Ballistic energy restrictions, the new gun control avenue

[GnometownHero]

I saw some misguided liberal discussion of this a few years ago. A 12ga slug, belted magnums, even a +p 45 Colt would fall to this failed logic being spun by anti gun pundents

What we keep getting wrong about gun regulation

Ryan Sanders: In our debate about gun control, we’re talking past each other, partly because we aren’t using the same language for firearms. I offer a primer...

www.dallasnews.com

 

[retrieverman]

I don’t have a subscription, so I can’t see the article. However, I’ll make the same comment as to all the other BS the anti gunners come up with. It’s unenforceable. :finger:

 

[golddigger14s]

Can't read,

 

[HoLeChit]

@retrieverman @golddigger14s


ARTICLE TEXT



I like clarity. And I see a frustrating lack of it in our nationwide conversation about guns. Americans have been debating gun issues for decades, and we still have the same persistent miscommunication about what guns are and how they work — a topic experts call “ballistics.”
Pro-gun activists love to chide their opponents for not knowing enough about ballistics, asserting that no one can write smart public policy on guns if they can’t articulate the details of how specific guns work. They’re right. We don’t expect people who know little about the subject matter to make policy on women’s health, traffic safety, or international trade, for instance. So why should we lower the standard for firearms?
On the other hand, among gun-control proponents, there seems to be a hesitation to learn about guns at all. Many find the subject itself to be morally reprehensible. Some worry that allowing people to get too close to guns will make them more attractive, romanticizing them and contributing to a gun culture that already seems pervasive.
All of this muddies the waters and leads too many people to believe that there’s no good way to restrict guns. Should we ban assault rifles? But what exactly is an assault rifle? Is it any gun that looks like a military weapon? Should we ban handguns? What if you can attach a stock to that gun so it looks more like a rifle?

 

[HoLeChit]

NEWS ARTICLE CONTINUED.


People who want gun reform can get tripped up in these details. And those who oppose stricter gun laws can point to the complications of banning this sort or that sort of gun as the reason why reform won’t work. It leads to stasis around the issue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, there’s a clear, commonsense category that could provide the basis for gun reform that is easy to understand and can get us past all of the questions about what a gun looks like, or the size of a round or other ways we have tried and failed to regulate these weapons.

I’m going to tell you what it is, but before we get to that, we need to walk through a short gun primer to show why the way we talk about regulating them isn’t effective.

I should say that, while I own guns myself and grew up around them, I am neither an expert nor an enthusiast. I like to hunt — especially game birds — but when my fellow hunters get into debates about minutes of angle and ballistic coefficients, I’m lost. What I share below is pretty fundamental gun vocabulary. For the advanced course, see your uncle who wears camo to Christmas.

Names and numbers​

The first thing to know about types of guns is that there is no cohesive framework for the way they are built and named. Some rounds are measured in millimeters, others in calibers. Sometimes brand names or acronyms change the meaning. And the calibers seem to be chosen at random.

If you hear about a .308 rifle, that doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as a .309 or a .310. There isn’t. But there is a .300, which is different from a .300 Win Mag. Confused yet?

Guns and their accompanying ammunition are almost always named for the diameter of the bullet, which matches the diameter of the inside of the barrel, or the bore.

But sometimes those numbers don’t make sense at all. For instance, a .380, a .38 Special, a .357 Magnum, and a 9 millimeter are all the same diameter. Go figure.

This Byzantine system creates the dynamic in which enthusiasts look down their noses at outsiders. But it’s OK not to know everything about every model of gun. Grasping the basics can make you at least conversant.

Categories​

Consumer firearms generally fit into three categories: handguns, rifles and shotguns.

Rifles and handguns are very similar, ballistically. They fire a single, conical-shaped bullet out of a rifled bore. Rifling means that grooves on the inside of the barrel cause the bullet to spin, which makes it more stable in flight and more accurate, like a quarterback throwing a tight spiral, instead of wobbling “duck.”

Shotguns fire hundreds of projectiles all at once — tiny pellets, usually a little bigger than a grain of ground pepper. When the gun is fired, these pellets spread out from the muzzle, making it easier to hit a target, particularly a moving one like a bird in flight.

