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Sturgeon's House

The Small Arms Thread, Part 8: 2018; ICSR to be replaced by US Army with interim 15mm Revolver Cannon.


Khand-e

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From what i know open bolt is bad, nobody likes them.

 

 

What is this?

kI9w5.jpg

 

 

Yes; open bolt in SMGs is not desirable.  It makes it much harder to take precise shots with the weapon and makes it much more likely that the weapon will fire when dropped.

 

The only advantage of open bolt SMGs is that they are easier to make.  But these days we aren't arming three million man armies to fight the Nazis, so huge numbers of ultra-cheap SMGs are not needed.

 

That is a very strange precision rifle.  Why does it lack a continuous upper rail?

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So I was wandering through TFB today like I always do and became bogged down in one of the press releases articles on the site penned by a writer other than Nathaniel about an effort by SilencerCo to update laws regarding silencers/suppressors and to presumably get rid of the federal tax stamp. This is something that I'm supportive of.

 

And there's a slick little website run by SilencerCo offering their services with photos of models gunowners with duct tape over their mouths, talking about the right not to shoot loud guns without suppressors and likening the $200 tax stamp to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And they have an Instagram page where you can submit photos of yourself with duct tape over your mouth holding a suppressed firearm. One of which is this one of a (I'm guessing) six year old kid brandishing a cocked semiautomatic handgun.

 

https://instagram.com/p/0VP1J7kfTu/

 

So. Smart move or more dumb stuff by gun owners? And I suppose we can expand on things with the question of when is the "right" time for kids to become familiar with rifles, shotguns and pistols?

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So I was wandering through TFB today like I always do and became bogged down in one of the press releases articles on the site penned by a writer other than Nathaniel about an effort by SilencerCo to update laws regarding silencers/suppressors and to presumably get rid of the federal tax stamp. This is something that I'm supportive of.

 

And there's a slick little website run by SilencerCo offering their services with photos of models gunowners with duct tape over their mouths, talking about the right not to shoot loud guns without suppressors and likening the $200 tax stamp to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And they have an Instagram page where you can submit photos of yourself with duct tape over your mouth holding a suppressed firearm. One of which is this one of a (I'm guessing) six year old kid brandishing a cocked semiautomatic handgun.

 

https://instagram.com/p/0VP1J7kfTu/

 

So. Smart move or more dumb stuff by gun owners? And I suppose we can expand on things with the question of when is the "right" time for kids to become familiar with rifles, shotguns and pistols?

I think it's kinda a dumb move due to the majority of the photo's being 'black rifle' type photos.  Let's be real here.  Your average uneducated white person who doesn't like guns thinks AR-15 is Scary so posting picks of SBRd AR-15s with Suppressors on them isn't going to get you a lot of new support.   Post pics of hunting guns and target guns with suppressors on them. Emphasize the hearing damage reduction... etc.  I'm Canuckistani... So I want suppressors to be legal for the most Canadian of reasons. As a wanna-be shooter, I think they are just good manners.

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So I was wandering through TFB today like I always do and became bogged down in one of the press releases articles on the site penned by a writer other than Nathaniel about an effort by SilencerCo to update laws regarding silencers/suppressors and to presumably get rid of the federal tax stamp. This is something that I'm supportive of.

 

And there's a slick little website run by SilencerCo offering their services with photos of models gunowners with duct tape over their mouths, talking about the right not to shoot loud guns without suppressors and likening the $200 tax stamp to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. And they have an Instagram page where you can submit photos of yourself with duct tape over your mouth holding a suppressed firearm. One of which is this one of a (I'm guessing) six year old kid brandishing a cocked semiautomatic handgun.

 

https://instagram.com/p/0VP1J7kfTu/

 

So. Smart move or more dumb stuff by gun owners? And I suppose we can expand on things with the question of when is the "right" time for kids to become familiar with rifles, shotguns and pistols?

 

I think that a huge number of silenced black rifles isn't a particularly good look to put forward for people who go that's what commandos and stuff carry, right? For the knowledgeable outsiders who don't automatically axiomatically treat gun ownership as an end in and of itself stuff like children who are young enough to be treated with severe distrust unless they're carrying baby's first sporting rifle with a responsible adult on hand and definitely someone letting them hold a cocked handgun for a picture where it doesn't need to be cocked doesn't help the image that the gun community puts forward that they have a universal safety culture and that there aren't people doing irresponsible things with guns.

 

Long ugly sentence but I think it parses and I can't figure out how to cut it down without gutting it.

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I think the number of NORPs with Remmy 700s is decreasing, versus the number of folks who want to build their first AR.

It's becoming a geek world, and fudds are (pretty regrettably) becoming marginalized.

 

There's an expectation that everything one does for enjoyment has to feel like or give the impression of being technology. It's weird.

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There's an expectation that everything one does for enjoyment has to feel like or give the impression of being technology. It's weird.

