Taken from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17307316/ By Blaine Harden Updated: 12:22 a.m. ET Feb. 24, 2007 SEATTLE - Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West. Zumbo's fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America's gun culture -- and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs. "Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles." Squarely in the crosshairs The reaction -- from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association -- has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo's career appears to be over. --- the article goes on for a bit, but... 'a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon'? man alive. for those who aren't familiar with the american gun lobby, this is actually fairly typical. there's more fanaticism found in the defense of gun toting than there is in the christian coalition!
Oh dear. The comment was silly, the response was simply idiotic, and I'm just sitting here wondering how this sort of thing can ruin a man's career. Stupid as the comparison was, he's just a somewhat more traditionalist hunter, is all.
So what does a semi-automatic assault rifle do to a prairie dog? They are fairly small, harmless creatures, yes? Why does it need to be shot with a big fuckoff weapon like that for? I have feeling that a lot of American hunters just like shooting big guns rather than liking the hunt itself. My solution to the problem is to let loose every member of the NRA into an underground borrow system, without their weapons, and then let loose the praire dogs with modified assault rifles to eradicate the vermin. Problem solved.
An M16/AR15 style assault rifle fires a 5.56 mm round, which is a .223 Remington. .22 Remington is a 'varmint' hunting caliber. Not saying one way or the other about what's going on here, I just wanted to clarify that Assault Rifle doesn't necessarily mean BFG.
Prairie dogs are quick and they can be very destructive, like any rodent. If they have become a problem then they have to be removed. That may not be the nicest thing but that's the breaks when you ae a rodent
Where I live we have loads of wildlife... I mean, vermin. We've got rabbits, hares, wolverines, wolves, lynxes, deers of various descriptions, bears, mooses/elks, wild boars, badgers and so on. We also have very restricted weapon-laws, but despite that we've got about one weapon for every two inhabitants. According to the American Gun-lobbyist, I should be dead... I don't own a weapon myself and who knows what can get into my yard! (well, I do, so far we've had phesants, rabbits, hares, squirrels, hedgehogs, moose/elk and two different kinds of deer) ... I could open a safari-zoo in my back yard... that's only about 20m^2
We do?!? I had no idea. There's very little that gets me as upset as the wolf hunting lobbyists. I'm not against hunting per se (I think hunted meat is more ethical than farmed meat) but with our very small wolf population today they're heavily inbred as it is. Also, wolves are not hunted for their meat but to protect farmed animals and wolves' prey. Now, it's been proved over and over that reducing a predator population will also reduce the corresponding prey population. This only applies to the wild animals and not to farmed animals but nevertheless I can't see how us humans should take for granted to expand into the forests on the forests' original inhabitants' expense. Edit: Added an apostrophe.
Really, I would have thought it would have resulted in the growth of the prey species population given that xxx of their number were not being eaten before reaching breeding age/succeeding in breeding. The population growth would of couse be limited by the amount of availible food and space (i.e for dens, lairs etc.).
Also note, I do not in anyway support the hunting of wildlife for sport and that those hunters who 'require' a automatic rifle for hunting are simply bad shots and poor hunters.
Yes, that is the obvious way to think about it, but the truth is that predators will help keep a population healthy and keen. Removing the predators will in the end decrease a prey population because sicknesses and other weaknesses are now being allowed to stay in the gene pool. This decrease is generally to a greater extent than what the predators were killing off for eating. Edited for clarity.
