this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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The author of the Bazaar and the Cathedral, an essay about open source development, wrote a lot about gun rights too, like explaining banning automatic weapons was dumb, as a good shooter would make more damage with a semi automatic.
I'm very, very pro-2A. But... I dunno, man. Yeah, I'm mostly opposed to the NFA of 1934, and the parts of FOPA that prevented new machine guns from getting tax stamps post-'86. But indiscriminate fire into a crowd will absolutely kill more people than a shooter taking aimed shots. If you're aiming, after the first shot, people are going to start running, and aimed shots are going to get much more difficult. If you're shooting indiscriminately on full-auto, you're probably going to mag dump in five seconds or less.
The 2017 Vegas shootings were like that (which was full automatic in practice if not in legal or technical definition).
Most mass shootings, though, aren't like that. People aren't clumped up like they were in that case. Also, most people tend not to be careful about shooting in bursts, which helps control your aim. Even an AR15 (which has relatively mild recoil) will still walk all over the place if you hold the trigger down.
The NFA had organized crime shootouts in mind. In theory, the mob could do the kind of training as a group where full auto makes sense. Even if they would, that's not really the threat posed these days.
FWIW, most AR-15s are semi-auto only. Yes, the M-4 is also an AR-15, but most AR-15s are not M4s, etc. Most of the time what happens when you hold the trigger down is that the trigger doesn't reset; that's been the case for every AR-15 I've seen outside of the very few post-ban dealer samples that you can rent at a very limited number of indoor shooting ranges. Yes, it's a nit-picky point. (Edit: I have both an AR-15 and an AR-10. I compete--badly--in shooting matches like PSCL, IDPA, Gun Run, multi-gun outlaw matches, and so on.)
The NFA wasn't really aimed at organized crime, per se; machine guns weren't in common use even by organized crime, although they were used in some very high-profile cases, like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre(which was organized crime), Machine Gun Kelly, and Clyde Barrow (who used a cut-down BAR that he'd stolen from a Nat'l Guard Armory). Bank robbers--which wouldn't generally be classified as organized crime--tended to use them more than organized crime mobs did. The mob didn't really do "training" per se, since para-military operations weren't their area of expertise.
As a fun fact, the only reason that the NFA sailed through the Supreme Court is because the plaintiff of the case had to go into hiding (...or was killed by his former gang; I don't think he ever surfaced after disappearing), and no one even showed up to argue his side in front of the court. It was a "tax" because the US AG was pretty sure that 2A didn't allow banning guns, but taxes were a-ok. And it originally tried to ban pistols as well, which is the entire reason that short barrel rifles and shotguns are included (e.g., it was thought that someone could cut a rifle down enough to be effectively a pistol and that would circumvent the ban). No one knows why silencers were included; there's no record of any debate about them at all. They seem to have just showed up on the bill, and gotten passed through without comment.
AR15 is just the base design that comes in several varients. There are slight changes to the receiver to make a full auto control group fit, and it needs a machine shop to do it, but it's not much.
Oh, I'm aware. It's not the, "BATF hates this one trick! Single drill defeats months of waiting for paperwork!" that people think. I've seen shop drawings somewhere, but the time in federal prison isn't worth it, IMO. I have a hard enough time hitting a sub-33% IPSC target at 50y on the clock as it is, I don't need to mag dump into the berm and still miss. (What are those, 33% A-zone only targets?)