Shotguns are dangerous at close range, but the pellets are smaller and slower than bullets and they slow down much faster, which means shotguns have much shorter range. Many Texas dove hunters have experienced a shower of pellets from a fellow hunter blasting away from the other side of a stock tank. It’s not an experience anyone wants, but it’s certainly not lethal.

For purposes of this essay, forget category-defying things like sawed-off shotguns and bump stocks. Those are illegal anyway, or at least they should be.

Repeating fire​

There are also three categories of mechanisms for loading a gun’s next shot.

Automatic guns fire repeatedly when the shooter holds down the trigger. These shoot very fast: often more than 10 rounds per second. These are also called fully automatic rifles or machine guns, and they are illegal for civilian use in the United States. Fully automatic shotguns and handguns aren’t really a thing.

Semiautomatic guns fire once each time the shooter squeezes the trigger, with no other action required. This is the category that is the target of much gun reform. Rifles, handguns and shotguns all come in semiautomatic models. Semiautomatic rifles and handguns fire from magazines, the size of which limits how many bullets can be fired before the shooter must reload.

Finally, manual loading guns require the shooter to load another round between each shot by pulling a lever, pumping a slide, or working a bolt. Not only does this slow down the shooting, it disrupts the shooter’s aim.

For rifles used in hunting and target practice, there is not much advantage to semiautomatic fire. The second shot at a deer or hog is going to be a desperate attempt at a fast moving target. And rapid fire on the gun range means you’re shooting for fun, not for accuracy. Semiautomatic fire is most helpful in situations when a shooter has multiple targets who can’t bound away as swiftly as a deer. If that sentence calls to mind mass shootings at schools or malls, now you know why semiautomatic fire has been at the top of the list for gun control advocates. Restricting access to semiautomatic rifles is the most commonsense reform available to us. It should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t the reform that I think can be most effective or get the most political support.

Cosmetics​

All of this has to do with a gun’s function, not its appearance. Too many people who want gun reform focus on what a gun looks like, when they need to be thinking about how it works.

Menacing black guns that look like weapons of war can fire relatively small, slow projectiles. And a common deer rifle that looks like a piece of wooden-stocked nostalgia from your grandfather’s barn, can kill instantly.

This is where gun enthusiasts lose patience with proposals for gun reform that identify firearms by labels that don’t describe their functions. “Assault rifle” is a useless term in this regard. So are “black guns,” “AR-15″ and “weapons of war.”

Variables​

Each model of firearm can only fire shells made to fit it, but there are lots of variables beyond bullet diameter. The length and weight of the bullet matter. A heavier bullet does more damage.

But the most important variable is the amount of gunpowder pushing each bullet. The bullet is only the projectile. The rest of the cartridge holds a charge that explodes inside the gun, in what’s called the chamber, sending the bullet on its way.

A .22 long rifle — one of the first guns given to many Texans before they’re old enough to drive a car — uses very little gunpowder. The cartridge is only about an inch long. The bullet itself is 15.6 mm long. A .22 bullet weighing 40 grains leaves the muzzle at about 1,200 feet per second. Some shotguns fire faster than that. But the bullet in a .22-250 — also a .22 caliber — is more than three times as long and leaves the muzzle at 4,545 feet per second. Same caliber round; dramatically different power. And gun reforms based on cosmetics or repeating fire might outlaw the former, but not the latter.

Which brings us to the feature that should be the basis of gun reform policies, in my opinion: muzzle energy.

Energy​

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers used to take all the cousins out for target practice. We wouldn’t shoot paper targets; we would shoot things like watermelons and coke cans and milk jugs full of water, because those things explode. When a high-energy bullet hits a watermelon, it doesn’t just poke a hole in it. The bullet’s energy is absorbed by the entire melon, and it blows up.

When a bullet hits a human body, it mushrooms and tumbles, causing gruesome damage to tissue and bone, but it also delivers a shock of energy that must be absorbed. In many cases, experts say, it’s better for a bullet to travel all the way through a victim than to tear and tumble until all that energy is absorbed inside the body.

