The Gun Control Challenge

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All armed forces in the world disagree with you. Why do you think most soldiers carry automatic rifles rather than sniper rifles?

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How the police is supposed to tell a person carrying a gun legally from a criminal carrying an illegal gun?

A cop isn't going to know there is a gun on someone if it's concealed like most states require.
Most cops support citizens being armed since they know they cannot be everywhere to protect eveyone.

Maybe, so could you explain? And yes, I think this right is illusory, if considered as some kind of antigovernment defence tool.




Yes. But is it worth it? The main reason of all this gun policy discussions is high US crime rate. Now people want to do something about it. They want to sacrifice their "right" in order to promote safety. They want the threats reduced instead of getting armed and creating new ones. It is like fighting insurgents by killing more and more indigenes. It is contraproductive, producing more fresh fighters only.




Sure he wants. And I asked why. Reducing crime is complex task, never works simply by tweaking one detail.


Tell this to bilion of people without water, food, shelter or job...

Gun advocates could you please explain to me why "gun" restrictions take place in global politics? Why can't Iran; DPRK or in fact any other country possess nuclear weapons, why don't your governments allow Iran to buy S-300 anti-aircraft defense systems??? Why such hypocrisy?

I think the only restriction on gun ownership should be that anything larger than .50 caliber should be illegal for civilian possession. In fact, IIRC this is already covered by the NFA.

That being said, it's too bad that SWAT teams and police departments aren't better armed with more reliable weapons and ammunition for dealing with heavily armed criminals. Many SWAT teams have M-16s that are full auto but that is really a lousy gun compared to its foreign counterparts like the AK-74 or even the G3.

What I find quite amazing is how no american firearms company bothered to get a license to reproduce the MG-42 machine gun. It has one of the highest rates of fire and accuracy of any light machine gun ever made(1200 RPM compared with the 500 RPM of the M-60). America loves its guns, but ironically, american gun manufacturers do not measure up to foreign gun makers like Glock, HK, Kalashnikov, and Fabrique Nationale.

I had thought I'd answered both question in the OP, but I'll try and clarify.

A level of crime comparable to the US. Too many people point to countries that have low crime and strict gun control as "success stories" without noting that they never had violent crime problems or widespread gun ownership in the first place, and so cannot attribute the crime level to the gun control. Japan is the arch example, they've had strict cultural conditioning against guns since the 1600s, not out of some benevolent program aimed at reducing violence, but because guns upset the feudal hierarchy of the times by making the previously invincible samurai vulnerable to the lowliest peasant with a gun. They also have other cultural factors that lead to low crime rates, leading to my assertion that I could air-drop machine pistols all over the country and not see a jump in their crime rates.

Relevant factors are things like poverty, employment rate, cultural norms, legal environment, etc. For example, a hefty portion of the US murder rate is drug/gang related, if you ended the drug war you'd see a drop in the murder rate, without even messing with guns. You'd probably see an even bigger drop if a concentrated effort were to be made to provide work in the inner cities, productively employed people don't murder each other over petty insults to their honor, only people who have nothing else do that. See what I'm getting at?




Right you are, chief, but I was not making that argument. What I was doing was pointing out that in a time frame that seen record gun sales and record numbers of concealed carriers, something the gun control lobby claimed would cause the streets to run red with blood and the country to become the Wild West (direct quotes, btw), we've instead seen record low crime. I'm not saying the guns caused the crime drop, I'm saying they didn't cause a crime wave as predicted by the naysayers and that it pretty good evidence of a lack of correlation between guns and crime.



http://www.cato.org/publications/commen ... -gun-shows

Knock yourself out. Spoiler alert: The DOJ's research division pegs the number of criminal guns obtained at guns shows at about 2%

AspieRogue wrote:

I’d say they are well armed from what I’ve seen. If anything more training for the average patrolman would pay off better. Nothing at all wrong with the M16 but most of them carry a semi-auto AR15 (M4 type) carbine. Those work very well for the intended purpose. They have excellent ergonomics and stopping power at close and medium ranges. The reliability is much better than what has become urban legend since the Vietnam era. There is a huge assortment of high quality accessories for them that does not exist for other weapons of that type.
No respectable American LE agency is going to adopt an AK-47 or AK-74. They are not that great except in terms of simplicity, utter reliability and low manufacturing cost. The M16/AR15 has vastly superior ergonomics and belter accuracy plus a much better selection of accessories and upgrades.

