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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch the Red
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.
In the short term? Absolutely not. In the long term? Only if coupled with a lot of other policies.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
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.