There is a measurement for this destructive force. It’s called muzzle energy. It measures the mass and velocity of the bullet when it leaves the gun.

Reform​

I propose gun reform considerations should start with muzzle energy. This would affect ammunition, not the guns themselves, since bullets come in varying weights for the same gun.

By federal law, we should restrict rifle rounds with muzzle energy greater than 1,100 foot-pounds, and handgun rounds with muzzle energy greater than 500 foot-pounds. That would restrict the popular 5.56 mm ammunition that many AR-style rifles use, but it would not restrict rounds that are perfectly good for target practice and varmint hunting like the .222 Remington, the M1 carbine, and the .22 long rifle. Some of the heaviest rounds for popular handgun calibers would be restricted, but capable personal protection pistols like the .40 Smith & Wesson, .380 and .38 Special would not.

Setting these thresholds will disadvantage large animal hunters and some serious target shooters, especially those who compete at long range. Those activities require more muzzle energy. But since that energy makes the tools of those hobbies dangerous to humans too, those shooters should face extra cost and scrutiny when purchasing ammunition.

The element of this proposal that will prove most unpopular has to do with deer hunting. To kill a deer or other large animal humanely requires a rifle round with high muzzle energy — the very rounds that should be restricted for public safety. There’s simply no way around that. When it comes down to it, I’m willing to do some extra paperwork and pay a few dollars more to fill my deer tag if there’s even the slightest chance it will save lives. And arguments about disarming law-abiding citizens don’t carry water.

Ammunition sales in categories with muzzle energy above these thresholds should be limited to small quantities, with controlled exceptions for gun ranges and competitive meets. Ammunition manufacturers should be required to label their products with muzzle energy, and the sale of such ammunition should carry an additional tax, the proceeds of which go to victims of gun violence.

These ideas are only ballistics-specific reforms. They don’t address policy proposals tied to gun owners (like background checks), storage (like trigger locks), sales (like dealer liabilities), or use (like stand-your-ground laws). They also don’t account for people who will skirt the system by loading their own shells or finding other work-arounds.

Some readers may disagree about where to set these thresholds. Maybe muzzle energy restrictions should be the same for rifles and pistols. Maybe it should be 1,500 foot-pounds instead of 1,100. Those are debates that reasonable people can have once we’re all using the same language with the same meaning.

The last serious push to regulate ammunition came in the 1990s, led by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. But that effort was focused on factors like the shape and softness of bullets, not kinetic energy.

Other nations use muzzle energy as part of their regulatory systems, though usually with much lower thresholds than I’m proposing. In Northern Ireland, any firearm with muzzle energy greater than 74 foot-pounds must be registered. Canada restricts ammunitionbased on muzzle energy too, among other factors, though its threshold is so high (7,376 foot-pounds) it’s basically useless.

Surprisingly, Texas already regulates some weapons this way. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department allows hunting some species with pneumatic air guns (not firearms) with restrictions on minimum muzzle energy.

But generally, the most specific language for gun control is largely ignored by those proposing new restrictions.

Alexander L. Burton, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at Dallas, said ballistics is virtually absent from the academic gun control debate.

“Much of the academic literature on the topic of gun control has failed to move beyond magazine sizes and style of weapon,” he told me. “This has led to the same back-and-forth debates that often become divided down political lines and fail to move the discussion forward.”

Burton is right. The first step in having better conversations about guns is sharing more accurate, empirical language about the topic. That’s where we should start.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at [email protected]

 

[HoLeChit]

This is the kind of chit that happens when you post memes and talk down to people about how “AR’s are just Mattel made poodle shooters, my grandpappys wooden model 70 deer gun will kill 3 people standing in a row” idiotic talk. Congrats, you trying to make someone sound dumb just made them realize that they should expand their list. I’m not saying you guys, i guess im just venting. I saw this crap all the time when I was on Facebook and it makes me mad.

