The AR-15 is a Weapon of Equality

I suppose I should mention Gersh Kuntzman's instantly famous declaration of fear, which is getting a massive amount of play on social media since he published it yesterday.
It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon....

The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. In fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.
He somehow missed that there isn't a fully automatic mode, but among this collection of emoting that isn't surprising.

The AR-15 wasn't actually the weapon used in Orlando. However, the Armalite Rifle ("AR") is the family that has allowed the military to expand women throughout its ranks without abandoning accuracy at range. The Marines teach women to shoot it accurately over multiple shots to 300 meters, a testament to its low recoil and reliable construction.

Over the last 20 years, the Marines have also made a shift to the Body-Mass Index (BMI) standard that they use today. This has led to far smaller male Marines, too, as powerlifters and body-builders can't hold to the BMI standard. For example, I have a 34 inch waist, but am informed that I need to lose over 50 pounds to attain a "normal" bodyweight according to this standard. If I dropped 50 pounds of muscle, a lot of strength-oriented tasks would become harder or even impossible. But I could still put steel on target with an Armalite.

It's a tool of equality, in other words. Edward Abbey said that was common to rifles:
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
That capacity for human equality is a particularly strong feature of the Armalite rifle. It can weigh as much as four pounds less than the M1 Garand rifle with which we fought World War II. Its recoil is vastly less than the .30-06 round the M1 fired. It is an ideal weapon for the kind of militia use the Founders intended: its operation is immediately familiar to anyone with military training, and it can be conveyed quickly to almost any citizen who might be called up even without military training. Almost any citizen can carry it and use it effectively, quickly, at need.

Of course, those things are also the very reasons it is so dangerous in the hands of a bad person. This particular bad person shouldn't have had access to firearms, under existing law, because of his penchant for domestic violence. The Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes it a felony to transfer a weapon to someone convicted of domestic violence. The only problem is that, somehow, he never got convicted. His wife didn't press charges, just as she seems to have gone to the store to buy the gun and to help him scout out the club (and possibly Disney World). Well, a battered wife has a complex psychological state, and legitimate physical fear, so perhaps we won't press her too closely about all of that. But the FBI also somehow missed any signs of it during their multiple investigations of him.

10 comments:

MikeD said...

Anyone who whinges about the recoil of an AR-15 is either a liar or the most fragile flower of humanity. Let this person fire a .30-06 and tell me of the recoil.

But given that they claimed it had an automatic mode, I suspect they never even fired the weapon in the first place, and this article is a complete work of fiction top to bottom.

raven said...

This guy had the spotlight of our intrusive surveillance system shining directly on him, all the indicators flashing, all the boxes checked, and they for some reason decided to look away.
This is not an anomaly. This is getting routine when a specially favored victim class is involved.

The dis-information campaign is in full swing- and for some reason gallup reports an all time low of 20% of the population trust the mainstream press and television. People are getting tired of being lied to by the gov. , about almost everything, all the time. There is no trust left among half the people, and the other half don't give a damn, as long as they get money for nothing.

Ed Abbey is one of the few left leaning people I had any respect for- he came under attack by his fellows because of his stand on guns and his distaste for illegals flooding across the border and leaving a sea of trash in the desert. His recommendation was to give each one of them a rifle and 50 rounds of ammo and send them back south. This had the illustrative effect of revealing how the commies agenda had taken over most of the ostensibly "environmental" organizations as they reacted in favor of a special victim group instead of the environment.



J Melcher said...

"It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon"

I wonder about Mr Kuntzman ... What an interesting name, phonetically speaking. Were an author to attempt a parody character representing a man lacking manly attributes and possessed of an excess of womanly parts, such a name might occur. But setting that observation to one side, I wonder about Mr Kuntzman's experience with weaponry in general. A bazooka, for instance. I have never fielded a bazooka myself. I've fired a Light AntiTank Weapon, (LAW) once. But that is, I think, more than more of my neighbors. What does it communicate to say THIS is like THAT when the audience has little to no experience of THAT? And does Mr Kuntzman himself actually have any basis to say an AR-15 is like a rocket launcher? My limited experience is that the rocket launcher had no recoil at all. Perhaps it is, then, true that the AR-15's modest recoil is "like" the recoilless LAW, or bazooka. Or perhaps the phrase is uttered without regard to its truth or useful descriptive power.

That in mind, has Mr Kuntzman ever been present to experience cannon fire -- from the up-range side, at least? All my own experience, I confess, has been up range of the various cannon, howitzers, and mortars my artillery colleagues like to use. I hope never to be down range of such. But the noise is rather distinctive --- and different from the noise of a carbine. To say THIS is like THAT when the two noises are clearly NOT like one another makes me wonder...

Kuntzman.

Hmm.

The name "Fisk" has acquired a certain utility in a form of literary criticism on-line. I'm wondering if "Kuntzman" might also become useful in describing an author who writes of experiences and draws comparisons among phenomena that he has not, in fact, ever been present to observe.

Grim said...

You know, it depends on what the meaning of "like" is, as Bill Clinton might say. Does it sound "like" a cannon? Well, more like a cannon than like a mosquito.

I've been uprange of old-fashioned cannons and modern artillery, and downrange of mortars and rockets. Also downrange of assault rifles and Soviet-made machine guns. I didn't find the "like" to be all that strong.

J Melcher said...

http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf or summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

[Kuntzman, perhaps] " is someone whose principal aim—when uttering or publishing bullshit—is to impress the listener and the reader with words that communicate an impression that something is being or has been done, words that are neither true nor false, and so obscure the facts of the matter being discussed. In contrast, the liar must know the truth of the matter under discussion, in order to better conceal it from the listener or the reader being deceived with a lie; while the bullshitter’s sole concern is personal advancement and advantage to their own agenda."

E Hines said...

What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing and very very loud

What a p*sy. He gives snowflakes a bad name. No, it isn't. On all three counts. If he were an actual fully grown adult, he'd know. My wife, who's almost as tall as my chest, has no problem.

I have to ask: where's his nurse? He can't possibly be out of the hospital without medical supervision.

Eric Hines

Ymar Sakar said...

It's interesting to see how many Democrats who ban firearms and ARs, actually own, use, or sell these automatic murder weapons. After all, what do their bodyguards carry, pop gun tazers?

Ymar Sakar said...

This guy had the spotlight of our intrusive surveillance system shining directly on him, all the indicators flashing, all the boxes checked, and they for some reason decided to look away.
This is not an anomaly. This is getting routine when a specially favored victim class is involved.


Indeed, it is not a result of incompetence or misguided beliefs or action. It is intentional.

It's almost as if the enemy is inside the gates... not just outside the gates with ragheads on that look different.

Eric Blair said...

I am wondering if that clown was some how shooting left-handed, and so yeah, the spent brass would fly across his face.

In basic training, (with the old full auto capable M16's), one of the drills actually fired a magazine on auto with it braced against his groin, just to show that the recoil wasn't anything to worry about.

I think somebody was trolling the guy.

Grim said...

Now that would be funny -- if tomorrow or the next day the gun range he went to said, "Oh, yeah, we saw that guy coming. Gave him a .50 Beowulf, told him to hold it off the wrong shoulder several inches out..."