Saturday - June 28, 2014

Dear Governor: Here’s Some Math

Dear New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

Please ignore my name in the online petition to get you to sign the low capacity magazine bill into law by the end of this month (when it ages out of the Senate). My name got on there by accident, because I clicked the “More” button on an old friend’s Facebook account. Hey, I thought it would give me more information, not take my slight interest as a vote of support.

Thank you.

Now get back to work and lower the insane taxes in this state. Far more than half of every tax dollar goes to public education. We’re paying a fortune to educate ingrates and deadbeats (Abbot schools), so A) let’s stop wasting that much money; B) let’s make sure that at least 2/3 of that money gets spent in the classroom, instead of an unlimited pyramid of highly paid and useless scholastic executives; C) let’s put some statewide performance testing in place and fire the teaching staff that can’t get the job done.

And don’t sign that bill. It’s a crock, and one more that real criminals will ignore.

sincerely,
Drew458
Clinton NJ

PS - That Facebook link starts out begging for your signature because during the 4 to 5 minute shooting spree at Sandy Hook, murderer Adam Lanza managed to fire his weapon 154 times. The implication is that smaller magazines would have taken so much more time to swap in and out, so that many of the people who were killed could have somehow run away.

It’s not as if a bell went off that forced Lanza to put down his gun. And I’m not sure, but I don’t think the police were there confronting him less than 5 minutes from the time he started shooting. “First responders were closing in” but I don’t know if there were actually there and actually confronting him. I could be wrong there, but it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that his shooting spree lasted at least 4 minutes but no more than 5. So we’re told; so must we believe.

And in that time he fired his gun 154 times, killing 20 little children and 6 adults.

So, 4 minutes to 5 minutes. 240 to 300 seconds. 154 shots. Let’s do the math.

The bushmaster, Sedensky said, was loaded with a 30-round capacity magazine. Fourteen rounds were in the magazine when the weapon was recovered by officers and there was one round still in the chamber.

Sedensky said Lanza took his own life with a single shot from a Glock 10mm handgun and was also in possession of a loaded 9mm Sig Sauer P226 handgun. Lanza also had more ammunition for the weapons he had on his person as well as three 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster, each of them containing 30 rounds.

In the area of the shootings were six additional 30-round magazines and contained 0, 0, 0, 10, 11 and 13 live rounds, respectively.

In total, 154 spent .223 casings were recovered from the scene, and investigators believe that the shooting only lasted five minutes.

After the mass shooting had ended and officials began to investigate what happened, they searched the vehicle Lanza parked outside of the school and inside they said they found a loaded 12-guage shotgun in the passenger compartment. The weapon was then moved to the trunk and locked up by officials for safekeeping.

So Lanza actually went through 7 magazines for his rifle: he came in with one loaded, fired until it was empty or jammed, then dropped it and loaded 6 more in turn. Obviously not all the 30 round magazines were full before being mounted (7 X 30 = 210, but 154 + 14 + 10 + 11 + 13 = 202) and used inside the school. You know, like the 4 shots on his mother. And perhaps these 154 shots aren’t including the ones he needed to shoot the doors open. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is 154 shots, the total spree time, the 26 murdered victims, and the 6 magazine changes. And the idea that “banning high capacity magazines” by making magazines of 10 rounds legal and making illegal anything larger, would have saved so many lives at the Newtown School in Sandy Hook. And that’s the rub, because it’s a total load of baloney.

Numbers don’t lie, but Liberals do.

If Adam Lanza had used one giant drum magazine, he never would have had to reload at all. Some kind of massive thing with a couple hundred cartridges in it. Never saw one that big myself, but who knows, they could exist. But he didn’t. He used plain old common, legal, standard, 30 round magazines. And the forensics guys tell us he changed magazines 6 times.

How long does it take to change a magazine on an AR rifle? Not long. Very little time at all if you’re ready for it. Only a couple seconds if you’re half ready for it, and you’ve got another magazine right there in an ammo pouch, or your pocket, or double mounted with one of those Mag-Pull things. And obviously Lanza was at least half ready. And as the media has told us so many times, he had a decent amount of practice learning to shoot and use this very rifle. So let’s pick a short, but not magically short, time for him. Let’s call it 5 seconds, which is a relative eternity when the job can be done in under a second by a trained and ready individual. Like Adam Lanza.