Another aspect is what is the prey population feeding on? I don't think you can say it's as easy as "The population growth would of couse be limited by the amount of availible food and space". A fast growth of one species could unbalance it's food source, or even other species and systems as well. Lets do a stupidly simple example. I'm just making up the numbers to illustrate the example. Of course, the reality is far more complex than this, but it will illustrate my point. One wolf eats one hundred rabbits a year. One rabbit eats one hundred carrots a year. There are one million carrots. Each year each surviving carrot yeilds two new carrots, but dies in the process. This means that as long as there are 500 000 carrots not eaten by the end of the season, the carrots will successfully stay at a constant level. So, 500 000 carrots can be eaten each year. This is enough to feed 5000 rabbits. Each two surviving rabbits can offspring eight new bunny rabbits each year. To make our calculations easy, lets say these two rabbits die in the process of reproducing. As long as there are 1250 rabbits not eaten by the end of the season the rabbits will successfully stay at a contant level of 5000 individuals. So, 3750 rabbits can be eaten each year. This is enough to feed 37 wolves. Lets say we kill off 10 wolves in year one. Only 2700 rabbits will be eaten that season. This leaves 2300 rabbits to reproduce. Year two we will have 9200 rabbits. They will eat 920 000 carrots. That leaves 80 000 carrots to spread. Year three we will start with 160 000 carrots and lots of hungry bunnies. The carrots will be eaten until not a single one remains, effectively starving the entire rabbit population to death and taking the wolves with them. It's all a big balance, and the population size of the topmost predators is probably the most important population size in the entire system.
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart's book The Collapse of Chaos (from which I am badly paraphrasing) explained all of this so much better than I am doing now. I'm sorry to say it was a couple of years since I read it and I could well be wrong somewhere.
Well Pepster didn't seem to have heard of it so I tried to explain it to him. Sadly, I think my explanation was perhaps not the most pedagogic. Want to have a go at it?
in reply to brad's post: the bullets may not be much bigger, but consider the amount of propellant behind a .223 round versus a .22 rifle cartridge. a .30 caliber round is not that big. however, a .30/.30 has a lot less gunpowder behind it than a .30/.06. either round can be found in a semi-automatic hunting rifle. either one is serious fucking overkill for hunting anything smaller than a wolf or rabid dog. now, assuming that prairie dogs are causing your farm or 'ranch' great difficulties, and trapping the things to send to zoos doesn't appeal to you, you could try poison. you could try importing a couple of mongeese. or, you could go get a browning M1 and in a very freudian way jizz all over nature.
This might be a good reason to ask someone who's not a gun virgin how all those calibers work. What does that .xx/.xx mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliber And a 5.56 round is not overkill. It seems that there is a debate about it being a good deer caliber, and one of its' main attractions is the fact that the ammo is cheap. There also seems to be a debate on whether the .223 is a good varmint hunting round, with there being proponents for something called 22-250 saying that it has longer range and a flatter trajectory. Incidentally, here's a definition for assault rifle. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/assault rifle If it has a pistol grip, it's bad? Also, some people find shooting relaxing, and may find the use of poison not discriminant enough.
I know Brad, I had a look at Wikipedia, but I still don't understand it. This would mean that Garner's .30/.30 had a barrel length of .09 inches, and the .30/.06 had a barrel length of .0018 inches. Surely, I must have missed something here?
the .30/.30 is a 30 caliber bullet backed with .30 grains of powder. i don't know what a 'grain' amounts to in grams or cubic centimeters or what have you. the .30/.06 is the same size bullet backed with 1.06 grains of powder. now, a .30/.30 is a big fucking bullet. if i were a squirrel, and i knew i was about to get shot by one of those, i'd spend my last seconds telling the wife not to bother with a coffin, but rather to get a hose ready to clean me off the walls. well, no, really, if i were a squirrel, i'd probably just sit there nibbling away at an acorn until some redneck exploded me across the tree branch with a bullet large enough to slow down a bear. the 5.56mm round used by the M16/AR15 is a particularly nasty thing. it's small, and it tends to 'tumble' once its entered a target. this creates a fucked up wound channel that doesn't heal easily and is extra prone to infection (the real risk from a gunshot, assuming it didn't hit something critical). however, despite being small enough for use on, say, a squirrel, it has enough powder behind it to drop a deer. consider, if you will, the relative mass of a squirrel versus a deer. one of them is at best half the size of a small, starved alley cat. the other is a big fucker perfectly capable of totalling your car (assuming you don't drive a volvo) if you hit it. not only would impact with the deer ruin your car, but its quite possible that the deer could walk away from that wreck (i had a friend back in highschool who had to chase just such a deer down to perform a mercy killing - lets face it, the deer ain't gonna last long after you hit it, even if it can walk away) now, a prairie dog is about the size of a squirrel, minus the tail. actually, it might weigh in at a few ounces heavier. if you need to shoot the prairie dogs on your ranch, do you need to shoot them with something that has more stopping power than a toyota?
