They have all the funds they want as long as they dont *advocate or promote gun control. *They can just state the facts and make real scientific studies. "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
If true then you should know this, so I’m equally baffled and questioning your narrative. We are talking about a shooter firing from over 200 yards. In your experience in the military, did you EVER see anyone fire on full auto (that wasn’t firing to suppress…which is the answer to your question about why they have full auto) but actually trying to hit anything? Also, in your military experience, did you ever fire or see someone fire a semi-automatic? What rate of fire could they maintain?
Rate of fire is all well and good if you hit what you are shooting at. A high rate of fire with something like I saw in that video or a full automatic weapon is going to miss at anything more than CQC ranges and is good for nothing more than suppressive fire. To hit targets you need aimed fire. And a semi-automatic could perform as well or better to what this guy did in Vegas, while being completely and unequivocally legal to any regulations that could or would be passed in the US. Which is my point.
Again, look at the numbers. If you REALLY are ex-military (and weren’t a file clerk or in some other REMF role), tell me…could someone with a semi-automatic weapon firing into a crowd of 22,000 not hit 500 people in 9 minutes? Are you REALLY saying that as an ex-military person?? :dubious:
When the crowd is running for cover after a handful of seconds? Absolutely. If my aim is to kill as many as possible, then full auto is superior, since in those first few seconds before everyone realizes they’re under fire, I could send far more bullets into the crowd.
The crowd was only a stationary target for a matter of seconds. After that it was chaos, and aimed shots are very difficult in chaos, even for trained marksmen. It was those first seconds that were most deadly, and that’s when full auto would have been so effective.
However, suicide is a basic human right, IMHO, not a crime. While tragic, it’s better than drinking yourself to death or driving into oncoming traffic or any of a number of the self destructive things people do. All tragic, all legal and imho none should be further regulated just because people are sometimes self destructive. Because- it is SELF destructive.
More drug= more suicide. More bridges= more suicide. More trains= more suicide.
And how about smoking? “Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, with more than 41,000 of these deaths from exposure to secondhand smoke.” Almost 10 times are many Americans are murdered by Second hand smoke than handguns every year.
It seems to me a bump stock is something anyone could build themselves in their backyard if they had a saw, a piece of wood and a few springs. Is that correct. My understanding is that it just uses the recoil to push the rifle forward again into the shooter’s trigger finger.
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The density of the crowd was likely high for a couple of minutes. It takes time to disperse a thick crowd like you had at the concert. I think a roughly aimed single shot still had a good chance of a hit.
I think I am pretty average with a bolt action gun I could probably get off 50 very roughly aimed shots in a minute. With a semi-auto I could probably do 150 shots in that same minute. An automatic or a bump stock is going to fire between 400-800 rounds a minute. The aiming in this last case will not be as good. I have only fired an automatic once, so I can’t really tell you how effective I would be with it, but I would guess that with a well balanced gun, taking long sweeping burst through the target area I could get pretty close to getting the full usability out of that 400-800 rounds. If the gun was stabilized like with a bipod I would be pretty sure of it.
These are some pretty broad assumptions but assuming he was able to get 60 people on full automatic and injure another 50, than we could assume that with a bolt action he would have gotten somewhere around 10 people and injured 100 with a bolt action. With a semi-automatic the number would have been more like 20 killed and 200 injured. I am ignoring the need to change magazines and I am taking some pretty big guesses at the drop down in accuracy that will occur as rate of fire increases. I am also ignoring the fact that at a very high rate of fire aiming is less important because a lot more bullets or going to find targets by random chance. In short, in this example I am being conservative in such a fashion that minimizes the advantages of a semi-auto or an auto. The advantage is likely much greater than I’ve described.
A bump stock essentially turns a semi-auto into a full auto in terms of functionality. We can assume that a bump stock and a full auto are roughly equivalent.
I would say minutes not moments, but yes.
By my estimates 2/3 fewer killed and injured. At least.
