Guns can be used to kill kindergarten children, as we found out at Sandy Hook. Clip-fed semi-automatic weapons, both rifles and handguns, are the weapon of choice for spree shooters, and are the weapons that are proposed to be banned. So, what purposes are guns used for, what kinds of guns are used for those purposes, and how would such a ban affect those users?
Well:
1) Hunting.
There’s basically four kinds of things you can hunt: birds, varmints (rabbits, squirrels, and other small animals), medium-sized game like deer, and large-sized game like elk or grizzly bear.
For birds, shotguns are the king of the roost. 20 gauge shotguns are preferred by smaller shooters, 12 gauge shotguns by larger shooters. The 12 gauge shotguns of course have greater powder and shot load and thus better range and spread, making it easier to hit the duck or dove that you’re aiming at. Most shotguns used for hunting are pump-action with tubular magazines. Shotguns with clip-type box magazines are extremely rare, due to being illegal to use for hunting in some jurisdictions. Semi-automatic shotguns are also available, but use of the recoil to cycle the action a) isn’t as reliable as cycling the action by hand (since if you aren’t firmly in place you can get the equivalent of “limp wristing” a semi-automatic handgun), and b) results in less force pushing pellets out the front of the gun, thus less accuracy. The majority of bird hunters care more about accuracy and reliability than about firing rate.
For varmints, the .22 Long Rifle rimfire is the preferred round, in a fairly lightweight rifle or carbine. Some people prefer a .410 or 20 gauge shotgun, aiming for the head in order to preserve as much meat as possible. Typical .22 rifles are either tube magazine lever rifles, clip-fed bolt action rifles, clip-fed semi-automatic rifles, or tube-fed semi-automatic rifles (and of course the old standby bolt-action single-shot rifle). Of those, only the clip-fed semi-automatic .22 rifles would be affected by a ban on clip-fed semi-automatic rifles.
For medium-sized game such as deer, semi-automatic rifles are virtually unknown because, as with shotguns, semi-automatic rifles are less accurate and reliable than bolt action or lever guns. In close country the Winchester .30/30 round in a tube-fed lever gun is probably the most popular round, while in less close country, bolt-action clip-fed rifles in .30-06, .308, or a variety of similar-sized rounds are the preferred weapon. A ban on clip-fed semi-automatic rifles would not affect the vast majority of deer hunters.
For large game, bolt-action clip-fed rifles in large calibers are all you find.
Note that the .223 round used in the Bushmaster military-style carbine used at Sandy Hook is not useful for hunting. Its velocity and ability to penetrate brush is too great for hunter safety, it is not large enough to take down a deer, yet is too large for varmints (it would mangle them too badly as it hit bones and fragmented). A ban on that round for sale to civilians would not affect hunters at all.
2. Self defense.
The most effective self defense weapons are a) a 12 or 20 gauge pump shotgun with open choke and the shortest barrel that’s legal (12 gauge preferred, 20 gauge if you simply can’t handle that big a shotgun), and b) the .357 Magnum revolver or, if that is too large for your effective use, the .38 Special revolver (which is the same size round, actually, but with a shorter cartridge and thus less recoil and can be built lighter). Examination of self-defense applications of handguns show that if the defender does not disable the attacker within three rounds, the defender is dead. Thus for self defense, a five, six, or seven round revolver is all the handgun that you need. Note that the .38 Special has approximately the same stopping power as the 9mm round that has largely replaced it in police use, the reason the police switched to 9mm semi-automatic handguns was rate of fire after the first six rounds were fired, not stopping power. But rate of fire after six rounds is not an issue in typical self-defense scenarios. Indeed, a large number of self-defense scenarios play out without any rounds fired at all, the potential attacker sees you pull out the weapon and decides that he has business elsewhere.