 

Actually... Yeah, that's one of the primary things that annoys me. It's the sign of a technology-based hobby, which isn't itself bad, but I think we sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater. It was the way to survive, dumping the fudds, but a lot of them (like Steve Bodio) are better people than we'll ever be, and the gun hobby at large should recognize that and try to reclaim that heritage.

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I guess I didn't even realize I had been dumped by the gun community hobby until recently. Does that mean I don't have to answer these pestering fundraising letters from the NRA because I made the mistake once of attending an NRA at College forum where cold pizza and 30-year old gun control cliches were spouted?

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I guess I didn't even realize I had been dumped by the gun community hobby until recently. Does that mean I don't have to answer these pestering fundraising letters from the NRA because I made the mistake once of attending an NRA at College forum where cold pizza and 30-year old gun control cliches were spouted?

 

Holy shit, dude, you think about the NRA!?!?

 

Yes, traditionalism has been dumped by the community at large, but there are some of us (blessedly, a few of us actually have an audience) who mean to change that, myself included.

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We had to dump it to survive. :\

Were non-scary guns hurting the cause?

Or was it the people using them?

Or was it simply that the market for tacticool is so much bigger?

 

Edit: since it's hard to convey tone, I'm being completely serious here. I'm very interested in how your hobby changed, as it's something I've seen in other hobbies as well.

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Were non-scary guns hurting the cause?

Or was it the people using them?

Or was it simply that the market for tacticool is so much bigger?

 

Edit: since it's hard to convey tone, I'm being completely serious here. I'm very interested in how your hobby changed, as it's something I've seen in other hobbies as well.

 

OK, so I got into the gun hobby when I was fourteen, in 2004 when ammunition was really, freakishly cheap. My perspective is colored by this.

I think we had to get rid of anyone like Jim Zumbo, and that meant that whatever gun the latest spree killer was using, we needed to adopt as our very own child. See my previous post on gun politics in the USA for why we'd do such an insane thing (cue Hitler's mustache analogies). So basically, the scarier the better. This meant anyone who just wanted to hunt pheasant and didn't care about those evil black guns was, pffft, well screw them, anyway.

This was a good move in the short term, as it consolidated the base, but in the long term, and in terms of cultivating a certain classiness, it has been a disaster. Basically, this is why Chipotle-dwelling rifle open carry activists exist. Jim, come back to us!

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What changed it - in my opinion - was the Assault Weapon Ban of the 1990s and subsequent anti-assault weapon legislation. Suddenly firearms that really had no real purpose and that serious gun owners really wouldn't buy other than just to stick in the safe were must have because you couldn't get them.

 

A similar phenomenon happened with Twinkies. Nobody was eating them anymore because they were unhealthy and - let's face it - gross to anyone with a palate more advanced than a teenager and Hostess was going out of business because of it. There was also some BS about Union workers wanting more money which brought in conservative talk radio hosts spouting bullshit and so forth. The upshot was that everyone had to buy Twinkies before they were gone for good.

 

Back to assault weapons, by trying to ban assault weapons using ambiguous language created a different market for those weapons. Gun makers found out that they no longer needed to make carbon copies of the M16 that the military was using and instead made them more modular to get around the bans.

 

Here's me being a conspiracy theorist. A more cunning aspect of the black gun craze is that scary looking ARs and scary looking polymer handguns are dirt cheap to make (I would wager) compared to more traditional weapons.

 

Never forget that gun makers are also out to make a buck. And if you can get people to fork over more money for a product that is less expensive to build than that is a good thing. For the gun maker.

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What changed it - in my opinion - was the Assault Weapon Ban of the 1990s and subsequent anti-assault weapon legislation. Suddenly firearms that really had no real purpose and that serious gun owners really wouldn't buy other than just to stick in the safe were must have because you couldn't get them.

 

A similar phenomenon happened with Twinkies. Nobody was eating them anymore because they were unhealthy and - let's face it - gross to anyone with a palate more advanced than a teenager and Hostess was going out of business because of it. There was also some BS about Union workers wanting more money which brought in conservative talk radio hosts spouting bullshit and so forth. The upshot was that everyone had to buy Twinkies before they were gone for good.

 

Back to assault weapons, by trying to ban assault weapons using ambiguous language created a different market for those weapons. Gun makers found out that they no longer needed to make carbon copies of the M16 that the military was using and instead made them more modular to get around the bans.

 

Here's me being a conspiracy theorist. A more cunning aspect of the black gun craze is that scary looking ARs and scary looking polymer handguns are dirt cheap to make (I would wager) compared to more traditional weapons.

 

Never forget that gun makers are also out to make a buck. And if you can get people to fork over more money for a product that is less expensive to build than that is a good thing. For the gun maker.

 

Don, you're absolutely right, but nevertheless I have more to add.

Note the date I got "gunny". 2004. That was the sunset of the "assault weapons" ban. So I'm coming from that angle, first off.

