I've dabbled in BR (rimfire and airgun) and while yes, wind doping is quite challenging, a lot of the satisfaction behind a good shot still comes from the aggregate effort: breathing, trigger pull, muscle control. For me at least.
The guys with the rail guns tho, that's a whole 'nother level.
As a long distance shooter, and lover of technology, I would most assuredly get a lot of joy out of this.
Also, you'd be incorrect about this doing the hard work. They add the concept of "windage" almost as an afterthought, and I can tell you that at long distances, it is anything but.
In long distance shooting, pulling the trigger is the easy part.
Hunting is 99% spending time getting into a position to take a shot, and then dressing your kill (and, for larger animals, getting all that meat out of the woods) and less than 1% aiming and pulling the trigger. This weapon increases the chances of you accurately targeting the vitals on an animal at ranges from 100 to 200+ yards, which a lot of hunters would probably be nervous about trying to shoot at.
Ideally, this weapon would reduce the number of animal injuries, and increase the number of immediate kills.
[edit: Ah, I just re-read your comment - you are actually saying you understand the use of this weapon while hunting, but don't understand the purpose of target shooting with it. Perhaps to prepare for hunting?]
Except when there are really[1] fun[2] targets[3], I generally get bored too. I do love sporting clay, which is similar to trap and skeet, except you walk from one station to the next, and the patterns are different at each station.
Considering it's a killing machine designed to make it as easy as possible to kill something very far away from you with no skill, I think jumping to mass killings is the logical thing to do. There is no reason something like this needs to be sold to the public.
I'll wager this isn't a valid use case for you, but having worked with a number of disabled veterans who prefer the AR15 for its ease of use and modifiability to accomodate their physical injuries, something like this may accomodate their needs for hunting and such more easy.
It also potentially enables those with diminished eye sight or nearsightedness for greater accuracy.
On top of that, at least as it stands right now, it makes the operation of a long-range rifle safer and more effective. I don't know why that would be considered a negative.
There are lots of things to worry about in this world. Cars are dangerous. Gasoline is dangerous. Shotguns are dangerous. Swimming pools are inordinately dangerous.
Very, very far down on my list of things to worry about are $17,000 ultra-long range computer aided bolt-action trigger initiated rifles.
[edit - after thinking a bit, I believe I could come up with a list of 500 things that we should be more worried about than this weapon. Just the cost alone means that there will be very few of them in general circulation. In the next 20 years, I wager there will be less than 10 homicides in the United States resulting from this weapon. If you want to get up in arms about something - start with the likely 500,000+ automobile deaths that will occur in the same time period (I'm presuming automobile safety will bring the numbers down to those levels)]
As I just learned, the .50BMG has never been used in the commission of a homicide in the United States. Extrapolating from that, I would happily place a 'long bet' and take the over on your 20 year claim and spread the odds to zero homicides.
In short, if there is even one intentional homicide in 20 years resulting from this gun (or related technology) I would be extremely shocked.
My argument is more along the lines of, "There is a list of things we should worry about. Somewhere, on that list is Y. Ahead of Y, there are 250 other things, that, if we really wanted to change the world for the better, make it safer for ourselves, and our children, we would focus on.
If we wish to act rationally, and make the world a better place, there will be far greater return on our effort, lobbying, and resources, to worry about items higher up on that list, as opposed to some incredibly unlikely events that will occur because of Y.
For some reason, Y grabs our attention though - and I was just trying to pull us all back to realizing, that, in the grand scheme of things, Y is irrelevant to the safety of ourselves, our children, and our community. As such, little to no effort should be put towards worrying about, or legislating Y."
I'm saying "I should worry about X" does not mean "X should be illegal." Clearly everyone should worry more about cars than this firearm. But the usefulness of X has to be weighed against its potential misuse.
Without trying to sound condescending, a car is a far less useful tool for preventing invasion by an enemy nation-state or for defending against tyranny by our own government.
Just because you don't see the practical need for that utility does not negate that such utility exists and (in my opinion) is the express reason for the second amendment.
I notice you don't bother to argue with the parent's point -- that this weapon is a lot more dangerous than your average rifle since the level of skill required to use it effectively (and, equivalently, lethally) is much lower.
It seems a valid point to me. Maybe you could give share your viewpoint instead this silly red herring suggestion that the parent is deranged for bringing up the point.
I'm not the author, but I'll recap some of the points I've made all over this thread.
1) Where you claim it makes a more effective killing machine, another might easily say that it makes a much safer hunting weapon, or more easy to use for wounded, injured, disabled or handicapped hunters or veterans.
2) There are many, many ways that criminals could exploit even every day items to achieve extremely deadly results, and until we're ready to ban every single one of them (which admittedly, Mayor Bloomberg seems poised to do), we should not punish the majority for the very unlikely potential criminal use by a very small minority.
3) It's an advancement in technology that I worry may be stifled for private industry and instead hoarded for military application, which will almost certainly lead to slower development in the technology. Imagine further into the future, as the technology evolves, it might be able to distinguish between humans and potential prey. Or even perform sentiment analysis on humans to differentiate between humans at peace and humans that are actively trying to kill you.