There is no — zero — self-defense need for a civilian to possess a handgun capable of holding 17-shot magazines. There is no self-defense justification, for the most part, for civilians to possess *any* semi-automatic handgun — they are all far less reliable under pressure than a revolver (which is literally point-and-click — no worries about safeties, racking the slide to put the first round in the chamber, etc.) and offer no improvement in stopping power compared to equivalent revolver rounds. The only advantage for self defense purposes is that they also tend to be smaller and lighter than revolvers, which makes them easier to conceal, thus there might be an exception made for small semi-automatic handguns with limited-round magazines for concealed carry use.
There is also no — zero — self-defense need for a civilian to possess a semi-automatic rifle that accepts clips (as vs having a tubular magazine). A shotgun has greater stopping power at close ranges as are typical for self defense and the limit of three to five rounds in the tubular magazine of a typical shotgun is not going to be an issue in typical self defense situations. Indeed, the simple act of racking the first round into the chamber of a pump-action shotgun is enough to make most potential attackers decide they’d rather be elsewhere.
3. Overthrowing a tyranny
Find me one single example of unorganized armed individuals overthrowing a government via force of arms and I won’t laugh and giggle at the notion. Organized militias such as in Somalia and Lebanon have managed to do so, but the end result of militia rule in those states has not been particularly good — Lebanon manages to rebuild, then one of its militias does something stupid that gets the country pounded into rubble again, while meanwhile Somalia has been chaos and death for decades now.
But even those kinds of organized militias have never arisen in a national security state such as the old Soviet Union or today’s United States of America. The reality is that our national security state is very effective at identifying and taking out with extreme prejudice any armed individuals that might threaten its existence. There are three concepts that render the armed overthrow scenario ridiculous: intelligence, concentration of forces, and logistical supply train. Our police forces regularly take down heavily armed individuals (we call them “drug dealers”) without harm to themselves via use of these concepts. The deal being that armed individuals must work for a living in order to provide for their logistics, which in turn precludes effective concentration, while the State taxes for its living (a.k.a. seizes the resources it needs at gunpoint) thus is able to have the logistics to concentrate. Armed individuals who challenge the State’s monopoly on seizing resources at gunpoint are swiftly identified via intelligence. Application of laws that have been on the books for decades (note that you’re likely breaking a law anytime you walk down the street, given how many laws are on the books, and certainly armed robbery is one of the laws in those books) are used to justify concentration of forces that then are then used to overwhelm said armed individuals before sufficient of them gather together to create an existential threat to the State. Just ask David Koresh about that one. Oh wait.
The reality today is identical to 1959 when the Louisiana legislature demanded that Governor Earl Long resist a desegregation decree from the Federal courts. He ranted to the Legislature, “are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me? We’re talking about the government of the U S of A here, they got the goddamned ATOMIC BOMB!” Armed militants in both Iraq and Afghanistan were unsuccessful at overthrowing tyrannical governments installed and propped up by our military. The only reason our military is leaving those states is because there is no existential threat to the existence of the USA in either of those locations, and thus no real reason to continue incurring the large logistical costs of maintaining standing armies in those locations. But the reality is that neither the Taliban in Afghanistan nor Al Qaeda in Iraq have any hope of overthrowing the U.S. military dictatorships of those countries as long as the U.S. military remains. And once that military returns home, the logistical tail becomes *much* shorter.
The Soviet Union fell because everybody agreed it was over. The military basically dissolved into regional militaries, the security establishment basically deserted to regional security establishments, and people simply started ignoring the orders coming out of the Kremlin, until Gorbachev was reduced to rattling around the Kremlin issuing orders to the wait staff, and had to admit reality and formally dissolve the Soviet Union once even the wait staff quit taking his orders. That is how tyrannies end in the modern era — with a whimper, not a bang of machine-gun fire, as the majority of people decide they want something else and simply quit cooperating with the tyrannical government. If you want to know why the Chinese government freaks out so badly over dissent, now you know — if the notion that the national government is not firmly in control and worth following ever took hold, they’d fall just like the Soviet Union did. And they know it. And that’s why they do their best to use both the carrot and the stick to maintain the support of their citizenry. It ain’t democracy, but it could lead to something akin to democracy over time — and that, friends, is how tyranny ends in the modern era — with a whimper, not the bang of machine-gun fire.
