One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the sheer naivete of people endorsing violence as a solution to various problems. It is, of course, a cleverly concealed naivete, insofar as favouring violence can make you feel like a toughminded badass, and look down your nose at the idealistic peaceniks and their Kumbaya fantasies. And while it's true that there's a lot of pacifism that is pretty unrealistic (bad guys will not simply lay down their arms), there also seems to be this ridiculous belief that violence can be contained, that it will serve us faithfully, that it will only do what we want it to do and then it'll stop.
Case in point: there's a cluster of memes that have been circulating for some time now with various images underlying text that reads something to the effect of: "If duelling made a comeback, people these days would be a whole lot less 'offended'."
Now, to begin with, no they wouldn't. People would be at least as offended as they are now, in no small part because threatening people with violence for expressing themselves in a way you don't like is not far from the top of the list of offensive behaviours. It's probably true that they'd be less inclined to complain about being offended, but that's not at all the same thing.
But that's the people who aren't good at duelling, or those who are but just really don't want to have to kill someone. Among the people who enjoy violence and are good at it, being offended would become a popular and lucrative hobby. It's amazing how easy it is to be offended by, say, the business rival of a client, or someone your client really really doesn't want as an in-law...
This is pretty much exactly what happened in Scandinavia, back in the days when holmgang was a lawful way of resolving disputes. Not surprisingly, there were people who made a living going around picking fights with people, and the only people who could defeat them were too busy making their living the same way. Eventually it was abolished because it was profoundly unjust and horribly abused.
Oh, but it was abused. That wasn't how it was supposed to work. Some bad apples took a perfectly sensible system that would have worked just fine to make everyone be polite and respectful to each other, and they corrupted it into something evil.
See, there's the naivete I'm talking about. This amazingly selective approach to violence, this belief that we can allow duelling as a remedy only for people who are legitimately, sincerely offended, while somehow magically excluding it from people who are only pretending to be offended for some ulterior motive. It's that same fantastic belief that leads people to think we can somehow magically tell the difference between good guys with guns and bad guys with guns. Or that it's important to ensure the population is armed so they can overthrow the government if it becomes too tyrannical, because somehow it'll only be good decent law-and-freedom loving patriots who would be able to seize power from the tyrants by force of arms, and not evil ambitious tyrants who want to seize power for themselves by force of arms.
I understand being frustrated with the political process, losing faith in democracy and negotiation. and despairing of ever being able to fix things by these means. And I know what it is to feel certain beyond a reasonable doubt in the righteousness of my cause to warrant meting out just punishment to the evil-doer. I've been temped by violence many times, and still am from time to time. I've heard the beast ask to be let out of its cage, just a little bit, just to get that one guy who really really deserves it and that'll be the end of it. But that beast lies, and it is naive to trust it to go back into the cage.
Saturday, 24 March 2018
Saturday, 3 March 2018
What's all this about assault rifles?
Disclosure: When it comes to guns, I am neither an enthusiast nor an expert. That said, I aspire to Socratic wisdom in most subjects, which is to say that I try to learn enough to have a good idea of just how much there is I don't know. And in so doing, I often learn enough to recognize when someone else does not know what they're talking about.
In the gun control debate, I am beginning to recognize a lot of that on both sides. I'm sympathetic to those gun enthusiasts who criticize gun control advocates for not knowing what they're talking about when they say they want to ban assault rifles and who seem to be concerned more with what the weapon looks like than how it works.
The enthusiast may go on to cite that an assault rifle is defined as a select-fire rifle that fires an intermediate cartridge stored in a detachable magazine. Select-fire means you can switch between semi-automatic (the weapon fires one bullet per pull of the trigger) and automatic fire (it fires more than one bullet per trigger pull). And, since full-auto weapons are already largely restricted from civilian hands and the AR15 is normally only available in semi-automatic configurations, it's not even a true assault rifle and you dumb ignorant gun-grabbers don't even know what you're talking about so shut up.
Well, that's true, as far as it goes. But the select-fire distinction isn't really quite as meaningful as that makes it sound, at least as far as assault rifles are concerned. And here's where I'm going to talk technically about guns without being an expert.
Anti-gun people often like to say that assault rifles are designed to kill large numbers of people very quickly, but that's not quite true. They are designed to be effective combat weapons, which means they're meant to be used against similarly armed people who are also actively trying to shoot back. For combat, semi-automatic fire and a large magazine is essential. It just so happens that these properties also make them ridiculously efficient at killing lots of people who are not firing back.
