New IS attack in Paris

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Originally Posted by Aimless

Going by the definitions in the assault weapons ban bill that was defeated in 2013, a third (possibly more) of the guns used in your latest mass-shootings would have been deemed illegal primarily due to the inclusion of high capacity magazines. I'm not sure how much of a reduction in non-gang-related mass-shootings one might be able to expect from such a ban in the near term. I wonder how many mass-shootings may be expected to be prevented through other means that address "root causes" without addressing means.

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Even if you were able to ban high capacity magazines, and let's go one step farther and say you were able to somehow confiscate all the high capacity magazines currently in circulation, (which is the only way I could see such a bill having an impact given the huge number of magazines that are in private hands) then you have done two things. One, you have created a brand new black market for high capacity magazines, a market that a novice with a 3D printer could easily participate in, and two, only made it slightly harder for someone to commit a mass shooting. Reloading, especially by someone who has spent some time practicing, is not a challenging thing to do, nor is it time consuming. This could probably best be illustrated by the following video.

All right, I guess you guys're completely fucked then. Some bed you've made for yourselves. The only remaining solution is Chris Rock's bullet-pricing strategy

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Originally Posted by Aimless

All right, I guess you guys're completely fucked then. Some bed you've made for yourselves. The only remaining solution is Chris Rock's bullet-pricing strategy

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I guess I don't even see that as a terribly effective strategy. Someone who is willing to give up their life probably wouldn't blanch at spending their savings on enough bullets to cause the kind of damage they are wanting to cause. Or ambushing a police officer and taking his guns and ammunition.

I dunno man, he proposed a price of $5000 per bullet which in today's dollar value would be something like $7200. With the typical insane shooter seemingly not being particularly wealthy that might be a problem. And if some rich nutjob decided it was worth the cost, well, it would draw some attention.

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Originally Posted by Aimless

I dunno man, he proposed a price of $5000 per bullet which in today's dollar value would be something like $7200. With the typical insane shooter seemingly not being particularly wealthy that might be a problem. And if some rich nutjob decided it was worth the cost, well, it would draw some attention.

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Well then you are back to creating a thriving black market. I'd be tempted to part with a small percentage of my ammunition for the bargain basement price of $50 a bullet.

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Originally Posted by Aimless

All right, I guess you guys're completely fucked then. Some bed you've made for yourselves. The only remaining solution is Chris Rock's bullet-pricing strategy

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Yeah because mental health and urban reform, plus actually going to after the assholes that provoking and doing this shit, isn't a solution either....

Incidentally, it's incredibly dishonest to claim that an AR-15 only does bad things in the hands of bad people, and then do virtually nothing to keep the weapon out of the hands of bad people.

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Originally Posted by Loki

Using this argument, why are we spending hundreds of billions to deal with terrorism? It kills fewer Americans than lightning strikes.

Are you that obtuse? One could kill a handful of people, the other dozens. With equal effort. One is useful for defending oneself, the other is useful if defending against an enemy army.

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Exactly. We as a society set often policy priorities around emotions.

On the AR-15 issue, I assume you realize the previous "record-holder" for a shooting was Virginia Tech, which was conducted entirely with 9mm and .22 handguns?

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Originally Posted by Asmodian

So far the only reason to own an automatic gun is because it is fun, which I totally agree with fun is important!! But I don't see whats wrong in making the guns available to shoot at targets in a controlled environment like a shooting gallery. Guns can be stored there people come in pay an hourly and munitions fee get the gun they want and have fun!! It can be done in a supervised manner and there could be legal requirements for the facility to meet certain safety standards. I don't really see why you need the gun at home.

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I don't believe in banning something simply because it could harm someone else and only does so at insanely low incidence rates. If something can harm someone else, we generally ban the harmful act.

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Originally Posted by Aimless

All right, I guess you guys're completely fucked then. Some bed you've made for yourselves. The only remaining solution is Chris Rock's bullet-pricing strategy

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The other bed didn't seem to stop two major gun massacres in Paris last year.