The prairie dog I saw and petted in a petstore was a hell of a lot bigger than any squirrel I've ever seen, more like a rabbit or a ground hog, of course she was also very very fat and named Daisy.The ones I saw in the wild were maybe not quite as big as a ground hog. They have such big colonies, in the days before the plains were plowed they covered areas many hundreds of miles sqare and larger, they have the potential to alter the landscape as drastically as beaver do. Beaver are also becoming overpopulated and with no market for fur to speak of the local governments of effected areas sometimes have to hire hunters. My dad told me that an area back in the woods near his house that is called the hundred acre meadow, is now totally covered with water impounded by beaver dams. When that water breaches those dams it will probably(as it has already done in the very recent past) take out a big section of paved road. Beaver were almost wiped out by the turn of the last century, but they have come back in a big way. When I was a girl I helped my dad skin and stretch the beaver he trapped, they helped support my family.When we first moved to the farm we saw a young beaver traveling from its childhood home to its own home only occasionally, now almost every year the dogs catch one or two in the yard, and the battles are awful but so far the dogs have always won. I think my nephew has an old eastern bloc rifle he uses for deer hunting, I don't think it is an assault rifle but I could be wrong.
I disagree about the 5.56 having enough power to drop a deer. It can certainly kill a deer, especially with a well placed shot, but unless it's an excellent shot the deer will live for a bit (like when one is hit by a vehicle). Incidentally, wiki (dangerous though it may to cite at times) states that the 5.56 military version packs less powder than the civilian .223 Remington version. Now, the .30-06 and .30/.30 are significantly larger rounds (corresponding to a 7.62mm diameter). The NATO 7.62 round used in our light machine guns nowadays (M240B and the older M60) seems to have a civilian hunting variant known as the .308 Winchester. My only point here is that a 5.56mm round is not "too big" to hunt praire dogs with. There are plenty of discussions out there that even talk about the 5.56 versus the Remington .22-250 with many people choosing the .22-250 because it's more powerful.
Okay, I'm going to provide links rather than risk imbeding the images... and anyway, direct linking to images is a bad thing. First off, we have this picture of 5.56mm rounds from an AR-15. (AR-15 5.56mm Tactical Ammo) Note the size of the mushroom head of a spent bullet, and the size of the brass (which contains all the gunpowder). As this lacks scale, please see this link as well. (nevermind, see the link below. can't directly link to that picture...) That picture is taken from this website, which has quite a few other interesting diagrams to show dimension and scale: (5.56mm (5.56 x 45 mm) Ammunition) Now, contrast this with the size of a standard .22 long rifle bullet: (http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/7/7c/300px-22lr.jpg) That's the kind of round I used to target shoot with, and is more than sufficient for any small rodent that actually requires a firearm to deal with. While looking for a sample of a .22 bullet, post impact, I came across this site: (SUDDEN IMPACT !, From AMMOMAN.COM) If you'll scroll down, you can see photographs of the impact damage a .22 bullet causes on an apple at different speeds. For sheer fascinating photography, this site amazes me, but also check out the EMB bullet going through the gel block (third picture down)... that's a block of JELL-O. Look at the shock wave. That's what a bullet does when it hits you. Now, here's where things get a bit funny... let's stick with the .22 for a moment. When Hinkley shot Reagan, Ronnie didn't even know he'd been hit (is this a bad time for an altzheimers joke?), but rather he thought he'd broken a rib when the secret service threw him to the ground. Brady, who was shot in the attack, has been paralyzed ever since. When Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy, he used a .22 pistol, but managed multiple shots. (I'm going to guess six from memory, but I'd have to look it up to be sure). Now, those are three very widely different outcomes from a bullet with only a fraction of the powder behind it that you'd get from a .223. Go back to that website that shows what some of those bullets can do to a piece of fruit. There's a shot of a .223 round exiting an orange, with the bullet now traveling almost sideways. Remember what I said earlier about the 5.56 (equivalent of .223) round having a tendancy to 'tumble' in a body? Go back and look at that gel block again as well. Imagine that shockwave from a subsonic round that's tumbling as it goes through you, with all the powder behind it that you can see in the earlier photos that show a sense of scale. You need THAT much surrogate penis to take on one of THESE: (http://files.dogster.com/pix/grp/17/1117/1117_1144699574.jpg) Sheesh. Edit: fixed a link, took out one that doesn't work.