See, in just about any kind of combat, you have to commit yourself to an attack. While you're in the en garde position with a sword, for example, you are ready to strike, parry, advance, retreat, depending on what you need to do. But when you commit to an attack, say, a lunge, you move out of the ready position, and your options suddenly narrow for a time. That's why we train so often to recover from a lunge, so that we can quickly return to the en garde position; you're vulnerable mid-attack, or mid-parry, or mid anything other than a guard position.
It's the same with firearms. When you're in a ready position, you can aim and fire at a target of opportunity, or duck for cover, or advance or retreat. When you commit to firing a shot, you lose these other options for as long as it takes for you to recover from the recoil and reload for the next shot. In the days of muskets and muzzle-loading cannon, this took quite some time, and in fact that's where the tradition of the gun salute comes from: by firing your gun into the air, you demonstrated peaceful intentions since your weapon was now unloaded.
So just as fencers gain an advantage by being able to recover into the en garde position quickly, combatants with firearms need to be able to return to their ready position quickly after firing. This is what has driven so many advances in firearm technology over the years, from pre-measured paper packet of gunpowder to the Remington repeating rifle to the Colt revolver to the modern semi-automatic, where the gun automatically ejects a spent shell casing and chambers a new round after firing, so you are back in your ready-to-fire position a fraction of a second after pulling the trigger. And this is important because real firefights are not just blasting away at enemy targets; they involve cover and concealment, maneuvering for position, feints and withdrawals and all sorts of tactical stuff I don't know about, because remember that the enemy is also trying to shoot back. So the less time you spend reloading, the more time you are ready to act or react, and the more effective you'll be.
Now, once you have a gun that reloads itself after firing, it's a ridiculously easy matter to make it fire again and again and again while the trigger is still held in the firing position, so fully-automatic machine-guns are a natural consequence of this development. Machine guns fire full auto, hosing down an area with a continuous stream of bullets. We think of the appalling slaughter of the early part of the First World War, where a single machine gun nest could mow down hundreds of soldiers at a time as they tried to charge. And not coincidentally, a weapon designed to efficiently stop a massed infantry charge is just as efficient against massed civilians in a shopping mall.
Full auto is, to be sure, a terrifying thing, but it's actually not what makes an assault rifle effective. In fact, they tried having your basic infantry assault rifle be full auto for a while in Vietnam, but it turned out to be a really, really bad idea. It used up a ridiculous amount of ammunition (which is heavy to carry around and thus never available in unlimited quantities), and didn't actually kill more enemies. Sure, it has its uses, but that's why infantry squads have a dedicated light machinegunner. Today, the typical assault rifle's selector does not have a setting for full-auto; instead, it can be set to fire a burst of 3 rounds per pull of the trigger.
Remember that the main value in a semi-automatic weapon in combat is that you spend more time in your ready position, and less time reloading between attacks (pulls of the trigger). The more bullets fired per attack, the fewer attacks you can make before you have to reload. So it's actually better, for the most part, not to be firing bursts all the time.
So that's why I say that the distinction between the semi-automatic AR15 and the select-fire capability of a military assault rifle isn't really that significant. (I'm not absolutely clear on why military assault rifles even have a burst setting, though I imagine it's for when you're reasonably confident you're actually going to hit the target and want to make sure you do damage, while maybe semi-auto fire is more for covering fire, making the enemy keep his head down while your buddy moves to a better position, stuff like that.)
They can both fire the same number of attacks in the same amount of time; on burst setting, the military weapon will make fewer attacks, but those attacks will probably do more damage with three bullets instead of just one. And when firing at unarmoured civilian targets, that's just overkill.
So bickering about whether or not an AR15 is technically an "assault rifle" is an unimportant distraction from the question as to whether or not they should be restricted. Select-fire or just semi-automatic, the weapon was designed for battle. Not for hunting, not for target practice, not for home defence (the typical home defense scenario is not a prolonged firefight). Battle.
I'm not going to argue here whether or not such weapons should be in private hands. I've already made my position on gun control fairly clear in other posts, and we can argue in the comment threads there. But feel free to correct me if I've made factual errors in my discussion of weapons and tactics.
In the gun control debate, I am beginning to recognize a lot of that on both sides. I'm sympathetic to those gun enthusiasts who criticize gun control advocates for not knowing what they're talking about when they say they want to ban assault rifles and who seem to be concerned more with what the weapon looks like than how it works.
The enthusiast may go on to cite that an assault rifle is defined as a select-fire rifle that fires an intermediate cartridge stored in a detachable magazine. Select-fire means you can switch between semi-automatic (the weapon fires one bullet per pull of the trigger) and automatic fire (it fires more than one bullet per trigger pull). And, since full-auto weapons are already largely restricted from civilian hands and the AR15 is normally only available in semi-automatic configurations, it's not even a true assault rifle and you dumb ignorant gun-grabbers don't even know what you're talking about so shut up.
