Moderator Note
Let’s keep the gun control debate out of GQ, please. Great Debates is over thataway —>
The only reason to use a handgun instead of a rifle are ease of concealment and ease of carry. Rifles are (generally) more accurate, more powerful, and have a higher capacity. Cops and security guards carry handguns because carrying a rifle all day would get tiring and restrict movement. Criminals like handguns because they are easy to conceal. Terrorists in a shooting rampage have no reason to conceal a gun and are not looking to carry them around all day.
I don’t know about terrorist attacks but in general military style rifles are almost never used by people committing murders. If you look at the statistics Hand guns are by far the weapon of choice even if you just look at mass shootings.
Why? Because when you want to kill a bunch of folks you need to get to your killing ground as it were. Getting into a mass gathering area is much more difficult if you’ve got your AK-47 strapped to your back than if you have a pair of pistols in your jacket. Reload time is fairly quick with a pistol and they can be just as powerful as a rife particularly a AR-15. Accuracy isn’t a big factor really. No shooter is stopping and aiming carefully at a distance since they’ve got plenty of targets close up.
If it turns out though that terrorists are using military rifles more often than regular shooters its important to remember that terrorists are humans too. They watch TV and movies and pick up “tips” from those media even if the people in the show are acting stupid, which they commonly are. It’s actually a benefit that Hollywood gets these things wrong so often because it leads to incompetent criminals. (for example holding your pistol “gangster” style completely messes up your aim)
They also have really useful shoulder straps!
The context of the question I was answering in the first place was (paraphrasing) “why so many wounded and not killed with military style rifles?”
And the answer is because a .223 or 7.62x39 are lame assed rounds for reliably killing 100+ lb mammals.
I’d say the reason is that these people know they can’t shoot a pistol for diddly.
Shooting a pistol is about like throwing a rock. For a given amount of practice a typical student could hit a person at about twice the range with the pistol…out to 30yds or so anyway. It is very discouraging at first. I never let someone shoot only a pistol first time out.
I’ve had students hitting bottles at 50yd with a rifle their first time out. Then they bug me about when they can go again.
Consider that policemen land about 10% of the shots they fire from pistols. Sometimes they empty a magazine and don’t land one.
In the evolution of weapons, it started out with the hand cannon (literally, a tiny cannon that you held in your hand) and proceeded from there to matchlock muskets, flintlock muskets, and then the rifle-muskets of the Civil War. The Civil War era rifle-muskets were actually the worst standard infantry weapon ever made as far as wounds went. They made worse wounds than the round ball muskets before them and worse wounds than the cartridge rifles that followed. But their rate of fire was horrible. So from there we went through a period where the emphasis was on increasing the rate of fire. At first you had fairly simple cartridge rifles like the Krag Jorgenson (your basic bolt action rifle). This progressed into semi-automatic rifles like the M1 Garand, then to automatic rifles like the M-14.
From there, the US military started focusing on weapons that were “good enough” as far as stopping power was concerned, but were lighter weight and used smaller and lighter rounds, so that soldiers could carry more ammo and other gear. The M-16 was very controversial at the time since it was made out of plastic (soldiers referred to it as the rifle made by Mattel) and it fired a much less powerful round than the M-14. If you are fighting one-on-one, the the M-14 is obviously a better choice. But if you are fighting army on army, the logistics benefit of the M-16 plays a huge role. You can have more soldiers and more ammo for the same amount of space and weight on your troop and cargo carriers. The US Military still uses the M-16 and its modern variants (like the M4 Carbine) today.
Hunting rifles often use the older military cartridges like the .30-06 used in the M1 Garand or the .308 used by the M-14. These are more powerful than the 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge used by the M-16 and its variants.
Fully automatic assault rifles are currently restricted in the US. When you hear politicians and the press talking about so-called “assault rifle” bans, they aren’t actually talking about assault rifles. What they are talking about are semi-automatic rifles. A full automatic rifle has the capability of firing more than one shot per trigger pull. A semi-automatic rifle fires one shot per trigger pull, but automatically cycles and loads the next round.
When the press starts talking about military style assault rifles, what they usually mean are weapons like the AR-15, which is the civilian version of the M-16 (originally the AR-15 was a military weapon and evolved into the M-16, but these days the term AR-15 tends to refer to the civilian version). Even though the press and politicians like to call them military style assault rifles, they aren’t military weapons and aren’t assault rifles. The AR-15 originally fired the same 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge used by the M-16. These days, there are variants of the AR-15 available in numerous other cartridges.
The other thing that you need to know is the difference between a rifle and a carbine, which is actually very simple. A carbine is just a shortened version of a rifle. The M-4 carbine used by the army is basically a shortened M-16.
Rifles, because of their longer barrel, are more accurate at a distance than a carbine. Rifles are typically designed to be used at distances from 50 yards to a few hundred yards. Carbines aren’t so good at the longer distances, so they are more for 50 to 150 yards or so. In military use, that’s the distance at which most battles are fought,so that’s what they are designed for. A carbine, with its shorter barrel, is lighter, which for the same total weight allows the soldier to carry more other stuff like ammo. Carbines are also better for urban combat, as you are less likely to smack the shorter barrel into doorways and such as you are making your way through buildings.
By comparison, a handgun is more for the 10 to 30 yard range. Handguns also typically fire less powerful rounds, as the recoil from a more powerful round tends to make the handgun much more difficult to use.
Rifles used for deer hunting don’t usually carry a large number of rounds per magazine (if they even have a magazine). Semi-automatic rifles and carbines based on military weapons have different magazines available, some with maybe 20 rounds per magazine but others with up to 50 rounds or more per magazine. I think the highest capacity magazine that you can get for an AR-15 is a 100 round drum magazine. Your typical handgun magazine is more in the 7 to10 round range.
A handgun is very easy to conceal. A carbine is harder to conceal but can be tucked under a coat or hidden in a box. A rifle is even harder to conceal and would require a very long box.
The general rule is never bring a handgun to a rifle fight.
Seems to me you got that exactly backwards.
If I wanted to attack, say, a crowded theater or similar, I’d want to be able to spray the maximum number rounds as fast as possible. And to have a decent chance of hitting what I’m generally pointing at (I won’t dignify what these folks do as aiming). And given that I’m not doing individual head shots, I’d want a lot of damage for each hit, whether it was peripheral or a vital area.
For all of those reasons a high capacity semi-auto carbine is the ideal weapon. IOW what the news media commonly calls a “military-style assault rifle.”
I’d expect 3x the wounded and probably 4x the wound damage / kills from an weakly skilled attacker with a semi-auto AK-47 or M-16 clone versus armed with a handgun, even a high capacity one.
The only advantage the handgun brings is improved concealment before the shooting starts. But in environments where long coats or violin or guitar cases are commonplace or where the shooter can lie in wait for the crowd to come to him, that’s not an advantage that matters.
And that’s what a mass shooting generally becomes when law enforcement shows up. If I wanted to effectively shoot it out with SWAT or militarized patrol police, I’d want something more than a 9mm pistol to counter their M-4s or FN SCARs.
Interesting.
Now, the question that’s really in my mind (though I might be straying out of GQ territory by asking it) is this:
If high-capacity semi-automatic rifles and carbines were unobtainable, would we see fewer attacks of the kind that just happened in California, and/or fewer people killed and wounded in such attacks?
I agree that the question you’re asking seems better suited for IMHO or GD, but…
Taking the current unrest in the West Bank into consideration, maybe both. “Unobtainable” is a fantasy, but “more difficult to obtain” would probably reduce the frequency of gun-involved violence; some of it would morph into knife-involved or vehicle-involved violence.