A long time ago, I was a JROTC cadet, just like 3 of the victims of our 21st Century St. Valentines Day Massacre in Parkland, Florida. The only difference being their unit was Army while mine, as you can see above, was Navy.
I later did 3 semesters of college level NROTC at Texas A&M University. I have never served in the military proper owing to physical disqualification pertaining to eyesight. I have retained a large amount of trivial knowledge and a lay interest in military affairs ever since. I’m no expert by any means, but I often shock and surprise civilians and service members alike by how much I know about military organization, structure, procedure, etc.
But as is often the case, the further I get from these early formative experiences, the more I find my military knowledge is outdated and incorrect and I have to go bone up on the latest, current info to update my understanding.
My personal positions on Gun Legislation have been all over the map at various times in my life. I’ve held and defended various positions through the years. I was on my NJROTC Air Pistol team. I eventually became commander of my NJROTC Drill Team by my senior year. I’m a former NRA member (and never will be again, I will quickly add). I quit TSRA (Texas State Rifle Assn) when they unequivocally backed so-called “Open Carry” for handguns and I deplore the obnoxious practice of Open Carry of long guns in suburban and urban areas that serve no purpose other than to intimidate.
Vehemently Pro-Gun/Anti-Regulation partisans will bait leftists and liberals over the distinction between fully automatic and semi-automatic weapons, and thus how the military M4 carbine and M-16 rifle differs dramatically from the “civilian” AR-15 they lovingly and disarmingly call a “sporting rifle”.
Here’s the thing. The US Military, in actual practice on the battlefield, mostly uses the M4 carbine and the M-16 rifle in its semi-automatic mode of fire; here’s a very illuminating article from Military.com (from Dec. 2011):
Full Auto: Battlefield necessity or waste of ammo?
The article notes in passing that the 3-round burst option was never popular nor effective and was usually disregarded by soldiers in the field. The 3-round burst option has been dropped in favor of a return to the Vietnam-era option for Full Auto. But opinion remains divided among military men if this option is necessary or useful. In any case, the consensus opinion among soldiers was that the semi-automatic mode of fire was plenty effective for most missions they were confronted with, even Special Operators.
What does that mean for the National Gun Debate we are now having in the wake of the Parkland St. Valentine’s Day shooting? It means that the actual battlefield use of M4s and M-16s by US Military personnel is *functionally identical* to the way an AR-15 is operated by mass shooters within our borders. Moreover, as witnessed in Las Vegas, the lack of a true full-auto function can be overcome with a Bump-Stock attachment which can “simulate” full-auto mode (the victims are just as dead and maimed whether hit by a “true” full-auto weapon or a simulated one, however)...and before you jump in the comments to correct me, yes I am aware Bump-fire can be achieved without the use of a Bump-stock with sufficient skill & practice. Which as a practical matter means ANY semiauto weapon, from a Ruger Mk III target pistol to a tube-fed .22 LR boy’s hunting rifle could be bump-fired to simulate the fully automatic fire attainable by different mechanical means in true machine guns.
Extreme Guns Rights partisans will point to this and throw up their hands and say this fact means that there’s nothing that people can do to specifically target AR-15s and AK-47 clones and not impact semi-automatic hunting rifles, target pistols and regular self-defense handguns that have semi-automatic mechanisms.
The brute reality of this has moved me to a different conclusion. That perhaps the real answer is banning the civilian possession of *all* semiautomatic firearms. Allowable civilian arms would be single-shot rifles, bolt-operated rifles, revolvers, and perhaps lever-guns and pump-operated shotguns and rifles (I know there are Cowboy Action Shooters who can attain a truly frightening rate of fire with Lever action rifles, but the reloading is still down a tube magazine, one cartridge at a time). Or short of a full ban, all Semi-Auto guns should be as tightly regulated as True Class III firearms, i.e. Machine guns. Perhaps semi-automatics of size .22 LR or smaller could be excepted; But mind you, the AR-15 and M-16 rifle uses a round not very much larger than .22 caliber; the key difference is the much larger cartridge and gunpowder used to propel the bullet at significantly higher speeds. Even a .22 magnum cartridge isn’t safe for indoor range use. The key trade-off for any firearm is bullet mass vs. velocity. The 1911 Colt .45 ACP handgun pushes out a more massive bullet at a slower speed, while the 9mm handgun pushes out a lighter bullet at a significantly higher speed. Both are effective handguns but for different reasons.
The AR-15 and M-16 and M4 that use the .223 cartridge have a special quirk in that the bullets are designed to tumble upon contact with its target, causing significantly more tissue damage than if the .223 bullet continued in a straight trajectory through the body and out. It honors the spirit of international law by not being a hollow-point or expanding bullet, but violates the spirit of that law with this tumbling effect to achieve the same end by technically different means.
One last aside, we need to purge the word “cop killer bullet” from our vocabulary. By which liberals mean bullets designed to pierce police body armor. Police (and military) body armor is rated to stop at most handgun ammunition. It will not stop much more powerful rifle ammunition in most circumstances, and that includes from your uncle’s trusty old bolt action deer rifle.
It seems clear to me that the most dire threat to Public Safety is the ability for mass shooters to fire off large amounts of rifle ammunition at a very rapid rate in a very short time span and rapidly reload to continue inflicting carnage this way until they run out of high capacity loaded magazines to keep jamming in the receivers of their respective weapons. The target for regulation has to be all semi-automatics; lest we forget, Virginia Tech’s massacre was perpetrated by an individual wielding only semi-auto handguns. And while Mass Shootings are, compared to other kinds of shootings in raw numbers, statistically “rare”, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do about them or should do nothing about them. In the same way that Ralph Nader argued that cars on American roads were “unsafe at any speed”, semi-automatics are also by nature unsafe in any civilian hand.