 

[dennishoddy]

This is the kind of chit that happens when you post memes and talk down to people about how “AR’s are just Mattel made poodle shooters, my grandpappys wooden model 70 deer gun will kill 3 people standing in a row” idiotic talk. Congrats, you trying to make someone sound dumb just made them realize that they should expand their list. I’m not saying you guys, i guess im just venting. I saw this crap all the time when I was on Facebook and it makes me mad.
View attachment 409485View attachment 409486View attachment 409487

Here is the original assault rifle. Almost every firearm in history was developed for military use, then superseded by more modern weapons. The evolution will continue.

 

[HoLeChit]

While I’m on this rant and unreasonably angry at the moment, stop calling ARs “modern sporting rifles”. They aren’t. They are weapons of self defense, tools for use in situations of invasion, anarchy, and if governments get too dick tater ish. Trying to make things sound like unicorn farts, puppy dogs, and rainbows to people who don’t understand firearms doesn’t educate them. It doesn’t make firearms less dangerous, it makes them more surprising to people who need to understand what they are, rather than being caught off guessed by them or influenced by what they are portrayed to be by media or otherwise.

 

[dennishoddy]

People who want gun reform can get tripped up in these details. And those who oppose stricter gun laws can point to the complications of banning this sort or that sort of gun as the reason why reform won’t work. It leads to stasis around the issue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, there’s a clear, commonsense category that could provide the basis for gun reform that is easy to understand and can get us past all of the questions about what a gun looks like, or the size of a round or other ways we have tried and failed to regulate these weapons.

I’m going to tell you what it is, but before we get to that, we need to walk through a short gun primer to show why the way we talk about regulating them isn’t effective.

I should say that, while I own guns myself and grew up around them, I am neither an expert nor an enthusiast. I like to hunt — especially game birds — but when my fellow hunters get into debates about minutes of angle and ballistic coefficients, I’m lost. What I share below is pretty fundamental gun vocabulary. For the advanced course, see your uncle who wears camo to Christmas.

Names and numbers​

The first thing to know about types of guns is that there is no cohesive framework for the way they are built and named. Some rounds are measured in millimeters, others in calibers. Sometimes brand names or acronyms change the meaning. And the calibers seem to be chosen at random.

If you hear about a .308 rifle, that doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as a .309 or a .310. There isn’t. But there is a .300, which is different from a .300 Win Mag. Confused yet?

Guns and their accompanying ammunition are almost always named for the diameter of the bullet, which matches the diameter of the inside of the barrel, or the bore.

But sometimes those numbers don’t make sense at all. For instance, a .380, a .38 Special, a .357 Magnum, and a 9 millimeter are all the same diameter. Go figure.

This Byzantine system creates the dynamic in which enthusiasts look down their noses at outsiders. But it’s OK not to know everything about every model of gun. Grasping the basics can make you at least conversant.

Categories​

Consumer firearms generally fit into three categories: handguns, rifles and shotguns.

Rifles and handguns are very similar, ballistically. They fire a single, conical-shaped bullet out of a rifled bore. Rifling means that grooves on the inside of the barrel cause the bullet to spin, which makes it more stable in flight and more accurate, like a quarterback throwing a tight spiral, instead of wobbling “duck.”

Shotguns fire hundreds of projectiles all at once — tiny pellets, usually a little bigger than a grain of ground pepper. When the gun is fired, these pellets spread out from the muzzle, making it easier to hit a target, particularly a moving one like a bird in flight.

Shotguns are dangerous at close range, but the pellets are smaller and slower than bullets and they slow down much faster, which means shotguns have much shorter range. Many Texas dove hunters have experienced a shower of pellets from a fellow hunter blasting away from the other side of a stock tank. It’s not an experience anyone wants, but it’s certainly not lethal.

For purposes of this essay, forget category-defying things like sawed-off shotguns and bump stocks. Those are illegal anyway, or at least they should be.

Repeating fire​

There are also three categories of mechanisms for loading a gun’s next shot.

Automatic guns fire repeatedly when the shooter holds down the trigger. These shoot very fast: often more than 10 rounds per second. These are also called fully automatic rifles or machine guns, and they are illegal for civilian use in the United States. Fully automatic shotguns and handguns aren’t really a thing.

