The Assault Rifle Shibboleth

Needless to say, the latest mass shooting, (in a Texas elementary school), has triggered the usual fire burst of demands and denials over gun rights and gun control, the debate in auto-mode over abortion being temporarily pushed to the side. The arena of American politics is like a Roman circus of mad dogs who are thrown bones of contention at whim by a bored emperor. Nothing changes. The dogs simply like to go at it.

Of course, gun control activists (which is most of the Demorat Party) were quick to call for an "assault weapons" ban, even though from the confused and sparse reports of the incident it was never very clear what kind of weapon the 18 year old killer used. That didn't stop St. Jacinda the Mournful, (New Zealands Prime Minister), from telling a cheering crowd of Harvard grads that it was time to ban "semi-automatic style weapons."

I can't stand it when people are more interested in scoring Agenda Points than first ascertaining what the facts of any situation are.

I still am not sure what weapon this guy used. You would think someone would say: he was "carrying" a ... blah blah blah -- not that he had "purchased" a blah blah blah two days before. There's a difference.... Duh. Why leave it at a dangling inference when a simple statement of fact will do?

But assuming he was carring an "AR-15 Assault Rifle" .... so fucking what? A Basic Wiki....

"The ArmaLite AR-15 is a select-fire,gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed rifle manufactured in the United States between 1959 and 1964. It was "designed by American gun manufacturer ArmaLite" but later sold to Colt "which "marketed the redesigned rifle to various military services around the world" including "the US military which designated it as the M16."

So... "AR" does NOT mean "assault rifle." It is the name of a manufacturer and stands for "Armalite Rifle."

OK... but it is true that the AR-15/M16 was (and is) what the American military classifies as an "assault rifle" whether made by Armalite or Colt. However, whether a firearm is or is not an assuault rifle does not depend on its nifty and ominous looking silhouette. Pictures of an AR-15 rifle are basically useless, except for harumscarum propaganda purposes.

The qualification of a weapon as an "assault rifle" depends on various defined factors or capacities, including size of bullet and range of fire. For present purposes, what matters is a little switch on the left side of the chamber. A little switch that can have two or three settings: (1) safe (2) semi-auto and (3) full auto.

 
(1) means the rifle will not fire; (2) means it will fire one round per one squeeze of the trigger; (3) means it will fire as many rounds as are in the clip so long as your finger holds down the trigger. (Some have an alternative known as "burst mode" which limits auto-fire to two or three rounds per trigger pull.)

Now, one shot per one squeeze doesn't sound very "automatic." In fact, it sounds rather "manual." The "automatic" in "semi-automatic" does not refer to automatic firing but automatic chambering. The round will automatically be spring loaded into the chamber without having to be leveraged in by pulling a bolt.

The term "assault rifle" itself is more an accident of history than a description of the weapon's use. The standard theory is that the term was a translation of the German sturmgewehr or "storm weapon" which was designed to provide a shorter barrel and more agile firing range than the then standard issue rifle. That in turn got translated into the Hollywood Taktik of charging at the enemy while letting loose a continous discharge of fire from a rifle held at the hip.

Although it may be something soldiers like to argue about, I think it is fair to say that the main purpose of full auto-mode in a rifle is to provide suppressive fire; that is, to make the enemy hunker down under a hail of bullets, although it can obviously also be used for either offensive or defensive mass-kills albeit with less continuous lethality than a belt fed machine gun.

In all events, what makes for a military application is less the "style" of the gun and more the automatic rate of fire; or to be ultra precise: the automatic chambering and firing of rounds.

Again Wiki: "Colt [has] continued to use the AR-15 trademark for its line of semi-automatic-only rifles marketed to civilian and law-enforcement customers, known as Colt AR-15." Semi-automatic.

In other words, what Agenda Activists are calling an "assault rifle" is actually a "one squeeze, one shot" weapon.... just like an semi-automatic 9mm handgun or a .22 carbine.