Well, that's true, as far as it goes. But the select-fire distinction isn't really quite as meaningful as that makes it sound, at least as far as assault rifles are concerned. And here's where I'm going to talk technically about guns without being an expert.
Anti-gun people often like to say that assault rifles are designed to kill large numbers of people very quickly, but that's not quite true. They are designed to be effective combat weapons, which means they're meant to be used against similarly armed people who are also actively trying to shoot back. For combat, semi-automatic fire and a large magazine is essential. It just so happens that these properties also make them ridiculously efficient at killing lots of people who are not firing back.
See, in just about any kind of combat, you have to commit yourself to an attack. While you're in the en garde position with a sword, for example, you are ready to strike, parry, advance, retreat, depending on what you need to do. But when you commit to an attack, say, a lunge, you move out of the ready position, and your options suddenly narrow for a time. That's why we train so often to recover from a lunge, so that we can quickly return to the en garde position; you're vulnerable mid-attack, or mid-parry, or mid anything other than a guard position.
It's the same with firearms. When you're in a ready position, you can aim and fire at a target of opportunity, or duck for cover, or advance or retreat. When you commit to firing a shot, you lose these other options for as long as it takes for you to recover from the recoil and reload for the next shot. In the days of muskets and muzzle-loading cannon, this took quite some time, and in fact that's where the tradition of the gun salute comes from: by firing your gun into the air, you demonstrated peaceful intentions since your weapon was now unloaded.
So just as fencers gain an advantage by being able to recover into the en garde position quickly, combatants with firearms need to be able to return to their ready position quickly after firing. This is what has driven so many advances in firearm technology over the years, from pre-measured paper packet of gunpowder to the Remington repeating rifle to the Colt revolver to the modern semi-automatic, where the gun automatically ejects a spent shell casing and chambers a new round after firing, so you are back in your ready-to-fire position a fraction of a second after pulling the trigger. And this is important because real firefights are not just blasting away at enemy targets; they involve cover and concealment, maneuvering for position, feints and withdrawals and all sorts of tactical stuff I don't know about, because remember that the enemy is also trying to shoot back. So the less time you spend reloading, the more time you are ready to act or react, and the more effective you'll be.
Now, once you have a gun that reloads itself after firing, it's a ridiculously easy matter to make it fire again and again and again while the trigger is still held in the firing position, so fully-automatic machine-guns are a natural consequence of this development. Machine guns fire full auto, hosing down an area with a continuous stream of bullets. We think of the appalling slaughter of the early part of the First World War, where a single machine gun nest could mow down hundreds of soldiers at a time as they tried to charge. And not coincidentally, a weapon designed to efficiently stop a massed infantry charge is just as efficient against massed civilians in a shopping mall.
Full auto is, to be sure, a terrifying thing, but it's actually not what makes an assault rifle effective. In fact, they tried having your basic infantry assault rifle be full auto for a while in Vietnam, but it turned out to be a really, really bad idea. It used up a ridiculous amount of ammunition (which is heavy to carry around and thus never available in unlimited quantities), and didn't actually kill more enemies. Sure, it has its uses, but that's why infantry squads have a dedicated light machinegunner. Today, the typical assault rifle's selector does not have a setting for full-auto; instead, it can be set to fire a burst of 3 rounds per pull of the trigger.
Remember that the main value in a semi-automatic weapon in combat is that you spend more time in your ready position, and less time reloading between attacks (pulls of the trigger). The more bullets fired per attack, the fewer attacks you can make before you have to reload. So it's actually better, for the most part, not to be firing bursts all the time.
So that's why I say that the distinction between the semi-automatic AR15 and the select-fire capability of a military assault rifle isn't really that significant. (I'm not absolutely clear on why military assault rifles even have a burst setting, though I imagine it's for when you're reasonably confident you're actually going to hit the target and want to make sure you do damage, while maybe semi-auto fire is more for covering fire, making the enemy keep his head down while your buddy moves to a better position, stuff like that.)
They can both fire the same number of attacks in the same amount of time; on burst setting, the military weapon will make fewer attacks, but those attacks will probably do more damage with three bullets instead of just one. And when firing at unarmoured civilian targets, that's just overkill.
So bickering about whether or not an AR15 is technically an "assault rifle" is an unimportant distraction from the question as to whether or not they should be restricted. Select-fire or just semi-automatic, the weapon was designed for battle. Not for hunting, not for target practice, not for home defence (the typical home defense scenario is not a prolonged firefight). Battle.
I'm not going to argue here whether or not such weapons should be in private hands. I've already made my position on gun control fairly clear in other posts, and we can argue in the comment threads there. But feel free to correct me if I've made factual errors in my discussion of weapons and tactics.
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