artherd
member
I was having a discussion recently with a friend of mine. It was ceneterd around the folly of forming 'classes' of man-portable shoulder-fired firearms at all.
My premise is as follows:
All guns are very dangerous. (be they single-shot or belt-fed, they can kill!)
Fully automatic rifles are not signifigantly more lethal or dangerous than their semi-automatic cousins.
Certinly not different enough to warrant a totally new classification system.
Consider the following hyopthetical scenarios. Same shooter, with:
An engraved Browning BAR in .338Win Mag (with 2 30 round mags) in semi-auto.
Versus an M-16 in full-atuo (with 2 30 round mags.)
Versus an AR-15 semi-auto ((with 2 30 round mags.)
I would be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which any one of these guns was likely to kill more people quickly than any of the others.
I find it hard to belive that the element of full-atuo increases lethality any more than 30% over a semi-auto. Sometimes I think lethality would be decreased (given finite ammo, full auto resulting in fewer hits/shots-fired.)
Discuss?
My premise is as follows:
All guns are very dangerous. (be they single-shot or belt-fed, they can kill!)
Fully automatic rifles are not signifigantly more lethal or dangerous than their semi-automatic cousins.
Certinly not different enough to warrant a totally new classification system.
Consider the following hyopthetical scenarios. Same shooter, with:
An engraved Browning BAR in .338Win Mag (with 2 30 round mags) in semi-auto.
Versus an M-16 in full-atuo (with 2 30 round mags.)
Versus an AR-15 semi-auto ((with 2 30 round mags.)
I would be hard pressed to come up with a situation in which any one of these guns was likely to kill more people quickly than any of the others.
I find it hard to belive that the element of full-atuo increases lethality any more than 30% over a semi-auto. Sometimes I think lethality would be decreased (given finite ammo, full auto resulting in fewer hits/shots-fired.)
Discuss?