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Originally Posted by Loki

Are you always this dishonest? You look at outliers when it comes to handgun use and ignoring the very obvious fact that it's a heck of a lot easier to kill more people with a weapon that shoots faster, has deadlier ammo, and doesn't have to be reloaded every few shots.

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I want to add a purely technical note to echo some of Enoch's comments. It is by no means clear that rounds fired by a semiautomatic rifle are deadlier than rounds fired by a handgun (BTW, the rifle used in Orlando was *not* an AR-15, but these comments work broadly across different rifle designs). Rifles differ from handguns in a variety of manners - in general, they have higher muzzle velocities, better accuracy, and longer ranges. Yet their deadliness has a lot more to do with the skill of the shooter and the type of ammunition than with the firearm choice. Famously, the M-16 in widespread use by the US and other armed forces (and the basis for the civilian AR-15) has at times been criticized for putting holes in people but not putting them 'down' - i.e. while it's a very powerful weapon, its stopping power is limited. Bullets that fragment or otherwise change on impact cause a given weapon to have much greater stopping power; also, higher calibers may be more deadly, though the actual details are complex.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that a semiautomatic rifle would be favored over a smaller weapon for producing maximal casualties at a mass shooting. Rifles are useful for long ranges, and (automatic) rifles are useful for needing to unload a lot of lead quickly. But smaller weapons - whether handguns or machine pistols or shorter rifled weapons like bullpup or carbine designs - work much better in confined spaces than a bulky full-size rifle. Several militaries and branches of militaries have moved to compact primary weapons due to changing battlefields, especially as one gets into urban warfare - they aren't relying on handguns, of course, but they are using much smaller weapons than people typically think of when we talk about assault weapons. Many civilian 'assault weapons' are carbine designs, so they're a bit shorter, but far from the most easily maneuvered in tight spaces. I would imagine that if a trained operator was trying to kill everyone in a small space, they'd use a machine pistol or the like loaded with appropriate ammunition. Fortunately mass shooters are rarely trained and frequently nuts - that means that they buy scary looking guns but aren't necessarily optimizing their weaponry for the planned attack. It also suggests that appropriate policy might not just focus on specific weapons but more broadly on the availability of firearms as a whole.

All of the current suggestions - such as outlawing high capacity magazines or certain classes of rifles - are nibbling at the edges of a much bigger problem. Let's be honest about it and try to actually change things.

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Originally Posted by Dreadnaught

I don't believe in banning something simply because it could harm someone else and only does so at insanely low incidence rates. If something can harm someone else, we generally ban the harmful act.

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I think the fundamental difference here is that it's hard to imagine a circumstance where many firearms could be used without harming someone. Your argument works well for an object that has intrinsic worth or usefulness outside of killing people. When it doesn't, such as with firearms, the case must be made to keep them, rather than to outlaw them - even if the incidence of deaths per weapon is quite low.

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Originally Posted by Loki

Incidentally, it's incredibly dishonest to claim that an AR-15 only does bad things in the hands of bad people, and then do virtually nothing to keep the weapon out of the hands of bad people.

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Remember that the next time you drink alcohol.....

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Originally Posted by wiggin

I want to add a purely technical note to echo some of Enoch's comments. It is by no means clear that rounds fired by a semiautomatic rifle are deadlier than rounds fired by a handgun (BTW, the rifle used in Orlando was *not* an AR-15, but these comments work broadly across different rifle designs). Rifles differ from handguns in a variety of manners - in general, they have higher muzzle velocities, better accuracy, and longer ranges. Yet their deadliness has a lot more to do with the skill of the shooter and the type of ammunition than with the firearm choice. Famously, the M-16 in widespread use by the US and other armed forces (and the basis for the civilian AR-15) has at times been criticized for putting holes in people but not putting them 'down' - i.e. while it's a very powerful weapon, its stopping power is limited. Bullets that fragment or otherwise change on impact cause a given weapon to have much greater stopping power; also, higher calibers may be more deadly, though the actual details are complex.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that a semiautomatic rifle would be favored over a smaller weapon for producing maximal casualties at a mass shooting. Rifles are useful for long ranges, and (automatic) rifles are useful for needing to unload a lot of lead quickly. But smaller weapons - whether handguns or machine pistols or shorter rifled weapons like bullpup or carbine designs - work much better in confined spaces than a bulky full-size rifle. Several militaries and branches of militaries have moved to compact primary weapons due to changing battlefields, especially as one gets into urban warfare - they aren't relying on handguns, of course, but they are using much smaller weapons than people typically think of when we talk about assault weapons. Many civilian 'assault weapons' are carbine designs, so they're a bit shorter, but far from the most easily maneuvered in tight spaces. I would imagine that if a trained operator was trying to kill everyone in a small space, they'd use a machine pistol or the like loaded with appropriate ammunition. Fortunately mass shooters are rarely trained and frequently nuts - that means that they buy scary looking guns but aren't necessarily optimizing their weaponry for the planned attack. It also suggests that appropriate policy might not just focus on specific weapons but more broadly on the availability of firearms as a whole.

