Is there any use for a semi-automatic weapon outside of their use as a law enforcement or military weapon? I can see why someone in an enforcement situation might need a rapid fire weapon, but is there something regular citizens need them for?
Like, I can see the different uses for a rifle, a shotgun or a handgun, in, say, hunting. I can’t see why any hunter would need to spray bullets at random forest creatures.
Is there any argument for keeping semi-auto legal except for those involving the 2nd Amendment?
Yes. The ability to quickly send a follow-up shot in case something should cause the first shot to merely wound the animal allows the hunter to quickly minimize the suffering of the target animal.
A couple of things you need to understand: First, hunters don’t spray bullets at random. They are trying to take down game as efficiently and as humanely as possible, which means aimed shots. Second, most places (all of them I know of) place a limit on magazine capacity of the rifles and shotguns hunters use. For example, a magazine might have a limit of four rounds. Third, ammunition is expensive. No need to waste it while hunting. Fourth, ‘semi-automatic’ means one bang per pull of the trigger. Auto loading makes it quicker to come back on the game in the event of a missing or wounding shot. Many thousands of people find autoloading rifles and shotguns to be the best tool for their sport.
There are animals that are hunted that are not game animals, and which fall into the ‘pest’ category. Since these are not game animals, high-capacity magazines are not restricted while hunting them. Ranchers often use AR-15s, Min-14s, and other semi-automatic rifles to kill coyotes that hunt their livestock or rodents that present an injury hazard to their livestock. Fast-moving predators and other pests are ideal targets for the type of firearm in question.
There are shooting events (only paper or metal targets ‘killed’) that are specifically designed for semi-automatic firearms, just as there are shooting events specifically designed for shotguns, Old West firearms, muzzle-loaders, bows, and so on.
In addition to the legitimate uses mentioned above, nearly all firearms in this country are not used illegally, and fewer still are used to commit murder.
Yes, you actually can have a simple question and answer thread or you can have a gun debate thread. If you want to describe hunting in clearly antagonistic terms, you obviously aren’t fully committed to a simple question and answer thread, but going in good faith and hoping you do not make any more editorial comments while expecting gun owners to treat this as a simple question and answer thread I will answer.
A proper shot on game will kill instantly or close to it. With deer I frequently shoot for the area right above the heart, this is a diagram showing areas you can hit a deer and reliably kill them with one shot. But right above the heart is the best area, it destroys all the large arteries of the circulatory system and causes a large drop in blood pressure. Properly hit, I have never seen a deer remain conscious more than 5 seconds after the shot was hit. On a miss, if you hit the lungs or even worse go through the ribs and don’t hit the lungs or heart the deer can live a long time running, suffering great pain. In such situations, if you know you’ve missed the point where you can get a deer to almost drop instantly, it’s nice to be able to fire again right away.
If you miss game, sometimes you can get a second shot in time for a kill.
In self defense, if you miss (and police officers miss a high percentage of the time, higher than you’d think, in the rare cases in which they are confronting an armed assailant) you would much rather be able to fire again immediately. Even against a person charging you with a knife, a miss can be your life if that’s the only shot you get.
I personally do not believe in warning shots, although some rules of engagement around the world do actually provide for them, but if you’re trying to ward off an intruder or something in theory a semiautomatic gives you the option of discharging your weapon into the ground in warning to let the intruder know this is life or death. With a single shot firearm your only option is to shoot to kill.
One simple point that hasn’t been mentioned. Semi-auto is not “spray and pray” full auto. It simply means each pull of the trigger fires one bullet. I can see how for pretty much ANY civilian application - hunting, target shooting, home defense - one would want the convenience of not having to engage the bolt action after each shot.
The OP also seems to be ignorant of the existence of semi-auto shotguns. I’ve hunted quick-moving birds (quail, woodcock, etc.) with pump-action shotguns, but a semi-auto is clearly more effective.
Martin Hyde pretty much said it all. I might add that farmers need to get off a second shot damnfast when the first one just bounces off the skull of the old bull they’re trying to put down.