I think "sporting purpose" got redefined, hard. Zumbo types were convinced "sporting purpose" meant "something that looked like something Mauser or Browning designed", but actually lots of guns have a sporting purpose. I'd contend the AR-15 is more uniquely suited to certain significant sporting purposes than other rifles, including Mausers and Browning-designed leverguns by a mile. Maryland, for example, had at least until recently (didn't bother myself to familiarize myself with the Chesapeake AWB Mk. II, Electric Boogaloo much) a specific exemption on HBAR AR-15s, so well-suited to Hi Power competition were they. Likewise, the .223 caliber is uniquely suited to "varmints" and even medium game with heavier bullets, a spectrum which you may note makes up a majority of the hunting sports. And, of course, the sportsman can always use more versatility, accuracy (the AR-15 provides possibly as much as an order of magnitude more than the Winchester 1894/ Marlin 36), and reliability. So it wasn't so much that people switched to liking evil, purposeless guns as they did recognize the utility of evil black rifles. They were ugly, they weren't traditional, but god did they perform!

Imagine if Twinkies were the epitome of nutritious and habit-forming; that's basically the AR-15. Definitely an improvement over the previous paradigm, but highly subject to "over-doing it".

And the final word is... Donward's exactly right when he says the scary guns were easier to make. In fact, that's probably the scariest bit about them, and something I'm hoping to stamp into the popular consciousness with my writing. Assault rifles, which form the basis for "modern sporting rifles"/"evil black rifles" (both terms subject to equal quantities of derision and rejection from me), are a halfway point between the traditional repeating rifle and the submachine gun, yes, but they're most importantly more mass producible than the bolt gun (thought probably not quite as cheap as the SMG). Naturally this carries over to the "modern sporting rifle", which, while accurate, is still an infuriating euphemism. Seriously! A military-spec M4 clone costs less than a grand; someone willing to compromise could get something that looked almost identical for $700, easy. How on earth is even the most popular "traditional" levergun supposed to compete with that!?

No, you never will, Fudds, so give up on it. The days of the fine Mauser and elegant lever-actuated repeater are gone for a time; they may return but not today, tomorrow, or the next decade. Keep your dogs, your falcons, your class. Pass that on; it's what really matters. The next generation may foxhunt with an ugly black gun with a collapsible stock, but make sure they do!

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OK, so I got into the gun hobby when I was fourteen, in 2004 when ammunition was really, freakishly cheap. My perspective is colored by this.

I think we had to get rid of anyone like Jim Zumbo, and that meant that whatever gun the latest spree killer was using, we needed to adopt as our very own child. See my previous post on gun politics in the USA for why we'd do such an insane thing (cue Hitler's mustache analogies). So basically, the scarier the better. This meant anyone who just wanted to hunt pheasant and didn't care about those evil black guns was, pffft, well screw them, anyway.

This was a good move in the short term, as it consolidated the base, but in the long term, and in terms of cultivating a certain classiness, it has been a disaster. Basically, this is why Chipotle-dwelling rifle open carry activists exist. Jim, come back to us!

As someone who likes the aesthetics of wood and steel (M1 carbine and AKM being pretty much to my taste), I am saddened to hear that the hobby is going the way of aluminium and carbon fibre.

 

As someone who follows politics outside of my borders reasonably frequently, I'm also kind of sad to see how cynical the circling of the wagons has gotten.

I was chatting to my sister in law recently (who has, in the tradition of South African expats, become more Japanese than the Japanese) and she pretty coherently explained that the 'American disease' isn't really about a particular topic, but about how people get things done.

The approach where both sides simply burn the concept of consensus to the ground in favour of fighting to win is hella bad for getting good outcomes.

 

I'm sorry that you guys are so locking into that mode of doing things.

 

Edit: Yeesh, I just googled Jim Zumbo. They didn't just ruin him, they forced him to recant as well.

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As someone who likes the aesthetics of wood and steel (M1 carbine and AKM being pretty much to my taste), I am saddened to hear that the hobby is going the way of aluminium and carbon fibre.

 

Keep in mind, Zumbo would have called both of those "terrorist rifles". He was the product of another age...

 

As someone who follows politics outside of my borders reasonably frequently, I'm also kind of sad to see how cynical the circling of the wagons has gotten.

I was chatting to my sister in law recently (who has, in the tradition of South African expats, become more Japanese than the Japanese) and she pretty coherently explained that the 'American disease' isn't really about a particular topic, but about how people get things done.

The approach where both sides simply burn the concept of consensus to the ground in favour of fighting to win is hella bad for getting good outcomes.

 

I'm sorry that you guys are so locking into that mode of doing things.

 

Edit: Yeesh, I just googled Jim Zumbo. They didn't just ruin him, they forced him to recant as well.

 

Don't think it's just the Right; that's a big mistake. If anything, the Left is more guilty. Blame it on our Calvinist ancestors, if you must.

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