By the end of this piece, you probably still will not believe that I or any other civilian actually needs an AR That's fine — I wasn't really out to change your mind on that score anyway. I get that you still believe that no civilian should have such a gun. My only hope is that you'll go forth better equipped to talk about gun control based on an understanding of how real live people view and use these firearms.
Note: Before I get started, if you're like Rep. Alan Grayson or Sen. Bernie Sanders , both of whom I admire greatly and neither of whom seems to know the difference between a fully automatic weapon and a semiautomatic weapon, then we should get something straight before going any further: The AR is not an "automatic weapon. In contrast, the AR's military sibling, the M16, is capable of fully automatic fire, which means that the gun will keep spitting out bullets as long as the trigger is pressed and the magazine is loaded.
The AR was originally designed as a weapon of war, for man-killing and not for hunting or for target shooting — this is an obvious fact. But this is also true of most popular firearms throughout history, including your grandpa's lever action hunting rifle.
The vintage Henry lever action rifle — the quintessential 20th century deer rifle — was originally deployed to devastating effect in the Civil War. With its high capacity, rapid rate of fire, and popularity with soldiers and civilians alike, the Henry was the AR of its day, and it was followed over the years by the invention of the even more effective semiautomatic firearm, and then by a succession of long guns that we now generally take to be suitable for civilian use.
The AR, the gun behind some of the worst mass shootings in America, explained. My point in bringing up the lever action rifle is that civilians have been buying "weapons of war" for a very long time, since the black powder musket days. This is partly because soldiers who come home from wars to enter civilian life often want to buy a version of the weapon they were trained on and trusted their life to.
And it's also because "military grade" is widely if sometimes mistakenly understood to mean "this technology has been tested in the real world, the kinks have been worked out, and its reliability and effectiveness have been proven in the field by an entity with the resources of an entire nation at its disposal.
Thus it is that since the dawn of the gunpowder age, gun buyers have snapped up military hardware, because that is often the very best hardware they can get their hands on.
In this respect, today's AR buyers are no different than yesteryear's lever action rifle buyers. This is all part of the reason why I, a civilian, own a military-grade combat weapon. I don't want to shoot and miss; I don't want the gun to jam because it's dirty or cold; and when I'm hunting game I don't want to hit my target and then have it run off into the woods and die lost and wounded because I didn't "bring enough gun. But, you'll argue, isn't the AR uniquely deadly?
Unlike the lever action rifle, isn't the black rifle a weapon of godlike power, suitable only for putting as much lead on the battlefield in as short a time as possible?
And in their desire to own one of these turbocharged weapons of mass slaughter, which is clearly overkill for anything but mowing down herds of humans, aren't today's AR buyers uniquely twisted and callous? Isn't it time that gun buyers settled for second or third or fourth best, for the "good of the their fellow citizens"? The slightly longer answer is that your understanding of what the AR is "for" is all wrong, and says more about Hollywood's portrayal of black rifles than it does about how these guns are used in the real world.
If the AR were a weapon that's suitable only for indiscriminate, spray-n-pray mass slaughter, then it wouldn't be so popular with police. There is no conceivable circumstance in which a police officer — not even a SWAT team member — would need to mow down hordes of people. Yet the AR is the "patrol rifle" of choice for modern police departments from Mayberry to Manhattan.
And when you understand why police have adopted the AR, then you'll understand yet another reason why I own one. The AR is less a model of rifle than it is an open-source, modular weapons platform that can be customized for a whole range of applications, from varmint control to taking out pound feral hogs to urban combat.
Everything about an individual AR can be changed with aftermarket parts — the caliber of ammunition, recoil, range, weight, length, hold and grip, and on and on. In the pre-AR era, if you wanted a gun for shooting little groundhogs, a gun for shooting giant feral hogs, and a gun for home defense, you'd buy three different guns in three different calibers and configurations. With the AR platform, a person with absolutely no gunsmithing expertise can buy one gun and a bunch of accessories, and optimize that gun for the application at hand.
This policy eventually lead to the Indian wars of the late s, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in , where the American cavalry rounded up members of the Lakota tribe, and while disarming them, caused an outbreak of violence in which up to Lakota, including men, women and children, were killed. That was our own government in action, a little over years ago. In the early to mid s, Hitler and Nazi Germany committed genocide against German and Polish Jews in the holocaust, killing over 11 million, men, women and children.
In the s, Cambodia was taken over by the Khmer Rouge, and over two million Cambodians were exterminated as a result. Just two short decades ago Saddam Hussein and his regime committed countless atrocities in Iraq.
And currently, governments in the Middle East are killing their own citizens to stifle their quest for freedom and self-government. I could go on and on! I believe that the first and foremost reason that the American people need the right and ability to possess modern semi-automatic rifles and pistols is to ensure that our own government never feels it is more powerful than its citizens.
A little Internet research indicates the current size of the military is about 1. In addition to about three million soldiers, and we must not forget the over one million law enforcement officers who must also be viewed as government agents. That totals somewhere between three to four million government agents who could be called upon to repress the American people.
Compare that number to the estimated million gun owners in America. As long as the American people have the right to own the very same type of weapons with which the military and police are armed, they need not fear the government. The second reason Americans need high capacity semi- automatic firearms has a more practical, immediate application in our modern society.
Citizens must not be stripped of the ability to effectively counter criminal violence. I was a law enforcement officer in the 70s and 80s when the transition to high capacity semi-automatic handguns for law enforcement began.
I taught law enforcement officers firearms skills in the 90s, after the move to semi-autos was complete. The reason law enforcement switched to semi-automatic handguns is twofold. First was the discovery that the ergonomics of the semi-automatic handgun worked better for most officers, than those of the six-shot revolver. From this, we can extrapolate that a novice law enforcement officer likely more experienced than the average American would need about 12 shots to reliably stop a single attacker.
On the other hand, mass shooters plan ahead and bring spare magazines. Americans who find themselves needing to defend themselves are unlikely to have spares on hand trained for the occasion. Definitely not. Live Now. This article appeared in Orange County Register on May 6, I shoot' — "Every month or so I take my guns out to the range and shoot," says iReporter Christopher L. Hunting — Austin Nikel and his brother used a shotgun to shoot clay targets during this outing in Wyoming in Other enthusiasts of military style rifles often use them to hunt deer and other game.
But some states have banned the AR and its. Protection — In some home-protection situations, fans say, military-style rifles are generally more accurate than handguns. Rifles are generally easier to learn how to shoot, say military-style rifle owners. Collectable — Military style rifles are important to many gun collectors. IReporter Hrothgar said ARs are as much a part of the nation's history "as the muskets carried by pioneers" and "the rifles toted by doughboys in the trenches.
Supreme Court decision on whether the Constitution's Second Amendment right to "keep and bear arms" is fundamentally an individual or collective right. Story highlights A military-style rifle was used in the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting "Can't we leave those guns to the trained military?
One of the three guns Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut , was a military-style semiautomatic rifle known as an AR That surprised and shocked a lot of people unfamiliar with America's gun culture. They questioned why such weapons are available and why anyone would need them. Self-described gun owner Julie Jones-Hawkins comments , "I
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