Add in the fact that we have a revolution every four years via the VOTE here in America — or could, if the majority of Americans gave a damn about who rules them — and the “overthrow tyranny” bullshit becomes even more bullshit-worthy. Neither Japan nor Germany are tyrannies. Both were disarmed after WW2, and personal ownership of firearms is still illegal in Japan. Neither nation is a paradise — but in case you haven’t noticed, neither is the United States. Just sayin’.
- Badtux the Well-armed Penguin
(* But *not* with semi-automatic weapons that have no — zero — application to hunting or self defense).
Look, you know all this shit because you’e a reality-based penguin. But the sorts of people who have AR-15s, AK-47s, etc. are not reality based. They live in a land of fantasy, where “Red Dawn” (the original version) and cowboy movies for the basis for the script that’s running in their head. It’ll never happen — are they going to gun down the local cop without provocation, or do they expect a pudgy unarmed guy in a business suit with a government ID to knock on their door saying “I’m here from The Tyranny. Obey me!” and they can shoot him there, with no repercussions like a follow-up squad of gunsels in armoured personnel carriers? Or maybe they’re waiting for carloads of inner-city blacks to cruise down their street when chaos hits, like thug-lifers would be sitting-duck dummies.
I doubt the gunloonz think it through that far. From what I’ve seen, and thankfully I didn’t know many in the U.S., they’re anti-social and not prone to group action. I would be hard to get a patrol of these fcukers to take coordinated action, much less a battalion. You know more history than I do, so you know that one of the problems of the early American Revolutionary War was the shitty discipline of the volunteer militias, who just went home when the going got tough or the crops had to be harvested.
The only thing those guns are good for is making atomized, powerless individuals feel like they’re BIG! and TOUGH! and not just a meaningless pawn in the games of the people with real power. For $500 or so, they can hold something heavy in their hands that makes them feel like a god. They have the power of dispensing death in their hands! In a world where they can be tossed from their job at any moment, or left to die of some treatable disease because they’re not judged worthwhile to the power structure, it lets them FEEL like they’re somebody.
And that’s what most of the right-wing mindset boils down to — how it makes them feel. They feel ANGRY when they think about poor defenceless babies being killed in the womb. They feel LOVED when they think about their non-existent God-daddy. They feel POWERFUL when they fetishize their guns and the military. For all that righties deride lefties as being feminized emotion-driven pussies, it’s actually them projecting a trait that they exhibit yet secretly despise. Feelings, not reality, are what drives them.
One very important time that guns were used…OUR own revolution when we seceded from the British ! Which I might add were equipped with better weaponry than the Americans. A well regulated Militia…this statement was given in the context at the time when in fact all citizens were included as militia members or they were classed as traitors ! Hmmm , now which side should an American be on ? I side with the founders…and don’t give me that BS about those words being outdated. Some words are in fact immortal and will carry through the ages.
I do not expect any extremist anti-gun person to accept any of what I’ve just stated. This will only be resolved with the advent of the second civil war I fear.
Mores the pity that we cannot learn from history…
Uhm, Spud, sorry, but in our own revolution, both the Continental Army and the state militias were armed with military muskets, not with civilian weapons. The primary lack that the Americans had was artillery (thus the importance of capturing Fort Triconderoga early on, which allowed hauling its artillery to the Boston Highlands which in turn forced the British to abandon Boston), not in individual weapons, where they captured plenty and had plenty given to them by the French and Spanish (who basically cleaned out their arsenals in New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola and handed the weapons to the Americans).
