Weapons of war
As mass shootings have grabbed media attention of late, the cliché de jour is the assertion—offered by many advocates of gun control, of whom some should know better—that “weapons of war” do not belong in the hands of civilians. This is often accompanied by the claim that anyone who needs an AR-15 to hunt should find a new hobby. I have even seen comments about how such rifles would be bad tools to use in duck hunting.
Indeed. The common AR-15 round, a .223/5.56 centerfire rifle cartridge, is wildly inappropriate for shooting ducks. And shotguns with their pellet ammunition have magazine capacity maximums that exist to preserve populations of waterfowl by restricting how many shells can be fired in short order—after three shots, it is a good idea to see where one stands with regard to the bag limit. That gun control advocates do not seem aware of the need to deal with pests, particularly feral hogs, is down to the rural/urban divide in this country, and it would be well for mice of both the country and the city to learn of each other’s blessings and burdens before pontificating on what ought to be done. Such advocates also often declare the typical AR-15 round to be extraordinarily deadly—according to them, it will blow a body apart—thereby displaying a lack of knowledge about terminal ballistics—bullets do strange things to the point of making categorical statements difficult—and about the many rifle cartridges in existence that are much more powerful.
I have to ask, though, so what? The implicit contrast here is between hunting guns and “weapons of war, suggesting that the former are to be permitted—for now—to approved people, while the latter should be banned from private ownership. This is of course a false dichotomy, as it ignores personal defense, collecting, and competition shooting as purposes for having guns, and it also seeks to drain any practicality from the idea of collective defense. If a nation’s people ever have to fight off a tyrant or a foreign invader, weapons of war sound like exactly the sort of thing that they should be familiar with and have access to.
But what is a weapon of war? Gun control advocates toss this phrase around as if it has some meaning that we are all supposed to know, but it is not a mere rhetorical stance on my part when I inquire of them what they mean.
One possible characteristic might be the capability to fire in automatic mode—i.e., to continue firing as long as the trigger is squeezed, so long as there is ammunition available. This has use in suppressive fire in which the goal of shooting is not so much to hit anything specifically, but is instead to motivate your enemy to find other things to do while you cross the street, for example. Or it is useful in dog fighting between aircraft, since a lot of metal needs to go down range to score effective hits. It is worth noting here the General Accounting Office’s study determining that 250,000 rounds of ammunition get fired for every one insurgent (this was a look at the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) who gets killed. This suggests that a “weapon of war” is, to adapt a line from Macbeth, full of sound and fury, signifying not much.
Another possibility came recently to my mind while watching a video from Ian McCollum’s YouTube channel, Forgotten Weapons, reviewing the Army’s new rifle, the Sig M5, chambered in 6.8 x 51mm. McCollum suggested that the new cartridge’s barrel-burning properties may not be a problem, given the reality of modern war that guns are purchased in bulk and are expected to last only a few thousand rounds—especially in heavy fighting in which weapons are lost or destroyed. Many civilian gun owners see their firearms as heirlooms to be cared for over generations. Add to this the realities of government contracts that go to the lowest bidder and of what is all too often one-size-fits-all procurement, and we have a second part of the definition of a “weapon of war,” namely that it is the cheapest object that will hold together and function well enough only until the next congressional inquiry.
What does not work as a definition of the term is to look at the firearm’s design. Every gun design—not brand or model, but design—in existence has been used by militaries at some point, be the weapon a single-shot muzzleloader, a cap-and-ball revolver, a semiautomatic handgun, or a bolt-action rifle. How an M24/M40 sniper rifle differs from a common deer rifle, other than the latter’s greater likelihood of having checkered wood furniture, is beyond me. As is any way beyond property marks to tell a military from a police from a civilian Webley. Or the U.S. Air Force’s M15 .38 Special revolvers from the ones that private detectives on television and armed citizens in real life have carried for decades.
This can go on indefinitely, but perhaps the point is clear. There is one lingering possibility that I can imagine, the capacity of the weapon’s magazine that I mentioned above. In the case of hunting, limits have the legitimate purpose of maintaining stocks of public property, while for the military, enough rounds is one more than got fired in a particular engagement. What about for civilian use?
I am told that restricting us ordinary gun owners to ten rounds per magazine would have the benefit of making mass shooters pause to reload, thereby giving potential victims the chance to stop the attack. Those potential victims would have a more effective response were they able to shoot back, but this is rarely seen as a realistic possibility by gun control advocates. However, when the police allow a mass shooter an uninterrupted hour to commit his crimes—and an hour in which to reload as often as need be—as was the case in Uvalde, Texas, magazine capacity is of no consequence. Mass shooters in general pick the time and place of their attacks, allowing them to plan out a schedule of swapping or topping off magazines. The benefit of so-called high capacity lies heavily with defenders who must respond to attacks brought to them.
The bottom line here is that “weapon of war,” with regard to firearms, is little more than a scary sounding term to make the uninformed say, “well, naturally, ban those things.” A bomb dropped from altitude is a weapon of war in that it targets property of military or manufacturing value for destruction. A torpedo launched into a ship is a weapon of war. But personal weapons—the class of weapons that one person uses against another in discriminating fighting—have no sharp line between what is appropriate to soldiers on one side and civilians on the other. It may be that many gun control advocates have not thought the matter through, but I cannot help concluding that for those who have done the appropriate thinking, the real goal is to classify all guns as “weapons of war” and thus to ban them from private hands.