Going for a bit of a side topic here, but I happen to find prairie dogs extremely cute and not just rodents fit for sport hunting (like their cousins, the ugly squirrels). Re: Prairie dogs can impact the landscape... Yes, but this doesn't automatically equate to a bad things. For example, they're water conservationists! For those who want to see some good articles on why prairie dogs aren't bad things, please check this site out: (Keystone Species) Now, I'm not saying they can't cause problems. I have a huge soft spot for rabbits and someday hope to own a very large and well enclosed field, screened from birds of prey and foxes and neighborhood dogs where I can have a colony of rabbits all my own. I also want to have a very nice garden. These two goals will require extreme demarcation if they are to exist at the same time. Prairie dogs, like rabbits, make decent pets: (http://www.fuzzyco.com/news/archives/mime/DSC03131.jpg) Now, I can understand the need to remove pests from one's land. A beautiful flower is still a weed if it's growing in the wrong part of your garden. But there's hunting/trapping/poisoning/whatevering for necessity, and there's hunting for food (which I don't have much of a problem with - and besides, who the fuck's gonna eat a prairie dog?), and then there's THIS: (S-N-S Outfitter & Guide Service, Prairie Dog Hunts) You call that hunting? Sick fuckers. (http://www.treasureranch.com/treasure/rzuinfofiles/jpg/pdshoot.jpg)
Whack-a-Mole is great fun. It's what we call "pretend violence". Like shooting at tin cans, or Jell-O molds. Then there's what we call "real violence"... things like gunning down innocent critters only for the sake of it. Things like killing a hobo and blaming it on video games because you want even MORE media attention. Things like starting a fucking war. Things like shooting a lawyer in the face while out hunting birds just for the sake of it. Dick Cheney has a lot in common with mentally disturbed youths.
Garner, your own posts show the damage that several different .22LR bullets do to an apple, versus what a .223 will do to an orange. Yes, the .223 will tumble in a body causing more damage, but it's not like it's "blowing up" the groundhog. The .223 is not some super bullet as you've been implying. It does NOT have more stopping power than a Toyota. A Toyota moving at 60mph has impressive stopping power. In TN, it would be illegal to hunt deer with a .223 as it's not considered large enough. Legal/Illegal Hunting Equipment and Methods And here's yet another group of people who actually hunt saying that a .223 is a bad deer round, because it doesn't kill fast enough. What gun do you use for deer hunting? [Archive] - Military Photos It sounds like a fine varmint round to me.