In short, you are spouting revisionist made-up history that has no correlation to the actual history that happened back then. The majority of Americans were *not* members of the militia — one estimate of the total number of colonial militia members in 1775 is around 40,000, out of a total population of around 1,000,000 — and the vast majority of the militia were armed with military weapons that were stored in town arsenals, not with civilian weapons stored at home (remember, Lexington & Concord was about the British coming to destroy town arsenals, they weren’t doing house-to-house searches!). That is because civilian weapons of the day simply weren’t suitable for wartime use, because either they didn’t mount bayonets (which were *not* a decoration, most battles were won by bayonets due to the limitations of firearms of the day) or because their rate of fire was inherently too low (the hunting rifles used by some frontiersmen, which took close to three minutes to hammer a new round into the lands). RIflemen were used as snipers and sometimes made a difference in battles by taking out officers at critical times, but as far as winning battles, no — musketmen armed with military muskets with bayonets affixed did that. Period.
In short: Study military history from serious college-level military history books and get back to us. The bullshit history you learned elsewhere is just that — bullshit.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Engage in name calling again and expect the banhammer. Only the penguin has the right to be an ass on this blog.
Definition of the words”well regulated” seems to be what’s lacking. What, by whom and how much have never really been sorted out.
……. and personally, after the shortbarreled shotgun the .45ACP is the best “man-stopper.” – - just sayin’
I would say that the .45ACP and the .357 with hollow-point bullets have roughly equivalent stopping power. They put roughly the same size hole in people (due to the expanding mushroom of the hollow points vs the dome of the FMJ ACP rounds) and you can stuff 15.5 grains of powder into a .357 cartridge for 1200fps muzzle velocity with a 4 inch barrel, while a . 45ACP cartridge will hold a maximum of around 10 grains of powder for a maximum muzzle velocity of approximately 1000fps with a hot load.
The .357 has the advantage, in a self-defense application, of being point-and-click. You don’t have to worry about whether you racked a round into the chamber, you don’t have to worry about whether the safety is on or off, you don’t have to worry about it jamming because you “limp wristed” the first round, it Just Works, which is pretty much what you want when a perp is coming at you with a knife from 15 feet away and you don’t have *time* to make sure of all that other stuff.
Personally I believe that the .357 Magnum is the most powerful personal defense handgun round that the average person can handle, and even if it *wasn’t* as powerful as the .45ACP, the point-and-click attributes would make it preferable to .45ACP — just as the same would make .38 Special preferable to 9mm (both of which have roughly the same ballistics and stopping power, but the revolver is point and click and the automatic… isn’t).
Terrific post. Well played, sir. Mind you, nothing will penetrate the masturbatory fantasies of the sort of person who “needs” two AR-15 knock-offs. But I sure as hell wish that the Congress would read this.
Nor the masturbatory fantasy that banning a weapon will accomplish anything besides making the demented just choose another means to evil deeds.
Well, as I said in a prior post, it’s worked out reasonably well in Japan. Compare the number of knife deaths in Japan vs the number of gun deaths in the USA, and we’re talking about a few hundred per year in Japan, vs over 10,000 per year in the USA. Japan’s population is roughly 2/3rds of the U.S. population so you’d expect several thousand if you were correct.
But then, if you look further down on this blog, you’ll see that I actually agree with you on one thing — the majority of the gun deaths in the US, being in the context of the War on Drugs, suicide, or domestic violence, would not be affected by a ban on semi-automatic weapons that accept clips. It *would* make a difference in the (admittedly rare) case of spree shootings though — without affecting anybody’s right to self defense, since semi-automatic weapons that accept clips are in generally not useful for self defense applications due to their excessive penetration and lack of stopping power (exception being of course autopistols like the 9mm or .45ACP, which are useful for self defense but as I point out above, not as useful as a revolver chambered for .357 Magnum).
So far as being an expert on military weapons…I’ve only known a few weapons which used “clips” none of which are the AR or AK variety nor any semi-auto pistols for that matter. Clips are a tool that is used for feeding Magazines.