Semiautomatic guns fire once each time the shooter squeezes the trigger, with no other action required. This is the category that is the target of much gun reform. Rifles, handguns and shotguns all come in semiautomatic models. Semiautomatic rifles and handguns fire from magazines, the size of which limits how many bullets can be fired before the shooter must reload.

Finally, manual loading guns require the shooter to load another round between each shot by pulling a lever, pumping a slide, or working a bolt. Not only does this slow down the shooting, it disrupts the shooter’s aim.

For rifles used in hunting and target practice, there is not much advantage to semiautomatic fire. The second shot at a deer or hog is going to be a desperate attempt at a fast moving target. And rapid fire on the gun range means you’re shooting for fun, not for accuracy. Semiautomatic fire is most helpful in situations when a shooter has multiple targets who can’t bound away as swiftly as a deer. If that sentence calls to mind mass shootings at schools or malls, now you know why semiautomatic fire has been at the top of the list for gun control advocates. Restricting access to semiautomatic rifles is the most commonsense reform available to us. It should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t the reform that I think can be most effective or get the most political support.

Cosmetics​

All of this has to do with a gun’s function, not its appearance. Too many people who want gun reform focus on what a gun looks like, when they need to be thinking about how it works.

Menacing black guns that look like weapons of war can fire relatively small, slow projectiles. And a common deer rifle that looks like a piece of wooden-stocked nostalgia from your grandfather’s barn, can kill instantly.

This is where gun enthusiasts lose patience with proposals for gun reform that identify firearms by labels that don’t describe their functions. “Assault rifle” is a useless term in this regard. So are “black guns,” “AR-15″ and “weapons of war.”

Variables​

Each model of firearm can only fire shells made to fit it, but there are lots of variables beyond bullet diameter. The length and weight of the bullet matter. A heavier bullet does more damage.

But the most important variable is the amount of gunpowder pushing each bullet. The bullet is only the projectile. The rest of the cartridge holds a charge that explodes inside the gun, in what’s called the chamber, sending the bullet on its way.

A .22 long rifle — one of the first guns given to many Texans before they’re old enough to drive a car — uses very little gunpowder. The cartridge is only about an inch long. The bullet itself is 15.6 mm long. A .22 bullet weighing 40 grains leaves the muzzle at about 1,200 feet per second. Some shotguns fire faster than that. But the bullet in a .22-250 — also a .22 caliber — is more than three times as long and leaves the muzzle at 4,545 feet per second. Same caliber round; dramatically different power. And gun reforms based on cosmetics or repeating fire might outlaw the former, but not the latter.

Which brings us to the feature that should be the basis of gun reform policies, in my opinion: muzzle energy.

Energy​

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers used to take all the cousins out for target practice. We wouldn’t shoot paper targets; we would shoot things like watermelons and coke cans and milk jugs full of water, because those things explode. When a high-energy bullet hits a watermelon, it doesn’t just poke a hole in it. The bullet’s energy is absorbed by the entire melon, and it blows up.

When a bullet hits a human body, it mushrooms and tumbles, causing gruesome damage to tissue and bone, but it also delivers a shock of energy that must be absorbed. In many cases, experts say, it’s better for a bullet to travel all the way through a victim than to tear and tumble until all that energy is absorbed inside the body.

There is a measurement for this destructive force. It’s called muzzle energy. It measures the mass and velocity of the bullet when it leaves the gun.

Reform​

I propose gun reform considerations should start with muzzle energy. This would affect ammunition, not the guns themselves, since bullets come in varying weights for the same gun.

By federal law, we should restrict rifle rounds with muzzle energy greater than 1,100 foot-pounds, and handgun rounds with muzzle energy greater than 500 foot-pounds. That would restrict the popular 5.56 mm ammunition that many AR-style rifles use, but it would not restrict rounds that are perfectly good for target practice and varmint hunting like the .222 Remington, the M1 carbine, and the .22 long rifle. Some of the heaviest rounds for popular handgun calibers would be restricted, but capable personal protection pistols like the .40 Smith & Wesson, .380 and .38 Special would not.