Er, yes... but no. Not what I was saying at all, Brad. Now, if I were to go deer hunting, I'd either want a large rifle (.30 or higher) or a shotgun. However, I dislike anything with more recoil than a .38 pistol, so I wouldn't actually go deer hunting. Also, and let me make this clear because this is the point of my complaint about gunning down prairie dogs with an assault rifle, deer hunting these days consists of sitting a tree house and waiting. If you don't wanna wait that long, you can cover yourself in deer piss extract and cover the trees in female deer hormones and then start blasting once they show up. I've known hunters who still use a bow and arrow... because bow hunters are allowed to start the season earlier and this way they can get a few extra kills. I've heard of, but never met, people who actually go deer hunting with nothing more than a knife. Deer can, eventually, be outrun by a fit person, and a cornered buck can put up a fight. Now *that* strikes me as hunting as it should be. You want some trophy to put on your wall? Then you damn well better earn it. Now, let's go back to the prairie dog hunting... let us, however, take out any potential emotional attachments to cute little yipping things. Let's pretend we're hunting rats. Beady eyed, bald tailed rats. Ugly little fuckers. There's a big field of em, just full of the bastards, and, for some ungodly reason, that field's going to be turned into a children's park in a week. Called Rat-world. So we can't just poison the whole place in case a kid gets sick later. So we've got ugly critters that need dying, and we've got a valid reason why we can't use poison. So let's sell a packaged holiday for rednecks to come sit around in a lawn chair and shoot them. Bring a minimum of 500 rounds of amunition, and pay 500 bucks for the privledge. I dunno, I mean, if that sounds like your idea of a good time, then there's not really any point in debating it. To me, it's not hunting, it's just combining target shooting with killing things. I like shooting. At inanimate, lifeless targets. Wood, paper, tin cans. Etc. Cause, you know, "whatever you do to the least of my creatures, so you do unto Me"
I really can't pretend to know anything about guns, so have little to add to this discussion. But isn't there quite a big difference in size between a deer and a prairie dog? I wouldn't have thought it necessarily follows that a bullet too small for deer is not too big for an animal no longer than a cubit.
*shrug* A 5.56 would in fact be an extremely humane round, if your intent was to kill the prairie dogs quickly. If poison's not an option, then at least let it be a one-shot case. A smaller bullet is just as likely to do the trick, mind you. It doesn't really require that much powder to take down something the size of a rat. As for hunting anything else with it... It has stopping power. And little beyond that. It's chief advantage would be that it would likely stun what it hits.
It's true. But, I was disputing the assertion that a .223 had more stopping power than a "toyota". Speaking in those terms likens a .223 to a .50 (which can kill by passing close enough to a person). It's not some super round. Many US Army people don't even like it for people. It doesn't explode the animal, sick as this imagery is. It's not too large. There's video out there, although unless you're into watching animals get killed over and over I would't recommend watching it. I've tried to avoid referencing it because it is nauseating, but it does show a praire dog being shot with something larger.
can we, for a moment, pretend i didn't make any comparisons to japanese cars, lest "toyota" take on some mythical significance in the annals of these boards - equivalent, perhaps, to a deliberate misunderstanding over who told whom to suck what and when. can we, once that's done, perhaps move back to the original point of the appropriateness of an assault rifle for a prairie dog, and the response to criticism of same by the american gun lobby.
My brother has a deerstand that has a microwave oven, a propane heater and a loft with an airmattress. He can wait a long long time. He also uses a bow and arrow and so does his wife, this year she was talked into using a gun and she got 4 deer. Hunters around here can purchase several permits because there are so many they have reached the status of vermin. I have hit three myself in the last four years.
You know, when it comes to population control issues, I start to lose objections even to sport/trophy hunting, but a microwave on a deer stand still strikes me as... well... cheating.
What happened to the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of knowing that after all that suffering you went through it was worth it because you have this dear's head under your arm and your wit and skill won the day... Hunting isn't suppose to be comfortable or easy.
Believe me it isn't that comfortable, they didn't build any railing on the two flights of steps up to the deerstand and I had to creep down like a two yearold. He has electricity out there because he has one of those positive airflow mask things for his severe sleep apnea, I don't really know why the microwave got out there except for they had one laying around. I don't even know if they actually have shot anything from the deerstand,it is really more of a little cabin up on stilts where you can watch the deer then anything. They do walk out to various areas of the woods and sometimes they do drives, put some people out in various places and have others walk toward those places hoping to herd deer in the general direction and not get shot. I have never hunted deer, but I have cut them up and cooked them. The three I hit, I don't think I killed them, at least not outright. I do try to stop if I see them, usually they come in multiples and I wait for the stagglers when I can , but they do surprise you sometimes.
Okay then. My original point was that an M16/AR15 is not a huge super weapon. What makes an [wiki]assault rifle[/wiki] (see the def)? What makes an assault weapon? Technically, the prairie dog hunters most likely don't use "assault rifles". What makes it wrong to use a pistol grip rifle to kill a prairie dog? Is hunting the only reason to own a firearm? What makes an AR15 a "terrorist rifle"?