So the idea that this or any other gunman could go into a classroom and "spray the place with bullets...mowing down victims" under a rain of lead is pure bullshit.

Why is this important? Because when the firing capacity of the weapon is properly understood it basically makes no difference whether the shooter was armed with an "assault rifle" or a 9mm handgun. And if it makes no difference then either you outlaw both or outlaw neither.

Now it is possible to modify a semi-auto into a full auto but it takes a professional gunsmith to do it and even then the results can be problematic. Simple fact is that almost all so-called "assault rifles" in civilian hands are semi-auto (one squeeze/one shot) only.

It is also true that assault rifles are made for use with intermediate calibre cartridges (e.g. 5.56x45mm) which are designed specifically to kill people. But so too are 9mm rounds; and, at the end of the day, any number of different weapons and bullets will kill human beings with comparable effectiveness in non-battlefield situations.

What people like Sweinstein or Saint Jacinda want to outlaw is a dramatic idea they have in mind; in other words a shibboleth.

Now, in this case, it is turning out that the shooter was barricaded inside the classroom for one hour. No one has been very clear about this either; but it appears that during that one hour he picked off the 20 victims one by one. The impression I get...(and it's an impression because everyone is running for cover and being as vague as possible) is that he was"inter-changing" with the cops and at unspecified intervals shooting hostages.

Of course, that's a nightmare, especially if you are a kid waiting your turn. But horrible as it likely was, it has nothing to do with "assault rifles" and a lot to do with an insane kid and cops who were either cowards or racistly indifferent to the situation at hand.

None of this is to deny that the United States suffers from an affliction of violence. But instruments lack agency. The term "gun violence" is one of those verbal flash bangs that actually mean nothing. What is at issue is aberrational behavior, and the question that has to be asked is why is the USA so aberrant? We might as well ask why it is so out-of-shape, ignorant, belligerent, lacking in social cohesion but full self-righteousness and religious insanity ... etc. etc.

Americans are peculiarly inept at grasping fundamental or systemic causes. This is probably the real reason why Marx finds so few takers on these shores. For Alexis de Tocqueville the root cause was America's fetish of individuality. Americans, he wrote, are disconnected in time and place. The chain of generations linked to the land is broken and so too the bond of obligation not only to others but to those who have gone and to those who will come. Americans "owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. ... Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors,... it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” (Democracy in America, ch. 2)

We have quoted this before because we think that it was and remains one of the most fundamental observations that can be made about this country. Indeed solitude is one of the great themes of our painters, poets, cinematographers and singers. We are almost perversely proud of the fact.

But what is a "jungle" if not a place where the individual is thrown back on himself? We are a place so lacking in a culture of obligation and responsiblity that we are a jungle and foremost an economic jungle. Thus, if we want to end "human violence" we have to promote economic security and social purpose; that is, to recapture some of the linkages de Tocqueville referenced.

But of course liberals don't really want to do anything about laying strong, cohesive social foundations. That would cost them money. They are no better than conservatives. Both sides would rather substitute junk issues for issues of substance (again, read "money"). And so it is that one side wants to flood the square with unwanted babies while the other side wants to ban guns to stop violence and censor speech to stop "hate" (aka anything they don't like).

Not surprisingly, Saint Jacinda's commencement address at Harvard covered every single cultural and identity issue on the Woke Liberal's Smorgasbord, ending, of course, with a rousing call for "[t]he impact that we each have as individuals." Not a word, to this crowd of future elites, assured in their privilege, about economic injustice. Beware the evils of "disinformation" and "hate" she cried; but not a word about war, inflation or a preferential option for the poor. Tellingly, what brought the Harvard crowd to its cheering feet, was Ardern's clarion call for "banning semi-automatic military style weapons [cheers] and the decriminaliztion of abortion [louder cheers]." Of course, the Dumbocrats will make these two demands their main talking points and loose in November.  Not that it matters.

All I can say is that when guns are outlawed only cops will have guns.