I've decided that it's time to talk about the facts, and the facts are that we have a problem with assault weapons in this country, a problem that has allowed three lone-wolf terrorist attacks in the last few months.
Go to any on-line gun store and look under the category of "Semi-Automatic Rifles" Here are several examples.
As you can see just by looking at those images, the vast majority of semi-automatic rifles sold in the US are tactical (read:Military) style rifles.
When I heard that a Bushmaster .223 had been recovered from the scene of Sandy Hook, I guessed immediately that it was another Armalite Rifle. So I'm going to start my part of this national conversation by talking about a very specific gun with a checkered history.
The .223 Bushmaster is one of the more popular variants of the Armalite AR-15, the civilian version of the M-16. For those of you who haven't yet seen it, this is what it looks like:
First off, sandy hook is the third terror attack in the past year which involved the AR-15, the others being Clackamas and Aurora.
This is possibly the most popular and widely used American-made firearm. It's extremely popular among hunters because it is a very lightweight, very accurate, and very reliable rifle. Some versions are so simple to repair and maintain that hardware stores stock screws and springs that could replace lost or worn parts on the rifle. These traits also make it the favored choice of lunatics, revolutionaries, and terrorists. This is the weapon which was used in the Aurora shooting, and the Clackamas shooting. This was the weapon used by the DC sniper. An Armalite variant, the AR-180 is famous for being the rifle of choice for the Provisional IRA, who loved the gun so much that they wrote songs about it, and it appears in several Falls Road Murals and other dissident republican propaganda.
Its popularity among civilians has made it immune to attempts to prohibit the weapon, globally. It is so popular that the Canadian government failed to ban the weapon outright despite significant effort, though it does strictly control its use. The Australian government, too, has a permit which would allow individuals to use the AR-15. Variants of the AR-15 are even common in the United Kingdom, despite very strict gun laws there. It also is very popular in the Scandinavian countries, though some of them have banned its use for hunting.
It is commonly sold with 30-round clips in the United States. In Germany, the maximum legally allowed AR-15 clip size for hunters is two rounds. With one round in the chamber, that means a maximum of three shots before reloading. I'm of the opinion that if you can't shoot a deer in three shots, you need to pick a different hobby, but I actually prefer the New York and California State law, which bans clips with a greater capacity than five rounds. That's the place where Americans seem to be comfortable. The AWB prohibited clips over a maximum of 10 rounds.
The armalite is most commonly chambered in .223 Remington which is functionally identical to the military 5.56mm NATO, used in the M16. The rounds are almost interchangable, and many variants are capable of firing either the 5.56mm Nato or the .233 Remington, though there is a risk that doing so may damage a rifle chambered in .233.
The Armalite AR-15 was developed as a civilian version of a weapon of war. It was not designed to be a hunting rifle, though a great many people do use it for hunting. Some of the Nordic countries ban this rifle from hunting, while others require hunters to use a modified 2-round maximum clip, giving them only three rounds to use. My hunting rifle is a Lee-Enfield SMLE from the first world war, so military rifles do make very effective hunting rifles. The difference is that my SMLE is a bolt-action rifle. I have to use a lever to manually reload the gun after each shot. The AR-15 is semi-automatic, which means that it reloads itself every shot, and will fire rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger.
The AR-15 has more variants than any other rifle I know of. The compatibility with both .223 and 5.56 rounds makes the Armalite extremely popular with disaster preppers. There are variants chambered in other rounds, such as the .50 Beowulf, a 50-caliber round developed for the military which is designed to be used against vehicles and other harder targets. Those very high powered rounds are available on the civilian market.
There are other very dangerous modifications, including the ability to have a rifle that is legally a semi-automatic weapon, but functionally an automatic weapon. These completely legal devices are called "sliding stock" devices which allow shooters to bump-fire their weapons. They serve no practical purpose, even the advertisement admits that it's a "recreational" device.
Here's a young woman demonstrating the same principal on another rifle:
These are legally semi-automatic weapons because the trigger is pulled each time the weapon fires. You can see the weapon vibrating, going further back and forward than it normally would. The Recoil is pushing the weapon back, while the shooter pulls the weapon forward. A piece of the stock pushes the shooters finger off of the trigger, and the pressure pulling the gun forward pulls the shooters finger back on the trigger again.
Once again, an automatic weapon is legally defined as a weapon which fires more than one round with a singer trigger pull. This device just allows the shooter to pull the trigger faster, with a significant amount of control and accuracy.
There is no reason for a civilian to own a weapon capable of full automatic fire. Automatic fire from small arms is used by military units for one thing: suppression. If you throw automatic weapons fire at an enemy, it forces that enemy to take cover, giving your side breathing room.
In all three cases this year, Aurora, Clackamas, and now Newtown, the problem is that it's far, far too easy for mentally ill people to get their hands on these weapons. The DC shooter used a heavily modified version of such weapons
Now, as for solving this problem we need to ask three questions:
Which policies are likely to prevent lunatics from getting their hands on weapons like the AR-15?
Which of those policies are likely to get through John Boehner's congress?
More on all of that later in my second diary, where I discuss the problems with the Assault weapons ban, and why such a law does not go far enough.
This is because under the assault weapons ban, weapons with identical capabilities to the AR-15 would not have been banned. I direct you for an example to this rifle, which is identical in capability to the Bushmaster .223, but which is currently legal in California and would not have been banned by the AWB. The difference is that this rifle only has a 5-round clip as opposed to the 30-round an 100-round clips used in mass shootings.
Expect part two by the end of the week.