If your original point was that the M16/AR15 was not a huge super weapon, then why did you raise it, as I don't recall that being the point of the thread. The point of the thread was two fold, as i saw it: an outdoorsman columnist criticised the use of 'assault rifles' to hunt prairie dogs, and the gun nut community rabidly responded, destroying that man's career. The only person here who's raised the question of 'pistol grip rifles' is you. I haven't seen anything anywhere that suggests 'pistol grip rifle' has anything to do with the issues in question or even tangental issues. If you wish to object to a third party website's definition of an assault rifle, why not do it on their website? Incidentally, let's go with your link to the wikipedia article on assault rifles. Nevermind that Wikipedia is the greatest collection of plagerism and misconception currently going on the 'net. The definition of an assault rifle, which you asked me to look at: Note the absolute lack of the words 'pistol grip'. Let's read on a little bit though. Now, having established that 1) the pistol grip is not a manditory requirement of an 'assault rifle' and 2) that brad can't actually read... If we accept as givens that it is essential to even kill the prairie dog with a gun in the first place, I see the shape or design of the gun as irrelevant to the situation entirely. I don't care of it's got a pistol grip or if it's just a metal tube and chambering block that can only be fired by telekinesis. The point i raised was that any assault rifle, automatic rifle, machine gun, submachine gun, or battle rifle (weapons commonly featuring protruding pistol grips) would be over kill to gun down a creature that's not much bigger than a squirrel. (side note: some species of prairie dogs ARE larger than squirrels, but i've only ever seen the black tailed ones) Now, having, to my mind, demonstrated that brad's a strong contender for the Dragonmother Debate Trophy, I'll move on from this point and tackle the next award winning question. "Is hunting the only reason to own a firearm?" Let us for a moment disqualify the notion of 'collectors', people who just like to own stuff. Let's assume that if you own a firearm, you own it to USE it. 'Is hunting the only reason to USE a firearm?', well, no. absolutely not. but let's look at the three other uses that would cover most situations: To protect yourself from violent crime. To commit violent crime. To shoot non-living/non-sentient targets. Now, ignoring the NRA's own entries in the Dragonmother Debate Demonstration competition, if folks didn't have guns, there'd be a lot less gun related crime and thus a lot less impetus to protect one's self through similar forms of violence. This leaves target shooting as a valid reason to retain the right to own guns. Why one would *need* to privately own a firearm for this purpose is beyond me, as plenty of shooting ranges will rent time on any number of firearms at extremely reasonable prices, and even allow for free trial demonstrations of weapons you're considering to purchase. if that aint good enough for you, i'd suggest the issue is less to do with gun control rights and more to do with compensating for something. And, lastly, "What makes an AR15 a terrorist rifle?" I'm sure it terrorizes the hell out of small furry woodland creatures, and anyone who's ever been threatened with one, but let's face it: 'terrorist' is a loaded word. the meaning isn't as important as the emotional impact these days. similar to 'fascist' or 'commie' a generation or two ago.
Um, Clay? Brad was actually addressing some points mentioned in the article you originally posted. His points are valid, because he replied to arguments raised by Jim Zumbo, which he disagrees with. I think Brad's mistake was that he assumed you support Jim Zumbo's views entirely, to the point of having the exact same arguments as him. Your mistake was that you didn't make your own view all that clear when posting the article, and actually didn't notice at all that Brad was addressing the article and, by deciding that he was addressing you personally, ignored most of his arguments because they didn't apply to you personally. So you both win the Dragonmother Debating Award, because both of you were debating with yourselves rather with each other. :razz:
Um, roman? I knew brad was replying to the article Mind you, i had to go back and run a search through the first page for the word 'terrorist' to find out where the hell that came from, but doing so clued me in a bit.