As for name calling ? Huh ? Unless you are referring to the retort that I threw right back at someone for the same . If this gets me banned, then go for it son.
Seems to me that the left needs more of my ilk which wishes to understand the left and right aspects. So be it , I’m gone…
If your main complaint is the use of popular vernacular rather than the formal name of “magazine” then you likely have little contribute to the discussion anyhow.
Got it wrong on shotguns, shot is weighted by the pound. 20 gauge is like 20 pieces per pound, 10 is 10 pieces per pound, ect.
Uhm, not exactly understanding what you are saying.. The gauge of a shotgun is the bore diameter of the barrel. (Peers into closet, looks at 12 gauge shotgun and 20 gauge shotgun, holds one of each shell in each hand, validates that this link in fact matches the physical hardware, returns). It has nothing to do with pieces per pound. You may be thinking of the shot size of a shotgun. Typical dove shot would be like #8, while you’d use something like #2 for duck, and 00 buckshot if you’re hunting for buck. (Oops, is that racist?). The smaller the number (or the more zeros), the larger (and fewer) the pieces of lead in the shell.
It’s like wire gauge. A 12 gauge wire is much larger than a 20 gauge wire. A 12 gauge wire will power the electrical outlets in your house. A 16 gauge wire is your typical lamp cord. A 20 gauge wire is one of the tiny little wires inside your computer that carries electrical signals from the buttons on the front of the box to the motherboard. The bigger the gauge, the smaller the wire.
Heh heh heh… great post, comments and retorts. I had the EXACT SAME DISCUSSION at the holiday meal yesterday with my low-info brother-in-law who just bought his second handgun from a private party with no registration involved… no shooting skills, either. He spouts the same ignorant baloney as our good friend Spud, based upon his complete lack of knowledge of history and a void of reading anything beyond the back of a cereal box. When I asked him about the Second Amendment and what it actually states, he was of course totally unaware of the wording, let alone the context or meaning of the specific words used in it. So typical.
I am sending BIL this post, but I doubt he’ll read it since it would force him to, you know, think and stuff.
Thank, Pengy… you are awesome, coated in awesome sauce.
Slight mod on varmint hunting, bolt action ~0.223 (bunch of calibers around this range) are used for Groundhog. Need long range high accuracy but single shot. (Have a farm and invite all to come blow the little critters away.)
–jim
Good point. My hunting experience is in Louisiana so groundhog wasn’t on the menu. (Yes, if the critters existed in Louisiana, they’d go into a gumbo pot once killed
).
[...] talked guns this past week, and looked at the usefulness of various [...]
Some differences to air on pistol calibers. I’d recommend .40 S&W as the ballistics & stopping power stand up to the venerable .45 ACP with less recoil ergo better chance for accuracy & followup. If one must use a wheel-gun and .357 cartridge for personal /homedefense, I would recommend spending the extra money on a frangible round such as Glaser due to the probability for overpenetration.
I would put .40 S&W and .357 at roughly the same position on the stopping power scale. Regarding frangible rounds, the problem is that they can be stopped by as little as leather jackets and thus really aren’t all that useful, they’re used by air marshals because of the issues of unleashing rounds in a metal tube full of civilians, not because they’re particularly effective. I do agree that overpenetration is an issue with both the .357 *and* the .40 S&W, and that you definitely want to use hollow points in the .357 both for stopping power and to help reduce overpenetration.
Of course, no gun is any use if you can’t immediately identify and make the decision to kill someone who may be a threat to your life. Brandishing a firearm that you have no mental ability to use is just a way to have it taken away from you and used to kill you. Thus why of mass killings that have been stopped by people with concealed weapons, every one of those incidents was by former or off-duty police officers — they are, in general, the only people in the civilian population with practical training in identifying threats and practical training in killing threats once identified.