The Heckler & Koch G3 and HK-91 are decent. Very rugged and reliable with longer range and penetration. Ergonomics aren’t that great, though, and this is from my experience. Quick magazine changes are much slower because of the location of the mag release, mags usually have to be manually pulled out, and and the bolt carrier does not lock back after the last round if you’ve fired it till it’s empty. the charging handle is a pain in the ass since you have to reach way up in front of the receiver. The safety isn’t quite as well placed as an M16, the buttstock is a little too short, and the sighs are weird. Being a 7.62NATO the recoil is heavier than anything in 5.56NATO. It’s not punishing but more abrupt in the HK since it is roller locked delayed blowback instead of gas operated.
That more potent round it fires can be a police liability, too.
There has been some limited use of them, though, in the from of the semi-auto HK-91 and some individual officers have bought them out of their own pockets back when they were commercially availbe to have in the patrol car just in case.

The H&K MP-5 sub-machinegun is fairly common in U.S. law enforcement and it is a small 9mm version of the G3 rifle. They are a good weapon without the liability and controlability issues of the 7.62NATO round. They have in part been replaced by the AR15’s in carbine from but are still common with SWAT teams.


There was an attempt to reproduce the MG-42 via reverse engineering during WW2. I’m doing this off of memory but I think it was GM (they made guns for the war effort then) that was tasked to this project. They didn’t take into account that our U.S .30 caliber rifle round (a.k.a. 30-06) is slightly longer than the German 7.92X57mm and that caused reliability issues. It may have been intentional since the MG-42 wasn’t invented here and there was no real interest in adopting an enemy weapon. They did change some of the M1919 Browning machineguns to be more portable weapons by adding a shoulder stock and bipod. It was called the M1919a6, I think.
The later U.S. M60 incorporated a few of the MG-42’s features, primarily the feed tray and feed mechanism. Germany still uses the MG-42 in the from of the MG-3 in 7.62 NATO. I think they are made by Rheinmetal-Borsig AG. They are used by other countries, too.

I don’t even want to go in to why European manufacturers tend to outdo us in term of innovation. It would take more typing than I care to do.

You did note the phrase in my post "off of the battlefield", right? And "in all but the most highly trained shooters"? War-zones with professional soldiers who are trained to accurately employ automatic weapons are a very different scenario than any criminal one, things like suppressive fire don't really come into play outside of war. I'll also point you to the fact that the US army did away with fully automatic fire in it's standard issue rifles in the 1980s in favor of the 3 round burst, because they found that in most cases automatic fire was ineffective and wasteful. I'll also point you to the Vietnam era statistic that the US military as a whole expended 50,000 rounds of ammunition per enemy killed using automatic weapons, while the sniper units averaged 1.3 rounds using bolt action rifles. Apply this to crime, and think Charles Whitman.



Criminals don't tend to wear their guns openly. Also, if the policy has been demonstrated to work in Vermont and not cause problems, what's your objection? It works in principle but not in theory?

I would call those necessities, not rights.

Ever heard of something called smuggling, my friend? If dope can be smuggled into the US in large quantities, there's no reason to think that weapons aren't being brought in too.

01001011 wrote:

You really make it too easy.
A technically accurate example of “automatic rifle” would an M1918a1 Browning Automatic Rife (BAR), M14a2. Or FN FALO. They aren’t even used that much in the world any more and the US ditched them in the early 60’s.
An assault rifle (M16, AK-47, L85, etc.) is not an automatic rifle by description.
Neither the assault rifle or the automatic rifle are machineguns (M240, M60, G3, etc.).
A sub-machinegun (MP-5, Uzi, MP-40, etc.) is not a machinegun.
A semiauto rifle (Mini-14, AR15, etc.) is none of the above.


Because only a select few soldiers (by comparison) are snipers. The role of the scout sniper is entirely different from that of the infantry soldier or marine. A sniper rifle would be of little use to someone who has no tactical need for that kind of weapon or the knowledge of how to deploy it. There are also Designated Riflemen (DM) that take care of marksmanship tasks that fall between the average rifleman and the professional sniper. They use scoped semi-auto 7.62mm NATO rifles that allow them to have effective range beyond just the few hundred meter effective range of the assault rifle armed soldiers.
You have to be an excellent troop with recommendations just to get selected for sniper school. It’s a very long and difficult school with a very high washout rate.
When you see a military sniper from a modern army you are looking at someone who has been through a lot just for the honor to be called a sniper.
Professional military snipers are elite, period.

I mean, really. You could do a quick google of some of this and learn something BEFORE you post....