That moment didn’t happen? I’m talking about seconds ticking by with machine gun fire at a crowd of fellow humans. What on earth are you talking about?
It can’t possibly be contentious that silencers are deadly. They add to the shooters advantage.
You are being an abject apologist, minimizer, and factotum for the gun industry. So what? Life goes on.
I don’t think that’s right. A true full auto machine gun, something like an M-16, is generally less accurate than semi-auto. A Slide-Fire-equipped semi-auto is worse still though. See, the whole thing operates by leaving the gun loose to slide around, wobble back and forth, etc. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what you want when you want to fire accurately.
At least you bothered with a thoughtful answer and walked me through what you are talking about. Thank you. I disagree with your assessment or conclusions…in a crowd of 22,000 people they simply aren’t going to be able to disperse quickly, and he would have plenty of targets for aimed fire. Full auto would have been spraying bullets literally all over the place, and probably mainly high at those sorts of ranges. I also doubt that in seconds the majority of the crowd could have been running in all directions. From what I’ve read many thought it was fireworks and many didn’t even know what was going on for quite a while. It, sadly, would have been a target rich environment for quite some time. Heck, even after the police got there the crowd was not fully dispersed.
But, like I said, at least you gave me a thoughtful answer that actually makes some logical sense. I’ll just agree to disagree and hope that you will at least think about what I’m saying, instead of the strawman version.
Har, we are traveling thru New Mexico and went to a restaurant tonight. I ordered a gin and tonic and the owner came over to our table and said he couldn’t sell me gin because the permit cost $350k. But he could sell me a gun for $50 with no checks or anything. was he blowing smoke up my ass given this?
What do you base this on? Walk me through your estimates and how you arrived at them. I’ve already given mine…a semi-automatic rifle can be fired by even a semi-competent person at 3-4 rounds per second, aimed. Even cutting that to a bit less than 2 rounds per second that’s over 1000 rounds in 9 minutes. The crowd was 22,000. It would have taken half an hour or more to fully disperse something that size. A hit at that angle is going to probably go through more than one person. This guy managed to hit 500 people in 9 minutes. What do you have? iiandyiiii, feel free to chime in…do you really think that someone couldn’t fire 1000+ rounds at 22,000 people in 9 minutes and hit 500?
I don’t know if he’s had a telescoping sight (a scope) on the weapons he used. If he did: using a scope on a chaotic crowd would be nearly impossible. You are zoomed in, and every other moment someone would either be running in front of a selected target, or the target will have moved.
And if he had no scope, then aiming would have been even more difficult at that distance. It’s just not realistic to me that any but the most highly skilled expert sniper could even hope to kill more people with semi auto fire than he did with the bump stock. He probably practiced enough with the bump stock to keep it as steady as possible, and that would have been enough to send the bullets into the packed crowd before it started to disperse.
If he is “in the business” of selling firearms and doesn’t have an FFL & perform background checks on his customers, he’s going to get a very unpleasant visit from the ATF one day. If you’re from out of state, he also can’t sell you a gun without transferring it to your home state through an FFL, which means a background check and paperwork.
There is an edge case where a person who is NOT regularly engaged in the business of buying and selling firearms to earn a living could sell you one from his private collection in a face-to-face transaction, assuming you’re both residents of New Mexico.
When most of the crowd is moving or under cover for most of that time, I don’t think any but the most highly skilled sniper could match that body count.
I am talking about what happens when you unexpectedly find yourself being shot at. It’s happened to me on 3 separate occasions. What you describe is it not what it is like in my experience.
They save his hearing, and he has less of a need for hearing protection. How is that deadly?
I support a full and complete ban of all semi-automatic, and automatic rifles with no grandfathering. I support the idea of a gun ownership license, mandatory inspections, and mandatory liability insurance for all firearm owners and their weapons. I also support responsible gun ownership.
I don’t think you are characterizing me accurately.