Setting these thresholds will disadvantage large animal hunters and some serious target shooters, especially those who compete at long range. Those activities require more muzzle energy. But since that energy makes the tools of those hobbies dangerous to humans too, those shooters should face extra cost and scrutiny when purchasing ammunition.

The element of this proposal that will prove most unpopular has to do with deer hunting. To kill a deer or other large animal humanely requires a rifle round with high muzzle energy — the very rounds that should be restricted for public safety. There’s simply no way around that. When it comes down to it, I’m willing to do some extra paperwork and pay a few dollars more to fill my deer tag if there’s even the slightest chance it will save lives. And arguments about disarming law-abiding citizens don’t carry water.

Ammunition sales in categories with muzzle energy above these thresholds should be limited to small quantities, with controlled exceptions for gun ranges and competitive meets. Ammunition manufacturers should be required to label their products with muzzle energy, and the sale of such ammunition should carry an additional tax, the proceeds of which go to victims of gun violence.

These ideas are only ballistics-specific reforms. They don’t address policy proposals tied to gun owners (like background checks), storage (like trigger locks), sales (like dealer liabilities), or use (like stand-your-ground laws). They also don’t account for people who will skirt the system by loading their own shells or finding other work-arounds.

Some readers may disagree about where to set these thresholds. Maybe muzzle energy restrictions should be the same for rifles and pistols. Maybe it should be 1,500 foot-pounds instead of 1,100. Those are debates that reasonable people can have once we’re all using the same language with the same meaning.

The last serious push to regulate ammunition came in the 1990s, led by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. But that effort was focused on factors like the shape and softness of bullets, not kinetic energy.

Other nations use muzzle energy as part of their regulatory systems, though usually with much lower thresholds than I’m proposing. In Northern Ireland, any firearm with muzzle energy greater than 74 foot-pounds must be registered. Canada restricts ammunitionbased on muzzle energy too, among other factors, though its threshold is so high (7,376 foot-pounds) it’s basically useless.

Surprisingly, Texas already regulates some weapons this way. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department allows hunting some species with pneumatic air guns (not firearms) with restrictions on minimum muzzle energy.

But generally, the most specific language for gun control is largely ignored by those proposing new restrictions.

Alexander L. Burton, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at Dallas, said ballistics is virtually absent from the academic gun control debate.

“Much of the academic literature on the topic of gun control has failed to move beyond magazine sizes and style of weapon,” he told me. “This has led to the same back-and-forth debates that often become divided down political lines and fail to move the discussion forward.”

Burton is right. The first step in having better conversations about guns is sharing more accurate, empirical language about the topic. That’s where we should start.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at [email protected]

Did you even read what you posted?
Quoting from your post.

For rifles used in hunting and target practice, there is not much advantage to semiautomatic fire. The second shot at a deer or hog is going to be a desperate attempt at a fast moving target. And rapid fire on the gun range means you’re shooting for fun, not for accuracy. Semiautomatic fire is most helpful in situations when a shooter has multiple targets who can’t bound away as swiftly as a deer. If that sentence calls to mind mass shootings at schools or malls, now you know why semiautomatic fire has been at the top of the list for gun control advocates. Restricting access to semiautomatic rifles is the most commonsense reform available to us. It should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t the reform that I think can be most effective or get the most political support.

What fawking horseshat! I’ve taken 4 quail on a covey rise, multiple doubles and the occasional triple on dove, using semi auto firearms.
Controlled semiautomatic rifle fire on live targets that can move is easily disproved by YouTube alone watching folks down multiple pigs while on the run. We have members on this very forum that can disprove what was written.
Yes, Grandpas Mod 70 in 30-06 can kill three people in a row.

 

[HoLeChit]

Here is the original assault rifle. Almost every firearm in history was developed for military use, then superseded by more modern weapons. The evolution will continue.

View attachment 409509

Yeap! What we need to normalize the mindset America had in the revolutionary war. Americans owned weapons of war. Muskets, cannons, swords, warships, etc. From my understanding, many of our citizens in that era were more capable of waging war than our government. Because of the wealth, privately owned armaments, and patriotism of our private citizens they stepped up to the plate, and won our independence. That shouldn’t be such a foreign concept in our society.