it's not there because it helps them "spray and pray".
Does it help someone with a semi-auto rifle have more control than not when firing rapidly at moving targets (whether civilians, military people, or ducks)? I don't think someone who's trying to rapid fire with a semi-auto is going to notice one way or another, honestly. Guns designed specifically for off-the-cuff instinctive shooting of multiple moving targets in succession notably have never adopted the pistol grip (think field, double trap, and skeet shotguns).
You move from talking about the advantage of the pistol grip to just asking if semi-autos broadly "enable novices to easily kill large numbers of civilians". Not sure why it matters whether the targets are civilians or not for this purely functional question aside from the obvious appeal to emotion. Semi-autos do allow more rapid fire than other breech or muzzle loader designs, though I've seen people fire lever actions faster than you or I could fire a semi-auto but they definitely aren't novices. Kind of comes back to the question, though - if all semi-autos do this, why single out the AR patterned rifle? You brought up the comparison to the mini-14 suggesting there was something about the AR that enabled novices that wasn't present in your mini. I'm just telling you that that's not the case. To say the pistol grip matters all that much on either of these rifles is a hard speculative argument to make convincingly.
> Not sure why it matters whether the targets are civilians or not
It matters because civilians don't wear body armor. The .223 round has low enough recoil to be easy to control (vs .308, for example) while powerful enough to grievously harm or kill someone (quick Googling shows it has 2-3x more energy than a 9mm).
> I've seen people fire lever actions faster than you or I could fire a semi-auto
Rate of fire is only part of it. There's also the number of rounds the weapon can carry and how quickly you can reload. You're clearly more of an expert than I am, so I'll ask sincerely: Are there any lever action rifles that carry 20 or 30 rounds at a time? How does the time to reload compare to reloading a magazine?
If someone with a lot of professional training wanted to kill a bunch of people, they could probably do it with just about any firearm. And you can still have a mass shooting with "just" a 9mm pistol, as happened at UVA in 2017, where 32 people were killed and 17 more were injured.
But if a random criminal or nutjob wanted to do it, they'd be best served with an AR-type weapon with a few large capacity magazines. That's been the choice for the gunman in the Sandy Hook school shooting (27 killed, 2 injured), the Stoneman Douglas school shooting (17 killed, 17 injured), the Sutherland Springs church shooting (27 killed, 22 injured), etc.
> It matters because civilians don't wear body armor
Neither do ducks. Your remark about "civilians" was made in a sentence specifically about rate of fire.
> vs .308
Frankly, I'm not really sure where you're headed with the comparison of these rounds - neither are 'hard to control' in a semi-auto. You make too much of this. At the end of the day, both have been deployed broadly by militaries as infantry service weapons. Variants of the same action designs are widely available in both calibers. That the US military is presently using .223 widely should not be considered an endorsement of suitability without an acknowledgement that there are competing interests driving that standard that have nothing to do with terminal ballistics.
The original comment you responded to echoes more articulate concerns made in the shooting community that if gun control interests get traction for bans and further regulation by painting the .223 as somehow unusually deadly (when it's really rather mediocre - dare I say, lower end - insofar as intermediate cartridges are concerned), the arguments for turning their energy to anything over .224 write themselves. For if you restrict .223, why allowing 7.62? It penetrates better, packs more energy at the same ranges, is used by the military, private pyle shot himself with one, etc.". By any measure, .308 is a more high powered round than .223. It's silly to be painting .223 as an unusually high-power round - as they do - and it's not accurate to excuse this is just short-hand for an amalgamation of concerns with action design, rifle color, mag capacity, plastic grips, etc. None of those factors are unique to the caliber.
> lever actions
The statement about a lever action being shot quickly was that it does take an expert to mimic the rates of fire possible on semi-autos. If you agree with this then I'm not sure we need to go searching (or inventing) new things to litigate on the lever action front.
> random nutjob [would be] best served with an AR-type weapon
Back to platform rather than caliber. I'm not sure random nutjob gives a crap about the best weapon. Random nutjob has been shown to research his predecessors, mimic predecessors, and to use what's available -- even when stealing/murdering to get what they need. I'm fairly certain there are some biases in that decision making process for the rifle used, when used. If the Stoner design weren't as popular as it is, I'm quite certain we'd be seeing more mini-14s and SKS/AK platforms being used.
Yup--doing things the way the military does them doesn't make you someone interested in killing. The military goes to a *lot* of effort to design things to do the job well, you can be pretty sure any bit of equipment the military uses will be good at it's job. It may be overengineered for civilian use (for example, the infamous toilet seats. Civilians don't care if their toilets throw splinters or make toxic smoke when they take battle damage, bu if it's going on a combat aircraft the military does care), but it won't be bad at it's job.
But they are typically heavier, more unwieldy, and are bolt action and thus have a lower rate of fire.
It's a continuum though. Go up in ballistic power from .223 only a little bit and you still find plenty of lightweight semi-auto rifles. And you can certainly find semi-autos all the way to at least 7mm Remington Mangum.
With a pistol grip, an amateur could easily shoot and kill a bunch of people with one,
Personally I have a lot of doubt about how much difference a pistol grip actually makes, but I could be convinced if anybody has researched that and has some evidence.
with a pistol grip and large capacity magazine is far more deadly for killing
A skilled operator can change magazines so quickly that I feel like magazine capacity is almost a moot point. To me the real distinction is binary "has a detachable magazine" or "does not have a detachable magazine."
Of course, I suppose in the context of how much damage an unskilled operator can do, then yes, a larger magazine is more "deadly" in a sense. But large magazines are not specific to the AR series. Even if the original manufacturer doesn't provide them, there's little reason in principle that someone else can't manufacture a higher capacity magazine for any rifle that uses detachable magazines.
The kid in CT that murdered his own mother, stole her guns and killed all the students was dropping half-full mags and reloading. IIRC, law enforcement interpreted this behavior as mirroring his FPS “training”. That would seem to indicate capacity didn’t matter as much as simply having a detachable mag. The guy that shot up that Batman theater in CO or wherever brought in a 50 or 100 rnd drum mag (IIRC) and had it jam on him (as they do).
Exactly. We have a total of two mass shootings where magazine capacity had *any* relevance. One guy got jumped while "reloading"--but since his second magazine was damaged and wouldn't feed that's not really of much relevance--from a practical standpoint he was out of ammo. If he had smaller mags that might actually have increased the death toll because a dinged mag would have removed less of his ammo.
The second is the Las Vegas case--and in that case he had a ton of guns, mostly he was switching guns rather than reloading.
Detachable or not is the only meaningful distinction.
Even a stock "hunting rifle"-type Mini-14 can shoot 10+ high powered rounds accurately in a very short length of time. With a pistol grip, an amateur could easily shoot and kill a bunch of people with one, essentially combining the ease of use of a pistol with the power of a long gun.
Common sense dictates that a AR-type rifle with a pistol grip and large capacity magazine is far more deadly for killing people than a technically more powerful .308 rifle.