All of the current suggestions - such as outlawing high capacity magazines or certain classes of rifles - are nibbling at the edges of a much bigger problem. Let's be honest about it and try to actually change things.


I think the fundamental difference here is that it's hard to imagine a circumstance where many firearms could be used without harming someone. Your argument works well for an object that has intrinsic worth or usefulness outside of killing people. When it doesn't, such as with firearms, the case must be made to keep them, rather than to outlaw them - even if the incidence of deaths per weapon is quite low.

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But don't you think that legislators would take into account that IF they regulate at all (which I still have to see) they'd have to cover a range of weapons that are dangerous rather than just look more dangerous.

By the way, the 'limited killing effectiveness' of M16/AR15, given the original area where the military version was used, couldn't that have been intentional to an extent? A dead soldier is a dead soldier, a wounded soldier is a potential burden on the war effort of your opponents.

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Originally Posted by Hazir

But don't you think that legislators would take into account that IF they regulate at all (which I still have to see) they'd have to cover a range of weapons that are dangerous rather than just look more dangerous.

By the way, the 'limited killing effectiveness' of M16/AR15, given the original area where the military version was used, couldn't that have been intentional to an extent? A dead soldier is a dead soldier, a wounded soldier is a potential burden on the war effort of your opponents.

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They didn't last time there was an 'assualt' weapons ban.

It's all theater with Congress.

WRT: Intentional Design of limited killing effectiveness. I'll direct you to the movie: The Pentagon Wars. Weapon development is not always to make the most effective weapon...but to mass produce (and get that new star on your lapel).

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Originally Posted by Veldan Rath

They didn't last time there was an 'assualt' weapons ban.

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Didn't they attempt to in the 2013 AWB bill that was defeated?

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Originally Posted by Spenni

Yeah because mental health and urban reform, plus actually going to after the assholes that provoking and doing this shit, isn't a solution either....

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In a better world it might be a solution. In the US today? I don't know if it's much more likely to succeed in preventing mass-shootings than eg. $7k bullets. Can it succeed in reducing the number of suicides? Perhaps. Probably not by much. Can it succeed in reducing gang-related deaths? Maybe, but probably not by much. Accidents? Deaths related to domestic issues etc? Maybe a little. Probably not by much.

Mental health and urban reform, whatever that may entail, are certainly worthwhile things to pursue but their greatest benefit isn't likely to be a major reduction in gun-deaths and that shouldn't be their main justification.

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Originally Posted by Hazir

But don't you think that legislators would take into account that IF they regulate at all (which I still have to see) they'd have to cover a range of weapons that are dangerous rather than just look more dangerous.

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The problem is that in some circumstances a handgun is just as deadly (or deadlier) than an 'assault rifle'. The assault weapons ban was riddled with so many loopholes that it was nearly pointless, and any similar legislation is likely to follow a similar path. We've already seen that blanket restrictions on handgun ownership fall afoul of SCOTUS so there's honestly not that much you can do on the specific weapons question - there's a bit more you could do on restricting ownership/background checks, but that is at best a marginal improvement given the large number of homicides carried out with illegally obtained/used weapons.

