higgmond made my day
And I can’t believe Ohai just linked gun rights to a “hobby”. Defending your home and family members lives is now minimized to a “hobby”!?
He linked AR-15 type weapons to a hobby, not all weapons. I own a lever-action .45-70. That is a hobby gun, and it is a hoot to shoot. I also own several handguns - those are my srs bizniss weapons.
Realisitcally, an AR-15 is not a practical home-defense weapon. The rounds will overpenetrate anyone you actually hit and cause collateral damage. Any missed shots (and there will be several, unless you have remarkable aim and incredible trigger discipline) will go through walls and into neighboring rooms, endangering the very people you’re trying to defend. Clearing your house with a long gun isn’t practical if you don’t know how to check corners without giving away your position by sticking an 18 inch barrel out into a hallway. The muzzle flash has a high potential to blind you, if it’s night and the area is dark.
All these issues also affect shotguns, although overpenetration is not much of a problem with shot instead of slugs.
Better to have a handgun, so you can 1) peep around corners without giving yourself away, 2) move into an area without presenting the bad guy(s) an easy opportunity to grab the barrel and disarm you, 3) quicker sight alignment, 4) more mobility( “ready gun” is much easier to maintain with a handgun), 5) less muzzle flash and muzzle report to negatively affect your own senses.
I enjoy shooting AR-15s. They make it easy to maintain a high rate of accurate, sustained fire. So does Ma Deuce. Good for hobbies, yes. Good for hunting, sure. Good for defending your home against intruders? Not so much.
Disagree. I just had two active infantry guys weigh in and say the 223 is a great home defense caliber. Frankly any decently loaded handgun round will penetrate walls to nearly the same degree as a 223 but often with lower accuracy from a handgun than a carbine. If you’re worried your 223 could go through a wall and hit someone but fire your .40 or .45 in the same direction, you’re risking killing your own family. If you’re that concerned about overpenetration using pure hollowpoints (rather than fmj) a direct hit should not be passing through someone with enough momentum or mass to then pass through a wall. People using this week argument are typically unexperienced enough to not realize you can specifically choose lighter grain rounds without a jacket to almost completely mitigate that risk to the same level as a pistol. I’ve dug the fragmented remains of 223 rounds out of dirt mounds consistently less than six inches in. Not to mention that not all assault weapons are 223. You could easily buy a semi auto 9mm carbine like an UZI since the debate is about assault weapons as a whole and not just AR15’s. I would guess an UZI could do AT LEAST as much damage as an AR15 in these types of scenarios. If skill level is the concern, then simply train better. You’ll never see a swat team go into a house with their handguns out and leave their carbines behind. I doubt that they’re using the wrong guns. It is highly effective home defense weapon. If someone was in my home and I had any reason to believe they were armed as well, I would go for an AR (if I had one available) 100%. And none of this questions the assault weapon’s other key role in home defense from the state.
Fair enough.
True. A sheetrock wall is not cover against any bullet. That comment was a hasty attempt to make a point that is often overlooked - where will misplaced shots go. I should also have clarified that my comments were generalized for Average Joe AR-15 owner, not people who actually have extensive training on the platform.
For what it’s worth, a Remington Hydrashock 230 grain .45 hollowpoint has a muzzle velocity of 900 ft/sec. A Remington 55 grain .223 softpoint flies out at 3240 ft/sec. The .223 will retain its ability to injure at a much greater distance - and through more household objects - than the .45.
Sources:
http://www.ballistics101.com/45_acp.php
http://www.ballistics101.com/223_remington.php
http://www.theppsc.org/Staff_Views/Aveni/OIS.pdf
The hit ratios of fairly well trained people are not great, as specifically illustrated on pages 5-9 and 14. I don’t expect Average Joe to do any better.
Unfortunately, I have not found a source that breaks down police shootings by handgun vs long gun, so these results don’t paint the whole picture.
Also true. They also (usually) are trained to look beyond the target and not shoot through the window behind him and into the neighbor’s house.
I said it wasn’t practical, not that it wasn’t effective. 45-70 and .25 magnum are also effective against human targets; that doesn’t make them practical in a burglar-or-three-in-the-middle-of-the-night scenario. 223 - and other rifle calibers - has what I consider a disproportionately high risk of collateral damage in a civilian residential setting.
Not relevant. If Palantir is elected dictator and firearm seizure becomes a thing, they will be coming for gun owners with APCs and a company of Marines. Maybe even an Apache helicopter, if some of the gun safe pictures floating around Facebook are to be believed. A family that refuses to comply will be cannon fodder, whether they can engage “the Man” at 300 yards with an assault rifle or at 10 yards with a .380 pistol.
I’m not sure what just happened. But I like this new guy.
how does one compare the avg joe gun owner to a swat team.
on side note STL is on point 
Indeed sir, I like the way you think. Gun toting rednecks will submit to the power of the State!
Random thing, we were talking about long guns vs hand guns for home defense before lunch at one of my old jobs. One guy made a pretty convincing case about how if someone breaks in with soft body armor ect ect:… During my lunch break, i picked up a burger or something and an ar-15 from a sporting goods store. When I got home, I realized it didn’t even have sights so I bought an eotech sight, I think. I took it to the range once and now I just field strip, clean, and oil it once a year. It’s kind of a pain, more steps than most pistols.