*nod* But my point was that while Brad was replying to the article, you were stating your own personal arguments derived from the article. Which you didn't exactly state all that well until now While Brad ended up assuming what those arguments were. Which also contributed to the confusion. As such, you've basically thrown your arguments at each other up till now without the other knowing what they are, or why they're even using them.
It was a response in general, to Spiky: And I suppose that I should clarify that BFG in my first post in this thread means "Big Fucking Gun". The reason that I brought it up is that I feel the term "assault rifle" has a very negative connotation, like "big fuckoff weapon" that is not necessarily true. I apologize if I 'hijacked' your thread. I assume that it might happen in the future again though ;-) Incidentally the later on, might help again show why I wanted to talk about assault rifles. I wonder if Jim was referring to M16s (which after the first revision can fire a max of 3 bullets at a time), AK47/74s, M249s(Which are classed as rifles by the US Army, but are essential very light machine guns), or civilian type AR15s(which can fire only one shot at a time, but are semi automatic). But, I said my peace, so I was content to let the issue lie. You then replied to my original post, asking us to consider the amount of powder behind a .223 versus a .22 (I assume a .22 Long Rifle, from your later posts), then you talk about .30 cal. Now, I did make an assumption that when many people think of an American assault rifle, and since we were talking about assault rifles in America I thought it not to be too far fetched, they think of something that looks like an M16. Not the "Browning M1" that you mentioned, which I should now ask you to clarify what you meant by that? M2 Browning (.50 BMG [12.7X99mm] machine gun) M1919 Browning (.30-06 [7.63X51mm] machine gun) M1 Garand (.30-06 [7.62X51mm] rifle... "assault rifle"?) M1 Carbine (.30 carbine [7.62X33mm] carbine ... "assault rifle"?) With my assumption of the M16 style rifle, not to mention the world famous AK47 style rifles I figured pistol grips to be a pretty distinguishing feature. And, from Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence's (Garner mentioned Brady earlier) talking about assault weapons (which I admit confusing with assault rifles, does anyone else?) "The 1994 federal law prohibited the manufacture of semi-automatic firearms that accept a detachable magazine with more than two of the following assault weapons features: Rifle Folding or telescoping stock Protruding pistol grip bayonet mount threaded muzzle or flash suppressor grenade launcher" Pistol grips DO seem to matter. Although, maybe it should be taken with a grain of salt as this is from the same website. "Assault weapons are not just "ugly guns." Semi-automatic hunting rifles are designed to be fired from the shoulder and depend on the accurate shooting of one bullet at a time. Semi-automatic assault weapons are designed to be spray-fired from the hip and are designed to maximize death and injury from a very rapid rate of fire. Assault weapons are designed with military features such as silencers, folding stocks, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds and bayonets which are ludicrously unsuited for civilian use." You can't "spray fire" a semi automatic weapon... a continuous stream (or spray) of bullets is needed. The site also says that AK47s and Uzis are semi automatic weapons... While Kalashnikov and Uzi make semi-automatic versions of their weapons, AK47/74s and Uzi SMGs/Mini Uzis are fully automatic weapons with a selector switch to become 'semi-auto'. I would also challenge the idea that military use precludes accurate shoulder fired shots which I inferred from the above paragraph. Okay. And that's where we're disagreeing. I believe that a weapon that uses a 5.56X45mm round is not overkill. I'll agree that using more than one bullet, or using a .30 and larger bullet is 'overkill'. It's a matter of personal opinion, I suppose. You're right, 'terrorist' is a very charged word, especially nowadays. Maybe that's why Zumbo was criticized by the NRA. To be honest though, any weapon that a person is threatened with can terrorize that person, even a board with a nail in it. The small woodland animals, maybe not so much as people themselves, or the noise of a firearm (if the hunter misses, or is a bad shot). This doesn't make sense to me, please clarify if you wish. I read this as "If you wish to own a firearm, rather than renting one for target shooting your issue is not with the government controlling your rights to own a firearm but instead is an issue with compensation." Is that correct? [snarky]I apparently have a difficult time reading, so please indulge me.[/snarky] And I think that ultimately Roman is right, I am arguing with myself. I think that I'll stop now.