Honestly I think gun control advocates would do better making a solid case for repealing the 2nd amendment, while in parallel they work on policies that might actually reduce gun violence in the interim.

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By the way, the 'limited killing effectiveness' of M16/AR15, given the original area where the military version was used, couldn't that have been intentional to an extent? A dead soldier is a dead soldier, a wounded soldier is a potential burden on the war effort of your opponents.

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That's pretty verifiably not the case. Several reasons:

1. Most practically, the issue isn't precisely dead vs. wounded, but more 'down' vs. 'active'. You want your weapon to reliably put an enemy soldier out of commission, whether they are dead or wounded badly - if they are just hurt but still functional, they can wreak havoc and endanger your own soldiers - a much more immediate concern than some theoretical discussion about healthcare burdens. It just so happens that weapons/ammunition that reliably incapacitate targets also tend to have a higher fatality rate.

2. There is strong evidence that this was not the intention - first, by the way in which the weapons were designed and tested, and second, by the Pentagon's response to persistent low-level rumors about poor lethality of M16s using NATO standard M855 rounds. There is a lot of debate about whether this is a real issue or not - though it seems more likely to be a bigger problem for e.g. the M4 carbine given lower bullet velocities - but certainly fragmentation of M855 rounds appears to be less than might be desired for maximum stopping power. That's one reason why the Pentagon designed and fielded an improved M855 round specifically to address these issues.

Fundamentally the DoD has two views on the healthcare burden of enemy wounded: either your enemies don't have healthcare systems (being non-state actors or very poor), in which case it's a moot point - OR, they have relatively sophisticated healthcare systems that can easily shoulder the additional burden absent WWI-scale casualties (the real strain tends to be from civilian wounded). In that context, it makes far more sense to focus on making effective weapons systems that incapacitate enemies rather than doing some bean-counting exercise. That's also part of why the old 'one shot, one kill' mantra has long been abandoned in favor of putting multiple rounds through the center of mass of a target for insurance.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko figured out the effectiveness of wounding vs killing back in ww2 (and i'm sure its been a tactic since the beginning of time). Its one of the reasons she is famous.

V. interesting to see the continued Republican opposition to preventing people on the terrorism screening database contrasted with the NRA's u-turn on the matter. Lewk must be v. confused right now :o

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Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer

Lyudmila Pavlichenko figured out the effectiveness of wounding vs killing back in ww2 (and i'm sure its been a tactic since the beginning of time). Its one of the reasons she is famous.

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Largely irrelevant, of course, to whether it makes sense for the Pentagon in the last few decades.

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Originally Posted by wiggin

That's pretty verifiably not the case. Several reasons:

1. Most practically, the issue isn't precisely dead vs. wounded, but more 'down' vs. 'active'. You want your weapon to reliably put an enemy soldier out of commission, whether they are dead or wounded badly - if they are just hurt but still functional, they can wreak havoc and endanger your own soldiers - a much more immediate concern than some theoretical discussion about healthcare burdens. It just so happens that weapons/ammunition that reliably incapacitate targets also tend to have a higher fatality rate.

2. There is strong evidence that this was not the intention - first, by the way in which the weapons were designed and tested, and second, by the Pentagon's response to persistent low-level rumors about poor lethality of M16s using NATO standard M855 rounds. There is a lot of debate about whether this is a real issue or not - though it seems more likely to be a bigger problem for e.g. the M4 carbine given lower bullet velocities - but certainly fragmentation of M855 rounds appears to be less than might be desired for maximum stopping power. That's one reason why the Pentagon designed and fielded an improved M855 round specifically to address these issues.

Fundamentally the DoD has two views on the healthcare burden of enemy wounded: either your enemies don't have healthcare systems (being non-state actors or very poor), in which case it's a moot point - OR, they have relatively sophisticated healthcare systems that can easily shoulder the additional burden absent WWI-scale casualties (the real strain tends to be from civilian wounded). In that context, it makes far more sense to focus on making effective weapons systems that incapacitate enemies rather than doing some bean-counting exercise. That's also part of why the old 'one shot, one kill' mantra has long been abandoned in favor of putting multiple rounds through the center of mass of a target for insurance.