Again, you’re looking at muzzle velocity on the round. A low grain true hollow point 223 (not fmj) has less mass than even a small 9mm and will partially fragment even after hitting a drywall and fail to travel far with any significant impact due the lost stability. If it hits a person nothing of substance will exit. That’s a fact, it’s what they’re designed for. You can literally buy a round of of a small enough grain that risks fragmenting in the barrel. But all of that is irrelevant if you consider my point about AR carbines chambered in 9mm, which would also fall under such a ban and these guns would be just as effective in both home defense:
http://www.wilsoncombat.com/ar9-carbine/
RE hit rates, hit rates are low for the averge joe, but nearly always higher with a carbine. Ergo, why a carbine can be safer.
RE carbine vs pistol in clearing a house. An MK18 varient like I own is barely extends further than pistol when moving through a house in raised stance.
The rest after that pretty much falls apart from this point.
As far as the point the infantry made (they have experience fighting insurgents and one is a history major and current infantry officer in the army) the US is a large country. In a mass uprising (not a few households) 1) the military does not have enough of the high tech hardware to fully suppress the population. They would be outnumbered in the streets against even a large subset of the population and 2) it would be unlikely to even go that far. Most militaries will not use excessive force against their own population. See Lee and the southern military’s defection in the civil war, Egypt’s military’s role in deposing the rule when forced to choose, etc etc etc. History plays this out. By being well armed enough that the goverment is forced to make this choice in such an event (rather than just quietly arresting everyone) you can win without having to actually win the fight. If you need evidence, realize we’re still fighting in Afghanistan 15 years later, in a country with 10% of the US’s population and a 38% literacy rate.
Anyhow, like I said, the best (SWAT teams) use carbines when entering. If training is the issue, train better. Civilians can take home tactics classes. If you don’t want to train, don’t use a carbine, but don’t try to make the point that in the hands of a well trained shooter, a carbine isn’t the best.
Huh. Well I guess this thread isn’t dead yet.
And Sportbiker, I realized you just compared a 55 grain 223 round to a 230 grain.45 and focused entirely on muzzle velocity while completely ignoring mass (really???), basically making my ensuing point for me. This is particularly important in short range applications where the first impact (whether a thin wall or other object) will be met almost immediately so decelertion of the round will not be a factor. P=MV, so Momentum= MASS x velocity. A low grain round such as a .223, particularly in true hollowpoint form will quickly deform, fragment and destabilize, loosing nearly all of it’s momentum at a rate nearly equivalent to or greater than that of a high mass pistol round. The point here being, you can specify your round to your usage, which an experienced shooter should be doing.
But we can go around in circles on cartridges all day (two pro shooters will tell you you the 40 is both the best and worst handgun round depending on preference). I’m fine to let that one go. The fact remains that nearly every popular AR is available chambered in a wide variety of rounds (including 9mm or 45 for an AR-15 style carbine) so the point you are trying to make essentially is null and void.
The thing is, my first reaction to these shootings is nearly always to fall into the pro-ban camp. But when I actually begin to dig into the statistics on AR usage and encounter then ubiquitous misinformation or half truths of the anti-AR camp, I always wind up back in the same position, realizing it’s just misinformed pop science and media hype.
Police told papers they are gun enthusiasts and pose no threat. The guns themselves are likely not illegal (you can drive through manhattan with guns as long as your travel is uninterrupted and you do not stop at any point in the city) but the drugs are going to be a problem. What blows my mind is that they had these drugs and guns in a car that basically screamed “pull me over” with a cracked windshield to boot.
so if you stop for gas…
The 2A isn’t there to cover self-defense, hunting, hobbies, or resisting State power. People like to refer to the “Founding Fathers” as a monolithic group who shared broad agreement on the role of the state and federal governments. That view is completely wrong.
Some members supported using a standing army, and others instead believed in using militias composed of citizens. It is important to remember that no US Army, Navy, or Air Force existed at this time (it was a very different world). The idea is to allow people to have arms so they can militarily defend the nation. Switzerland has a similar type of idea, although not exactly the same.
Given this reality, the point of the second amendment is not to resist the State, but to support it. Same goes for things like self-defense, hunting, and hobbies. Great things, but not 2A issues.
These NAY Senators voted today for the right of folks on the Terrorist Watch List to buy assault weapons. This Day in Congress is Bought to You By the NRA. But, as my Love Warrior sister Nelba – who lost her baby in in Sandy Hook – vows: “Elephants and Mamas Never Forget.” Dear NAY Senators, We see you. And we will Remember in November. Us
Those who voted NAY and payments received from the NRA.
There are no bounds…
From Across America Patch-
"Here’s a look at the proposed amendments and how they fared:
- Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley suggested strengthening mental health records in the nation’s background check system. His measure fell seven votes short.
- Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who led an impassioned, 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floorlast week, wanted to require background checks at gun shows and for online sales. That proposal was 16 votes short.
- Republican Sen. John Cornyn’s proposal to allow a judge to block the sale of anyone on a government terrorism watch list failed by seven votes.
- And Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s suggestion to completely ban all gun sales to people on a terrorism watch list went down by 13 votes."
Why are democrats celebrated as impassioned when they filibuster but republicans are derided as obstructionists?
Why didn’t the Dems vote for the Republican supported gun measures? Isn’t something better than nothing?