Y’know, you can shoot more than once with a revolver, lever action, pump action or bolt action as well. A lever action can, in fact, be shot almost as fast as a semi-auto, and a revolver can be shot precisely as fast as a semi-auto, though you’ll need to reload sooner. Furthermore, bolt actions are perfectly capable of being magazine-fed, and speedloaders have been developed for revolvers. So, in that case, there’s not even an advantage to semi-autos in reload speed.
So, to be precise, your question is: Is there any legitimate reason for non-LEO/military personnel to have anything other than single-shot weapons?
I guess you’ve never heard of fanning a revolver, have you?
You might want to check out Youtube for shooting competitions. Somebody who’s willing to practice can quickly shoot multiple shoots from any kind of gun.
In addition to faster follow-up shots, nearly all semi-automatic firearms have significantly less recoil than manually operated arms. Cycling the action requires energy and usually moves heavy components (bolt, bolt follower) in a direction opposite the bullet.
This recoil reduction contributes not only to shooter comfort, but often to accuracy. As the gun is recoiling less, it is a bit less critical to hold it consistently enough that it recoils to the same place when the bullet leaves the barrel, and also the less severe recoil is less likely to cause the shooter to flinch and jerk or pull the shot off target.
Semiautomatic military-style firearms prevent the government from monopolizing violence through superior firepower. If a population is expected to resist a tyrannical government, it must possess appropriate arms. Take a look at situations like Libya and Syria where having high-power weapons are required to defend the populace from dictators.
It has been repeatedly made clear that the police cannot be relied upon to provide law enforcement. In such a situation, the citizens must possess appropriate weapons to defend themselves. For example, there are numerous documented incidents from the LA riots where citizens defended their homes and businesses with AK-47s. The rifles provided a visible deterrent. The stores that were not protected were looted. The cops were nowhere to be found.
Also, I think it is completely ludicrous to begin a gun debate with the words. “I DO NOT WANT THIS TO BE A GUN DEBATE.” Further, I find it bizarre that you ask for reasons not concerning the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not the REASON we own guns… it is just the Constitutional Amendment that enshrines the right to do so.
It is also baffling to claim that you want examples other than law enforcement, when law enforcement is the fundamental reason for having these weapons. As far as I’m concerned, the weapons are obviously for law enforcement. The real question is who does the enforcing when the police cannot/do not/will not do it.
You’re right, I poisoned the well. I did not mean to, but I did. Mea culpa.
I’m not a gun person, but have no strong opinion on gun rights either way, since there are compelling arguments on both sides. I also know very little about guns, so in an attempt to get educated, I asked this question. Poorly, I admit, and I apologize.
I guess what I’m trying to determine to my own satisfaction is whether a non-semi automatic might have prevented a few of the deaths in Connecticut. Based on what we know right now, probably not, but I wanted to see if there was something specific about a semi that made shootings of this type much more deadly. And to see if there was a practical reason to keep them available to the general public that outweighs a potential risk.
Since I can’t trust any online source, since they generally have an agenda one way or another, I wanted to ask Dopers. Thanks for the reasoned responses.
It’s hard to even speculate if there’d be fewer casaulties with a non-autoloader; as has been pointed ou but weapons designed for smaller rounds are fast to cycle, especially if designed for manual cycling. Compared to say my Mosin-Nagants, which even designed for manual cycling takes me several seconds to cycle (but could probably shoot right through a tree if a target was behind it).
As a side note, huge capacity magazines are much, much more likely to jam. Better to take a bunch of smaller ones that can be changed in seconds if you don’t want your gun to jam when you’re shooting at gophers.
Related question - is there a separate category that are classified as assault weapons? I keep seeing both terms, and I’m not sure if they’re being thrown around incorrectly, or what.
I don’t see how. When you have a bunch of potential victims trapped who you can pretty much assume are not going to be able to fight back, it doesn’t matter if your weapon is semi-automatic, bolt-action, pump-action, lever-action, revolver, or single-shot. It’s the same thing which Anders Breivik did; some guy on HuffPo bemoaned the fact that he used an “assault weapon” (a Ruger Mini-14*) as though it had anything to do with the hour-and-a-half he had to hunt down his victims.
see, too many people let Hollywood tell them how guns work. Even a fully-automatic rifle isn’t something you just point in a general direction and simply hose people down with. muzzle rise means they tend to be poorly controllable without training.