Also, for the record, I'm not suggesting that being afraid of the potential for technology such as this is completely unreasonable, but I am arguing that in this country, at least for now, we do have a Bill of Rights that protects our right to bear arms and this, such as it is, classifies as such, and should not be bannable on the meritless assumption that every would-be shooter will now plunk down $17,000 and become a super-villain just because they can.
1) I agree you'd have to include that in the weighing of pros vs cons. I think many people who argue that this weapon should be illegal for the average person would concede that it would make sense to legalize it for people with a disability.
2) Come on, seriously? You say "even every day items". It makes less sense to ban every day items than it does to ban extravagant items that very few people, if any, need or even want. I can kill someone with a fork. More people have been killed with forks than with this weapon. Are you willing to (digitally) stand here and suggest to all of us that it doesn't make sense to ban this rifle until we ban forks?
And where is your line? Every rational person has a line at which they say "X weapon clearly should be illegal for every day people to own." So where's yours? Do you not feel high explosives should be regulated? If farmers decided sarin gas (since it was mentioned elsewhere in this conversation) was a good pesticide, would you be all for it? Wherever you draw your line, it's just as arbitrary as anyone else's.
3) I'm simply not seeing any novel technology here. Motion tracking? It's been done. Servos being controlled by a microprocessor? It's been done. Distance gauging? Trajectory adjustment? Where is the new technology that we'd all miss out on?
Regarding the note about the bill of rights, what a horribly conceived piece of writing is the second amendment. It asserts the right to "bear arms" but doesn't give any hint as to the definition of "arms". An H-bomb classifies as an "arm" just as perfectly as this firearm does. We've outgrown that short-sighted text.
You might feel that way, but I doubt if the Founders would, considering that the majority of firearms, munitions, warships and cannons used to win our independence were provided by civilians. In short though, I don't have to draw that line, as the Supreme Court has effectively already done so, as they define arms being man-portable and "in common use" as a protected class of firearms for the purposes of this debate, though as I recall, Atonin Scalia did make a casual reference to rocket launchers as being too exotic for protections to apply.
US v Miller, another landmark case regarding the second amendment, defines protected weapons as those being of use to a militia. Before we go down that rabbit hole, a milita is defined by 10 US Code § 311 as all men aged 17 to 45, and has been expanded by the Supreme Court to include women as well.
As for the tech, I agree that the individual components are nothing new, but the aggregate of the parts is something new and noteworthy. For what it's worth, I also consider the Gibson robot tuner as noteworthy, as well as the Raspberry Pi, though clearly neither was exactly groundbreaking on the grand order of things.
>You might feel that way, but I doubt if the Founders would, considering that the majority of firearms, munitions, warships and cannons used to win our independence were provided by civilians.
If by civilians you mean the French, you would be accurate. The idea of a civilian warship or artillery piece is as ludicrous then as now. It's not like people have this stuff just lying around the farmhouse. France spent billions of livres fighting the British in that period, more than 1 billion directly on the American conflict. It is entirely accurate to describe the Revolutionary War as a proxy war.
From the NRA's magazine[0]:
>The New Hampshire shipments equipped much of the Patriot army at Saratoga in October 1777, and, by 1778, the majority of Washington’s regiments had replaced their earlier disparate mix of arms with French ones.
There is a staggering amount of historical revisionism to minimize the role of France in this war, and to omit any context or ulterior motive for them doing so. France was the world's major military power, as well as the largest and most populous country in Europe, and had been for centuries. War between England and France was more often than not the case for nearly 500 years between 1337 and 1815. The American war was by no means the largest or most important of these conflicts.
There's a reason that the treaty ending the war was signed in Paris, and it's not because of their fabulous wine and cheese spread. Speeches from the British Parliament will attest that they knew their enemies were Bourbon, and not American. Which should surprise no one except, lamentably, most Americans.
Later on, yes, many of our weapons came from France and Spain. Before that though, almost all of the arms provided (including cannons and ships) were done so by either civilian owners or confiscation.
So, this firearm and its particular technology not being "in common use", it would then seem reasonable to argue that it should be illegal.
You may not think the automation this gun provides is exotic enough to warrant being illegal, but surely you can agree that reasonable people could interpret "in common use" in that way?
I acknowledge that it very well could be read that way, but Alan Gura (the attorney of record in DC v Heller) held in his argument (which was confirmed by SCOTUS) that it can't be circular reasoning -- e.g., you can't ban a weapon to take it out of common use, then argue that it is not in common use because of the ban to prevent it from being unbanned.
That was, effectively the case in Heller, because DC had banned all handguns completely, making them clearly NOT in common use, which they felt allowed them to perpetuate their ban. DC's law was overturned on that logic.
That said, how do you prevent the banning of every new type of gun/handgun/rifle/taser/whatever if the claim is that "Well, it's never been sold, so it's obviously not in common use, so it can't be bannable?" In reality, this isn't even really a gun at all, but a complicated aiming system. The gun it's attached to is the Surgeon equivalent of a Robot tuner on a Gibson guitar (which is why I brought it up elsewhere). According to the ATF, the lower receiver of a gun like this is the only part that is the 'gun'. What this means is that I can buy the lower receiver by itself, with no firing group, no barrel, no butt stock, etc., and that constitutes the sale of a firearm. As such, as it seems that all the tech for this thing is basically in the reticle (except for the trigger group, which is still not technically part of the gun), this is really just an accessory.