So: 6 swaps X 5 seconds = 30 seconds. Take 30 seconds away from 4 minutes and 5 minutes: 240 - 30 = 210 seconds; 300 - 30 = 270 seconds.

How fast was the guy acquiring new targets, aiming, and shooting? We’ll never know exactly on a per victim basis, but we can figure out an average rate of fire. 210 seconds / 154 rounds = 1.36 seconds per shot. 270 seconds / 154 rounds = 1.75 seconds per shot. Once again, this seems really fast, but try this experiment: set a timer for 10 seconds and get ready to point your finger at objects around the room and say bang, then move on to the next object and say bang and so on. Lanza shot his victims from only a few feet away; precise aiming isn’t necessary: if you point at a wineglass, it doesn’t matter if you’re pointing at the goblet or the stem. Close enough is good enough. Say bang, then move on. The next object you see is your next target; you don’t have to search them out. Target rich environment Ok?

Ok. Ready? Ready to start the timer? Go. Point - BANG! Point - BANG!  Point - BANG! Point - BANG! Point - BANG! Point - BANG! Point - BANG! Point - BANG! Point - BANG! ... Time!  I took my sweet time, and I got off 15 “shots” in 10 seconds, which is 0.67 seconds per shot. Lanza’s slowest average rate was 1.36 seconds, a bit less than half as fast. In other words, he had more than double the amount of time as my casual finger gun exercise here in the living room.

But, holy cow ALREADY, Drew, this is about a bill up for NJ Governor Christie to sign, a magazine capacity law that will keep our school children (and everyone else) so much safer the next time a law-abiding lunatic gets a gun and goes on a rampage.  I know. Be patient. I’m almost there.

Let’s now assume that only 10 round magazines are available, and that they take just as long to swap in and out as the 30 round variety. So, to fire 154 rounds, Lanza would have had to use 16 magazines, which means he would have had to do 15 magazine swaps. 15 swaps X 5 seconds per swap = 75 seconds.

4 minutes less 75 seconds = 240 - 75 = 165; 165 seconds / 154 shots = 1.07 seconds per shot, half again longer per shot than my finger experiment (56 rounds per minute vs my 90).

5 minutes less 75 seconds = 300 - 75 = 225; 225 seconds / 154 shots = 1.46 seconds per shot, less than half the rate as my finger experiment (41 rounds per minute vs my 90). And 1.46 seconds per shot is still a longer time than the otherwise reasonable 1.36 seconds per shot we came up with in the 30 round magazine scenario using a 4 minute shooting window.

Let me state that again: Using 10 round magazines instead of 30 round magazines, Lanza would have had to change magazines more than twice as often, yet his average rate of fire is still within the time bounds (max, min) of the 30 round magazine rate. In other words, he could have got off just as many shots although he would have had to change from a leisurely rate of fire to a merely slow one.

Lets turn it around completely. Assume the slowest time, 1.75 seconds per shot, is the fastest this guy can shoot. So he’ll be shooting less within that 4-5 minute fixed window of time. There you go. That’s the “logic” the left and the hoplophobes are using on this one. Ok, let’s see how much less.

We’ve already determined that the smaller magazines would limit the shooting time to between 165 and 225 seconds. Fine.

225 seconds / 1.75 seconds per shot = 128 shots. Sorry for creating harsh mental imagery, but 128/26 = 4.95; nearly 5 shots per victim. Take 3 more seconds and it is 5 per.

165 seconds / 1.75 seconds per shot = 94 shots. 94/26 = 3.62; more than 3 shots per victim (18 shots for every 5 victims in 31.5 seconds).

Bottom line: even at the slowest rate of fire and the smallest time window to do all the shooting, even with a very generous amount of time to change magazines, if Lanza had only had 10 round magazines available to him he still had plenty of time to shoot everyone 3 or 4 times.

TRUTH: SMALLER MAGAZINES WOULDN’T HAVE MADE ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL

Don’t sign that bill, Mr. Christie!




( PPS - at 1.75 seconds per shot, Lanza could have done just as much shooting with a bolt action rifle. Even at his “fastest” calculated average speed here, the eye-blink fast reloading of a semi-auto rifle was completely wasted )

Posted by Drew458     on 06/28/2014 at 09:48 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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