General gun info

[BTGBullseye]

You can have your opinion, but I don't follow the opinion of someone who hasn't actually experienced it over someone who has.

[Seattleite]

That is also what paranormal "experts" say about the stories they hear.

 

Physics says it is not possible. Therefore it is not possible. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. Just like it isn't an opinion that ghosts aren't real.

[BTGBullseye]

Physics does not say it's impossible, you just interpret it that way... Known physics says that FTL is impossible, yet most physicists are working towards FTL travel... There was a time where people thought that physics said that sound speed was a fixed speed, and the fastest you could go...

 

Anyways, back to the thread topic, and no more argument about physics in relation to this particular point.

[Seattleite]

Hey, on the subject of guns, here's a simple thing to anyone purchasing a handgun: Never, EVER buy an extended magazine. EVER. I don't care if the gun's default capacity sucks, don't do it. And not because of the reliability issue, though that is real, but because of something even more fundamental: Ergonomics.

 

Extended magazines protruding from the bottom of the weapon doesn't just look awful, it directly interferes with the way you hold the weapon. Normally, when shooting, you put your off hand directly underneath your shooting hand, supporting it and helping control the weapon. This keeps it from shaking as much as it would in one hand, and helps compensate for recoil. Extended magazines protruding from the bottom of the weapon keeps your hand from going underneath your main hand, so it provides less support and less control, and the greater distance between your hands means that when the weapon recoils it has a longer lever and the effect of your second hand is diminished.

 

You can compensate by putting your off hand in front of your main hand, but that's a dangerous position with shorter pistols, and isn't as effective anyway as the weight of the weapon is no longer resting on your hand, it's resting on your shooting hand's wrist, which is exactly what you don't want. There's no making this issue go away. Extended magazines are just god-awful, even if they come standard you should buy a standard magazine that fits flush against the bottom of your weapon, otherwise you're going to ruin your accuracy.

 

For rifles, though, they aren't so bad. Just don't but double or triple stacked magazines for rimmed ammunition, it's horribly unreliable. And don't buy drums at all, for the same reason. Double or triple stacks for rebated or rimless ammunition are perfectly fine.

[BTGBullseye]

you should buy a standard magazine that fits flush against the bottom of your weapon

Unless the magazine it comes with is the 9-round short mag that comes with the SR40c... It is so short, it doesn't even have room to fit your pinky finger. In this case, either run with the magazine finger extension included with the mag, or use the 15-round designed for the regular SR40. (or if you're not in California, you'll get one of each mag with the pistol by default)

 

There's almost always an exception to the rule, but make absolutely sure your situation is an exception before spending any money.

[Seattleite]

Fair enough, though I am unaware of any exceptions and will look into that example.

[Seattleite]

A point I've made before, but not in this thread. Guns fire bullets. Bullets are tiny pieces of metal moving really fast, and they perform as such. They're just a means of inflicting puncture wounds at a distance. That's it.

 

Most people who get shot survive. Those who die mostly die from blood loss. If it isn't blood loss, it's usually infection. If it isn't blood loss or infection, it's organ failure. Blood loss usually takes a couple minutes, infection a couple days, organ failure is all over the place but usually takes even longer than infection.

 

People usually stop when wounded by choice. They give up, or they choose to focus on their wounds instead of on fighting or fleeing. Sometimes this is a good idea, sometimes a bad idea, but whichever it is that's what they choose to do and they could choose otherwise, or even change their mind after they've been "stopped" and resume fighting or fleeing because they aren't physically incapacitated. But *can* a gun physically incapacitate somebody? Well, yes, but that term itself needs to be addressed. "Incapacitation" is an extremely nebulous term, and highly misleading.

 

A severed tricep, a shattered kneecap, a deflated lung, losing a litre of blood, running a fever due to infection, these could all count as incapacitation and the military would deem you "combat ineffective" with any one of them, but you are still physically capable of fighting to an extent, if you really have to. A gunshot wound could do any of these, and a larger bullet would do them easier and better, but even if you had all the above, you aren't *completely* stopped. A man can have their main arm and a leg disabled, have trouble breathing, be weak and unsteady and feverish from infections in days-old wounds, and still hold a gun. They'll be a shite shot, they're still dangerous and you'd be a fool to dismiss them.

 

Severing somebody's spinal cord high enough would completely incapacitate them, but this is exceptionally difficult as it takes both a lot of power and a lot of precision. (More of one means you need less of the other.) Rendering them unconscious through head trauma could also do it, but it's really hard to do immediately and that would require lots of power and precision (more of one means you need less of the other). Dropping somebody's blood pressure through cardiac trauma could also do it, but actually causing them to lose consciousness from it immediately would functionally require you to destroy their entire heart, and it would LITERALLY take a cannon to do that.