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I think there is another component to consider, which is while the bullets themselves could definitely be made to be more devastating to soft targets, that rounds that are designed to expand rapidly when they enter a target, (e.g. hollow-point bullets) are not in general military use by NATO countries as they have been banned by the 1899 Hague convention. It isn't necessarily purely a technical limitation of the round. While the US never ratified the pertinent declaration, it still does not issue expanding ammunition, (aside from a few edge cases - MPs are issued hollow-point rounds for their sidearms I believe).

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Originally Posted by wiggin

The problem is that in some circumstances a handgun is just as deadly (or deadlier) than an 'assault rifle'. The assault weapons ban was riddled with so many loopholes that it was nearly pointless, and any similar legislation is likely to follow a similar path. We've already seen that blanket restrictions on handgun ownership fall afoul of SCOTUS so there's honestly not that much you can do on the specific weapons question - there's a bit more you could do on restricting ownership/background checks, but that is at best a marginal improvement given the large number of homicides carried out with illegally obtained/used weapons.

Honestly I think gun control advocates would do better making a solid case for repealing the 2nd amendment, while in parallel they work on policies that might actually reduce gun violence in the interim.

<snip>.

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Thanks for that answer, it makes a lot of sense.

As for the target of repealing the second amendment; do you really see that as a feasible way of getting rid of the excessive gun-related violence in the USA?

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Originally Posted by Enoch the Red

I think there is another component to consider, which is while the bullets themselves could definitely be made to be more devastating to soft targets, that rounds that are designed to expand rapidly when they enter a target, (e.g. hollow-point bullets) are not in general military use by NATO countries as they have been banned by the 1899 Hague convention. It isn't necessarily purely a technical limitation of the round. While the US never ratified the pertinent declaration, it still does not issue expanding ammunition, (aside from a few edge cases - MPs are issued hollow-point rounds for their sidearms I believe).

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Certainly, though most hollow point designs sacrifice armor piercing ability in order to get better stopping power on soft targets. The military probably wouldn't want a lot of hollow points (even jacketed slugs) for rifle ammo anyways.

More broadly (and I'm getting to the limits of my ballistics knowledge here), I believe there was a debate early on in whether the M193 or M885 ammunition was better suited for the M16. The M193 tended to fragment on impact (which caused some to argue it was inhumane albeit not illegal), but the M885 (which has a small steel tip inside) had better penetration through intervening materials (glass, foliage, etc.) while still having good armor piercing ability - at the cost of slightly decreased stopping power/fragmentation. There are a lot of tradeoffs in weapons design, especially when you're trying to develop a multipurpose system that can be used across a variety of conditions and needs. The M16 focused on weight and accuracy at the expense of some reliability (high cleaning etc. needs) and needing very high muzzle velocities for its smaller (and thus lighter) ammunition. A squad carrying M16s can carry far more rounds than a similar squad carrying AKs or M14s or the like, which was the primary determinant in the M16 design. That weight and caliber limitation, however, puts limits on how you design your ammo if you need to be able to pierce reasonable infantry armor as well as get decent stopping power against soft targets. The M885 (and its enhanced upgrade) is the approximate compromise they came up with - and M885 ammo is by far the most common ammo used by the AR15 and many of its cousins.

For a mass shooting, the 'needs' are very different, and a rifle shooting high velocity slugs with excellent penetration abilities is probably poorly suited to the job - a handgun or machine pistol with good AP rounds (like hollow points) is almost certainly 'better'. Hollow points do reduce the chances of ricochet and the like (which is why they are favored by law enforcement) but overall I think they would be better suited for a mass shooting if one's goal is maximal casualties.

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Originally Posted by Hazir

Thanks for that answer, it makes a lot of sense.

As for the target of repealing the second amendment; do you really see that as a feasible way of getting rid of the excessive gun-related violence in the USA?

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In the short term? Absolutely not. In the long term? Only if coupled with a lot of other policies.