Military grade AK-47s and AK-74s most certainly are capable of continuous(fully automatic)fire. In fact, the AK-47 is much more stable and reliable on full auto the M16A1. Many armies and paramilitary/guerilla/terrorist groups use fully automatic Kalashnikovs as well as light machine guns(which are exclusively full auto...such as the Russian PK or the German MG-42). Automatic gun fire is especially useful during an ambush when using high velocity weapons.

Sure, an assault rifle will empty the whole mag if you put the selector on full auto and hold the trigger down and in some cases that could be a good thing. What I meant was that they are not intended for or do as well in sustained fire like a belt fed machinegun would.

To expand on Raptor's point, the Kalashnikov series of rifles are designed as assault rifles and not machineguns, and will in fact fail if deployed in that role. Aside from the general lightness of the weapon and the intermediate power cartridge, they lack any ability to change the barrel during sustained fire and will overheat and fail if multiple magazines are fired in succession. Even the squad automatic version of the Kalashnikov, the RPK, suffers from this drawback and will not stand up to sustained use without allowing the barrel to cool down between bursts.

I'm not sure where you're getting this stability claim from, having fired the AK47, AK74, and M16 among other weapons, I can tell you pretty definitively that the M16 platform is the most controllable and accurate of the bunch. The AK74 is pretty nice to shoot, especially when fitted with it's original muzzle break, but the accuracy potential is much lower than on the AR/M16 platform. The virtues of the AK are it's cheapness, it's reliability, and it's simplicity, not it's accuracy or stability, which is why you so often see it in the hands of irregular or conscript fighters. Look at pictures from Liberia and you'll see kids shooting AKs that are held together with bailing wire tensioned with toothbrushes, the gun can take abuse and then some, but it's hardly precise.

AK's use a long stroke gas piston that's permanently attached to the bolt carrier, along with very generous machining tolerances, to produce a rifle with bulletproof reliability when dirty or poorly maintained, but little in the way of precision. Aside from the tolerances, having a big gas piston attached to the bolt and traveling the full length of the operating stroke every time you fire the thing is not conducive to accuracy or stability, it's like having a big weight going back in forth in the gun every time it fires. It's not quite as bad as pulling the trigger on an open bolt submachinegun and having the bolt slamfire the thing, but it's still not a good platform for accuracy. It's possible to build a relatively accurate AK, but it's much easier to build an accurate AR (lighter moving parts), and in building an accurate AK you lose most of the features that make it so reliable in the first place. Don't get me wrong, the AK is a very good rifle for what it's designed for, but if your equipping troops that can maintain their weapons and have some semblance of marksmanship, their are better choices out there.

TBH, I'm getting it from reading personal accounts of US soldiers in Vietnam who found the M16 to be problematic when set to full auto and used for suppressive fire. THAT is where it got its reputation for jamming up. I ever read an anecdote from one marine who admitted that he PREFERRED to use AK-47s stolen from dead VCs rather than his issued M16A1. Many countries have produced their own assault rifles based on the AK-47. It's one thing to shoot off these guns at a firing range, but actually going to war with them where you must use them to survive is a whole other kettle of fish.


As far as machine guns go, the M60 is also considered to be a flawed design and has the tendency to jam. I believe that both the US Army and the Marine Corps have completely replaced it with the much lighter and more reliable M249; a licensed replica of the Belgian Minimi.

Because there's something called "close combat" on the battlefield. Soldiers use semi-auto almost exclusively, even for room clearing. Fully automatic is intended primarily for suppressing fire, which is what they have machine gunners for.

What do you mean by "armed forces"? Al-Qaeda militants?

So the before/after effects of gun control in countries with both high rates of gun ownership and violence prior to enactment minus economic factors isn't specific enough for you to split hairs with, yet my comparison of the US and the Philippines is dismissed with the vague objection of them not being "in the same league" without explaining why. I love the hypocrisy.

It seems like the gun control folks will dismiss examples no matter what.
If it's Switzerland, it's only one example. If it's Mexico, it's the guns coming from the US and the corrupt Government. But now that it's a country that is far overseas from the US, has a similar level of income inequality, strict gun laws, a Government that makes it illegal to carry guns during election period out of the fear of people voting with their trigger fingers, and rampant illegal gunsmithing it's just not fair all the sudden!

Machine Guns are used in suppressive fire and in ambushing. They are just too damn big and clunky for close combat. That is why they submachinegun was invented and is designed for such purposes. They short barrels so they tend to spray bullets. If you spray enough the odds of hitting a vital organ or artery get much higher. That's why Israeli soldiers have Uzi's as well as automatic rifles.