Wednesday - January 14, 2009

Gag Me

What IS it with “professional” authors and journalists? What happens to their braincells when they have to write about guns? Do they suffer some kind of apoplexy? Is the subject just so naughty to them that their reasoning shuts off, and they have to go have a quiet lie-down for a while afterwords? It’s stunning just how poorly these “professionals” understand the subject. And it never gets better. Ever.

Case in point. Here is a link to a Fox News article. Vomit Inducingly titled “World’s Deadliest Conventional Weapons”, and of course the US has all of them. And number 5 on the list is the ultra eviil 50 BMG sniper rifle!!!111!! Airplanes beware!! Favorite gun of terrorists, gang bangers, and sexual predator grade school teachers!!

The .50-caliber sniper rifle: Confederate soldiers first mounted scopes on high-powered rifles during the Civil War, but the first specially designed sniper rifles for both police and military use came about in the 1970s. The barrels are precisely machined and specially mounted to minimize recoil.

Many Western sniper rifles use NATO standard 7.62-mm cartridges, but models using massive .50-caliber bullets are so powerful they can take out enemy ordnance by sheer force of impact.

One .50-caliber model, the McMillan TAC-50, set the record for longest kill in 2002 when a Canadian corporal shot a Taliban insurgent from a mile and a half away in Afghanistan.

“The advantage is range,” says Wright. “You can fire 2,000 meters plus, more than a mile, and hit a target accurately. ... If it hits it’s probably going to kill.”

Who wants to throw the first stone? Ok, fine, I will.

There were no “high powered rifles” in the Civil War, since even the oldest definition of “high powered rifle” describes a weapon that shoots a bullet faster than one can be shot from a conventional black powder muzzle loading rifle. Which is pretty much all they had, since smokeless powder wouldn’t be invented for another two decades.

Should we mention how there have been snipers ever since there even were rifles? Against muskets and arrows, the guy with the rifle is a prize asset. I’d guess snipers go back to about 1500. Maybe the military didn’t have a “specially designed rifle” for sniping before the 70s because they didn’t need one. Put a telescope on a Star gauged ‘03A3 and it works just fine. So would a nice Model 70 with a match barrel. And cops? How on earth did they survive before they had SWAT teams (hut! hut! hut!) and their ominous black trucks? Maybe if they had to shoot something at a long distance they just took the old .30-30 out of the trunk and did what they had to do, without special funding and uniforms? Maybe?

Do regular rifles use imprecise machining? No. If your barrel’s bore is off by more than about 0.001” the bullet will either get stuck, causing an explosion, or be wildly inaccurate, causing a miss.

Hey, how about special ways of mounting the barrel to reduce recoil? Um, you mean like a recoil operated M2 machine gun (1917-1919) or a Browning A5 shotgun (1898)? Or the recoil operated M1941 Johnson? No, that’s nothing new either. Muzzle brakes? They’ve been around at least 70 years now.

Bullets taking out a target by sheer force of impact? Um, that’s what they do. That’s their job.

And so on. And so on. Always. It’s pretty sickening. Book authors are even worse, although nobody gets the gun facts wrong worse than movie and TV directors.

Gotta go finish reading my gumshoe detective story. The private dick is in a shootout, and he’s down to his last clip for his 14mm double barreled automatic revolver. Hope he makes it through!

Posted by Drew458     on 01/14/2009 at 10:26 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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