Let us imagine a fantasy world where an amendment to the Constitution could be passed that would redefine the right to bear arms in a much more explicit and limited fashion (fully repealing the 2nd amendment without replacement would likely be impossible, and I'm not even sure I think it's a good idea). It would be exceedingly difficult for the federal government to go about collecting weapons from people - it is highly likely to be illegal as well. So you'd still have a few hundred million guns in the US, most of them legally owned. And you'd still have all of the social/etc. issues that drive violence and gun violence in the US. Now, you'd be able to slowly take guns off the streets by tried-and-true methods - banning the transfer of weapons from one person to another (so when they die, the gun needs to be given up), gun buybacks, seizures of illegal weapons, etc. The advantage you'd have now is that much fewer legal guns would be making it to the streets, and you could really go after straw buyers and the like to choke off the supply of fresh weapons. So over decades you'd likely to be able to bring the number of guns in circulation down, especially the number of legally obtained ones. One advantage here is that despite the scary number of guns out there, a substantial number are in the hands of a relatively small number of people, and most of those people are not the problem when it comes to gun violence - so even if the total number of weapons stays high for a long time, the number of 'dangerous' weapons (as in who is using them) might decrease much more quickly. Restrictions on ammo purchases would probably help as well, though since ammo is fairly easy to make, making things too restrictive is likely to result in a cottage industry of grey market ammunition.

This would have to be coupled to some pretty big changes in the way Americans see firearms in order to discourage a grey market of pro-gun types who are not otherwise criminals. This is easier said than done, but I imagine it is at least feasible given time and concerted political effort. Furthermore, there's always the issue of black market weapons - those are certainly easier in a society awash in legally obtained weapons, but even in places where personal firearms are much harder to get, terrorists and professional criminals by and large don't have that much trouble getting their hands on weapons. So the real target would be 'casual' gun violence (e.g. low level gang fighting), domestic gun violence (a distressing proportion of homicides), and suicides. Everything else would have to be dealt with by intelligence and policing, as it is today.

There are so many different axes to the issue of gun violence in the US (and violence in general) - our society has good fundamental reasons for being more violent than some other Western countries to start with, and we have entrenched legacies of all sorts of historical problems that lead to deep social ills. So restricting the supply of legal firearms can only be one part of a much more comprehensive policy to address these issues - yes, better mental health treatment and monitoring, and better opportunities for disadvantaged youth, and a change in the way we glorify violence in our culture, etc. But I do think that a sharp reduction in the number of firearms - especially handguns - readily available to people would be part of the solution in the long term.


As an addendum, I'd like to note that secular trends have dramatically decreased the homicide rate (and gun-related homicide) rate in the US irrespective of gun control legislation or other initiatives. Homicides overall (per capita) are near 50-year lows, and gun-related homicides are also dramatically lower than the peak 20-odd years ago. This is likely due to a lot of structural factors that have little to do with gun policy, but it suggests that while we're sorting out gun control there are other things we can do to substantially reduce the gun violence in our society. That doesn't mean we should give up on reducing the supply of firearms - far from it - but perhaps a pragmatic approach that dealt with the 'possible' in parallel with the ideal might yield better results.

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Originally Posted by wiggin

Largely irrelevant, of course, to whether it makes sense for the Pentagon in the last few decades.

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I'd say its extremely relevant with the way war is going now. Against trained armies I can see it being a tactic that wouldn't work well but when you're the invading force and the citizens are possibly the ones out for you its a very useful tactic to draw out the "bad guys" you can't see. Ain't that how that Collateral Murder video went down that raised a shit storm a few years ago?

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Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer

I'd say its extremely relevant with the way war is going now. Against trained armies I can see it being a tactic that wouldn't work well but when you're the invading force and the citizens are possibly the ones out for you its a very useful tactic to draw out the "bad guys" you can't see. Ain't that how that Collateral Murder video went down that raised a shit storm a few years ago?

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I'm not sure I understand the connection you're drawing to the 2007 helicopter attacks - please explicate it further for me.