 

So really, when using a gun in combat, the goal is neither to kill somebody right away nor is it to completely stop them. The goal is the same as in any lethal combat, which is to not get killed. While the wounds you leave on an opponent won't stop them completely, at least not right away, they sure do help avoid getting killed. Guns are better at this only because they have longer range than most other weapons, and other weapons with their range have really massive drawbacks that they don't have. They don't have magic powers, and they don't need to in order to be our best weapons. And they ARE our best weapons, 90% of the time.

[BTGBullseye]

That is 100% accurate.

[Seattleite]

Also, measurements of the exit wound are highly misleading. It's not actually a hole that wide, people. It's just lacerations stretching out from where it exits. They also usually measure in the head or upper back, where there's bone close to the skin and the lacerations are wider. This is not the same as the actual hole being that size, the actual hole at the exit point is only slightly wider than the entry wound, enough that medical professionals sometimes get them confused even with high-velocity rifle rounds. There was considerable debate, for instance, about which of JFK's wounds were entry and exit wounds, by coroners who are trained for this sort of thing. And not just his head wound, either, his arm wound and the wounds of the passenger in front of him.

 

Shot placement also trumps calibre. A .22 bullet to the heart is a guaranteed (if not immediate) fatality (with modern medical technology, who knows about the future), while a .45 to the lung just centimetres away is not only survivable, it only has a 30% fatality rate worldwide, which includes a lot of places where medical care does not exist. That isn't to say calibre isn't significant, it is, by my math a .45 does about seven times as much damage as a .22, shot placement is just much more significant. (That math, by the way, is for non-expanding rounds. The gap should only be enormous, not colossal, for expanding rounds.)

 

And the pistol vs. rifle debate largely depends on ammunition. A rifle of a given calibre can vary so massively in terms of damage, much more than a pistol, that it's ludicrous to directly compare the two. Suffice to say that if the bullet does not expand or yaw the pistol's (usually) larger calibre wins, but if the rifle bullet expands it expands a lot more, if it yaws it's effectively a larger bullet, and if it fragments all bets are off. Modern military rifle ammunition does not expand or fragment, is inexplicably all armour-piercing (well, not inexplicably, our politicians signed contracts with the manufacturers) and almost never yaws.

 

As a result, yes, our 5.56mm core-penetrator uber-stable mega-sleek boat-tailed spitzer rounds DO absolutely suck ass compared to even 9mm pistol rounds, but if we loaded our rifles in a way determined by effectiveness instead of idiotic contracts with manufacturers signed by politicians who have no idea what the FUCK they're doing, our rifles would be several times more damaging. And we know they would, we had better ammo in Vietnam despite having worse technology and using the shittiest weapons in the Armalite family.

 

Overall, if there's a thing the average person believes about guns, especially when it comes to terminal ballistics, it's almost certainly not true. Except for the whole "leaves holes in things" part, that's totally accurate.

[BTGBullseye]

One point I'd like to take on that, is that the reason for the ammunition being a certain way is because of international agreements about ammunition used by militaries, not because of contracts with corporations. The contracts are because of the international agreements.

[Seattleite]

The rounds we're using are still illegal under international law.

[BTGBullseye]

Which laws? Not civilian laws...

[Seattleite]

The Geneva convention explicitly bans ammunition that splits into multiple pieces inside a target, yet we use core penetrator rounds, which do exactly that. It forbids incendiary ammunition, and yet our anti-material rifles are often loaded with delay-fused high explosive incendiary munitions which are illegal for being incendiary and very obviously breaking into pieces inside the target (they, you know, explode). It also bans use of chemical and incendiary weapons, white phosphorous is both but we still used it in Iraq. Cluster-munitions are also illegal, but we use them and even give them to our Saudi allies for their massacres in Yemen.

 

It's pretty safe to say international law means dick to the US military's choice of weapons and ammunition. Business contracts not so much. As one example, we have a gigantic parking lot full of nothing but Abrams tanks that we can't use and don't have the crews for, that our own generals are telling us to STOP making, that are running up an absurd bill, but we're STILL making more of the damned things because we signed a contract with the manufacturer.

 

But regardless of what you believe the reason is, the fact is that our rifle ammunition absolutely fucking sucks for its current application (and any application we could find for it, the 5.56mm just doesn't have to mass for armour piercing rounds to be of any real benefit), and it would be much better to use expanding or frangible rounds, or even regular ball ammo.

[BTGBullseye]

For the most part, the Geneva Convention is only about openly declared war... So simply calling it a 'police action' is usually enough to 'legally' make those munitions usable. (Iraq was not officially classified as a war, just a 'police action')

[Seattleite]

That technicality makes me want to strangle people.

[BTGBullseye]

I agree completely.

[DrEvilBrain]

Keep in mind the United States has not actually declared war through Congress since WWII.

[Seattleite]

Strictly to bullshit its way past international regulations and commit warcrimes freely without being punished by the international community.

[BTGBullseye]

Remember, this is a thread about guns, not governmental decision making regarding combat on foreign soil.

[BTGBullseye]

Necrobump. Almost 2 years since last post.

 

Just making it easier to find for new people. Remember, this is for discussing the weapons only, not for the politics surrounding them.