[latencyloser]

Those are not automatic rifles, they're very likely all semi-automatic. Semi-automatic rifles can look the same as automatic rifles, visual appearance doesn't mean much. Automatic rifles in the US are much, much more difficult and expensive to acquire than one would think--tens of thousands of dollars usually vs ~$500 for a semi-automatic variant.

Sorry if that seems pedantic, but the media uses the understandably easy confusion between the two to misrepresent issues around gun rights a lot.

[wing-_-nuts]

The whole 'fully automatic rifle' is such a nothing burger anyway. M4s and M16s aren't controllable on fully automatic at anything over 10m. Watch modern combat footage of any trained unit, and I guarantee you'll see them using semi auto.

My point? Semi auto AR-15s are every bit as effective and deadly as their fully automatic military counterparts. Whether civilians should have such weapons is another discussion.

[umvi]

Regardless, full auto is misleadingly portrayed in media as being orders of magnitude more deadly than semi auto, hard to change that (for example[0]). Nevermind handguns kill more than all other gun types combined, it's the "military" style ones that politicians and media focus on because they look scary (again, also disregarding the fact that a functionally equivalent semi-auto hunting rifle has exactly the same destructive power).

[0] https://youtu.be/VYOjWnS4cMY?t=113

[wing-_-nuts]

>a functionally equivalent semi-auto hunting rifle has exactly the same destructive power).

I'd strongly argue against this point. Most hunting rifles have 5 round mags (legal limit for hunting in a lot of places). They won't accept 30 round mags. They're also chambered in more powerful calibers which have much more recoil.

An active shooter with his dad's hunting rifle is much less dangerous than the same shooter with an AR-15 with 30 round mags.

[umvi]

> They won't accept 30 round mags.

Why not? Seems like as long as the magazine can protrude from the bottom, you can have any capacity magazine you want.

[shpongled]

Have you ever trained with a firearm? Magazine capacity is a useless metric, because you can change a magazine in seconds.

[numpad0]

Gew98 was the Nazi’s frontline infantry rifle. 8mm Mauser, .30-06, 7.62mm NATO, those are/were proper military rifle cartridges, just obsolete.

It’s not like WWII rifles had wooden furnitures as luxury items.

[madengr]

The Texas Tower sniper killed 14 with a Remington 700, at up to 500 yards, though he had an M1 too.

[craftinator]

To add to this, having had quite of bit of firearms experience both semi and auto, the real limiting factors are, as mentioned, controllability and ammo.

With a 30 round mag and a cyclic rate of 700 rounds per minute (AR-15 mods run 700-1000 RPM), you get a little over 2 seconds of trigger time. That assumes you don't experience a jam, which is very likely with an AR-15 variant modified for automatic fire, and because of the weight distribution and recoil deflection, you won't hit anything you aim at after the second round leaves the chamber. So, if they are packing fully auto AR-15 mods, I'd be wayyyyy less concerned than if they were using semi automatic.

[umvi]

> I'd be wayyyyy less concerned than if they were using semi automatic.

In general, yes. To play devil's advocate though, accuracy/controllability is not really needed if your goal is just to spray as much lead as possible into a densely crowded area from, say, a hotel room above.

Such domestic terrorist events are extremely rare, but I would guess in these specific cases where the goal is to spray as many bullets per second as possible into a crowd, full auto + large magazine is going to kill more people than semi auto.

[asdff]

Semi auto fires as fast as you can tap the trigger, they still fire plenty fast. Test out how long it takes you to get through 30 clicks on your mouse. Now keep in mind with the automatic, by your third or fourth shot your aim might be 10 feet higher than where you set off aiming at the start of the burst, and you can see how even in crowds a semi automatic weapon would be far more dangerous as you could control where the rifle is pointed.

[craftinator]

Late reply, sorry. I'd say that in the domestic terrorism situation you describe, even someone completely untrained would still be more deadly taking aimed shots than with full auto or auto bursts. With auto, most of those 30 rounds would impact the ground unless they were shooting into a really, really dense mass of people, and even then you'd have many shots that would be grazing or non lethal hits. And by the time the second magazine went in, people would be clearing out fast.

With a large magazine it would be a different story though, you are right about that. This is why I think that it's good to have fully auto by design weapons be illegal (think the SAW, or the M240), along with magazines above 30 rounds.

[loeg]

Yeah you say that but in a tight crowd with nowhere to go, and enough ammunition, you can do a lot of damage. E.g., the Vegas shooting at a music festival with pseudo-automatic bump stocks.

[jpindar]

Each bullet does the same amount of damage, regardless of whether they are fired 0.1 seconds apart or 0.3 seconds apart. (Made up numbers, but a semiautomatic can be fired very quickly if you aren't taking time to aim.)

[loeg]

This pedantic distinction ignores reality. Police response to a shooter is measured in some finite number of seconds. N / 0.3 is smaller than N / 0.1. Slower fire rate matters.

[commandlinefan]

> Semi-automatic rifles can look the same as automatic rifles

And the people who confuse the two often talk about banning semi-automatic firearms (which ends up being just about all of them).

[djsumdog]

Yea one of my best friends has two fully automatics. He needed to get permits signed by the local sheriff and both of them cost more than his truck. He's a collector and likes shooting WWI and WWII era guns.

But yea, legal fully automatic weapons are not cheap.

[loeg]

> Automatic rifles in the US are much, much more difficult and expensive to acquire than one would think--tens of thousands of dollars usually

Clarification: to acquire legally. It is not nearly that expensive black market.

[shpongled]

Yeah, not that expensive to get illegally if you're fine with the ATF shooting your wife and dog.

[loeg]

For sure there are negative externalities; I wouldn't recommend it! I also wouldn't recommend dumping new car money into a legal automatic weapon.

[shpongled]

Just think of the ammo costs!

[latencyloser]

Yeah that's fair. One could also just make one pretty easily, it doesn't require too much knowledge to modify an existing semi-automatic.

[loeg]

> One could also just make one pretty easily, it doesn't require too much knowledge to modify an existing semi-automatic.

Sure, you can make an unreliable automatic from a semi-auto easily. But it's a far cry from a commercial/military product.

[asguy]

I would check your sources on that. As one example, there are plenty of registered legal “Lightning Links” in the US. They are drop-in fully automatic on many (otherwise) unmodified AR-15 variants. With small exception, they shoot and cycle just fine. They’re literally just one small piece of steel.

One could make [1] their own in 2020 illegally with the hand tools you find at an Ace Hardware Store.

[1] - http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/pdf/fast_bunny.pdf