Regardless, my point is two-fold:

1. Absent a truly high number of casualties, the economic burden of additional wounded troops vs. killed troops is either likely irrelevant (for non state actors) or minor. The real strain on a country comes from the damage to civilian infrastructure and wounded civilians that mess with a country's ability to function economically. In the 'total war' paradigm we saw in the first half of the 20th century this was certainly a valid concern given the millions of casualties and the use of strategic bombing et al against infrastructure and productive capacity. By some readings, the Allied victory in WW2 had a lot to do with the sheer industrial output of the United States coupled with sharp limits on production by Axis powers (especially wrt oil). Since the US adopted the M16 we have not engaged in any kind of war that worked like this - certainly the Vietcong, or the Taliban, or various Iraqi insurgent groups weren't particularly burdened by their wounded. That's because we're generally fighting against non-state actors, even if they may have backing by a much stronger power. On a strategic level, there's little sense in specifically trying to wound vs. kill.

2. I suspect you are more interested in the tactical level. In general, US military doctrine has been to aim for lethal force when engaging enemy soldiers - certainly that's how our troops are trained to shoot. The aforementioned risks to combat troops if threats are not definitively neutralized generally precludes the use of stratagems to, for example, draw out additional enemies. I have no doubt that when an attack results in a wounded enemy with no immediate threat to one's own troops, they will use any circumstances that arise in a tactically useful manner, but I doubt that this is ever a priori policy.

There is an additional complexity here, and that has to do with legal issues re: rules of engagement and proportionality. With the advent of much better situational awareness and targeting, Western militaries have come under a lot of pressure to reduce collateral damage as much as possible. That means that sometimes engaging with the force likely to produce fatalities is not always indicated. For example, both the US and Israel have experimented with very small guided munitions like the SDM or DIMEs in order to accurately hit a target with minimal lethality outside a small blast radius. The problem is that this increases the likelihood that the actual target will not be killed either. This does not suggest a fundamental change in the tactical or strategic calculus, though - the goal is till clearly the death of the target - but rather the impingement of other considerations on determining just how lethal an attack should be. The choice of weapons system have a strong effect on the likelihood of a kill, but I have seen little evidence that US tactical or strategic thinking is trying to reduce the likelihood of a kill so much as trying to reduce the likelihood of collateral damage while still maintaining a reasonably high likelihood of a dead target.

Of course, this whole discussion has a lot more to do with much more powerful weapons than a standard infantry rifle. AFAIK infantrymen are trained to kill, not to wound, especially since the chances of successfully hitting something when aiming at the center of mass are substantially higher than when trying to do something fancy. Is it possible that some fancy-pants snipers are used to wound occasionally for tactical purposes? Maybe, I don't know - but certainly that wouldn't be the basis of designing an entire weapon like the M16 and its associated ammunition around a philosophy of 'wound, not kill'. I am aware of cases in urban combat where combatants who are not immediate threats to troops are fired on with intent to wound - such as poorly armed combatants or those who are in retreat - but that is a marginal case. In pretty much every case, M16s are designed as used with the intent to kill the target. Whether they are effective at this compared to other weapons - especially in close quarters against unarmored targets - is a reasonable question, but suggesting there is intentionality in this deficiency is hard to support.

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Originally Posted by Aimless

V. interesting to see the continued Republican opposition to preventing people on the terrorism screening database contrasted with the NRA's u-turn on the matter. Lewk must be v. confused right now :o

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The problem is I dislike the idea that the government can simply prevent someone from buying guns w/o going to court. I could easily see it being abused. I don't have any issues with purchases made by people on terror watch lists to instantly trigger an investigation however. (Hopefully this time when they talk to someone who celebrated 9/11 and admires martyrs they'll actually do something). The simple reality is that just preventing the purchase of a gun won't stop a determined terrorist.

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Originally Posted by Lewkowski

The problem is I dislike the idea that the government can simply prevent someone from buying guns w/o going to court. I could easily see it being abused. I don't have any issues with purchases made by people on terror watch lists to instantly trigger an investigation however. (Hopefully this time when they talk to someone who celebrated 9/11 and admires martyrs they'll actually do something). The simple reality is that just preventing the purchase of a gun won't stop a determined terrorist.

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You're vastly overestimating just how smart, competent, or dedicated most lone wolf terrorists are.