6 ms·

"Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective." Absolutely and totally false. At the most fundamen

by hga 12y ago

"Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective." Absolutely and totally false. At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind). Hollow point bullets, if you're lucky, expand (which uses up some energy), and that larger bullet does more damage in its passage (also using up more of its energy). Here's the key question you're implicitly asking: do you want to stop or kill the target? Per the above, unless you get a lucky hit on the central nervous system (CNS), people who get shot stop because they don't want to get shot again (perhaps 1/2 of the criminals shot in the US), the rest when they've lost enough blood, which bigger wound channels, destroying more tissue, do a better job of. If you just want to kill someone, pump a lot of holes in them all the way through, for which FMJ is best. It'll be much harder for anyone to patch them up before they die of blood loss. I put it as a simple law: lethality scales with number of hits, stopping power with the diameter of the bullet. Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.

bequanna 12y ago
>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster. To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots. The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.
- hga 12y ago
  It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).
r00fus 12y ago
> At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind). When I served in the military, it was common understanding that Hague convention required use of "ball ammunition" was desirable because you want to inflict casualties on your opposition, not necessarily to kill them. From what I was told, a soldier wounded in service to a proper enemy army is useful to you because it takes a lot of people and effort to rescue, resuscitate and rehabilitate the wounded soldier than one you simply kill. Also having a screaming squad-mate does impact morale downwards too. Of course, all that reasoning could break down when dealing with irregulars and guerrilla warfare, but possibly not. In no way is it "Absolutely and totally false."
- hga 12y ago
  Here you're confusing war time operations, where for example you may only get one hit on a target due to him being distant or whatever, and deliberate killing is most certainly allowed, vs. what is ostensibly a peace time police style operation. In the latter, an order to kill the targets no matter what is likely to be illegal (but in a case like this arguably a matter of foreign policy). What ammo is used it likely to be a lot less important than how it's employed. For example, per one account a number of them were hosed down with machine guns, and the only hollow point ammo used, or plausibly used (since it doesn't tend to work well in semi-auto or full auto weapons unless they were designed or modified for it) was in .357 revolvers used by the close combat team. And strangely enough, 3 survived.... As for the Hague convention, I haven't studied it and its genesis in any detail, but the general idea was to make war less barbaric. Whatever is later said to troops who for political reasons are required to use much less effective ammo that's much more likely to get them killed is at minimum suspect. E.g. logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence.
  - phil21 12y ago
    > logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence. Strongly disagree, as do at least a few military strategists throughout history. I suppose it depends on who you're fighting (if you're fighting a ruthless Ghengis Khan all bets are probably off), but for Hague convention signees in general they will put a high priority on taking care of their wounded. In fact anti-personnel landmines are generally designed to maim, not kill, for this reason. It costs far more to take care of that soldier who got his leg blown off from the knee below, than it does to bury him. Both in time, material, logistics, and possibly morale. So yes - if I'm in an all-out war, I'm going to want to significantly maim (as in make them incapable of fighting for an extended period of time and require extensive logistics to keep alive) a large portion of the enemy. This soaks up even more resources on their side to take care of them and only a certain percentage of those will return to the fight.
atavistic 12y ago
Just out of curiosity, and not because I want to single you out as a representative of your species, but, a lot of firearms enthusiasts share some common traits, and one of the more problematic ones is the obvious fallacy that there are "good guys" and then there are "bad guys", and that only the "good guys" are well-informed about proper weapons handling procedures, and that's because they're focused on "saving lives". Another frequently displayed characteristic is to become pedantic about the technical aspects of gun specifications, and the precise language and acronyms surrounding tactics for close-quarter battles, or indirect fire trajectories or... whatever. Do you guys realize the absurd cognitive dissonance of propping yourselves up with the obvious fallacy of the "good guys versus bad guys" routine, especially when you stand it up next to an appeal to authority through opaque vocabulary? It may feel like you're winning the argument, but some of us are quick to see through this repetitive display that so many of you cling to, when arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wbl 12y ago
  The life they are trying to save isn't the life of the person being aimed at: it's the person behind the wall behind the target. Every bullet is going to land somewhere, the question is how far away that where is, and what it will do when it gets there.
  - hga 12y ago
    Ah, the curiously named "atavistic" did bring out one thing I may have not made clear: when talking about "arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here", one idea is that the target is indeed a "bad guy", and the sooner that bad guy is stopped, the fewer (additional) people he will wound or kill. This is often critical for a "good guy" in close combat with one or more "bad guys", and generally particularly critical in the politically motivated hostage situations which prompted the discussion, where killing the hostages is a frequently desired eventual outcome of the "bad guys". Which in my opinion definitively makes them "bad guys", to the point of my not being in the least upset at those higher ups who give sub rosa orders that they'd prefer none of the hostage takers survive. The point you make is also strong, very frequently so in hostage taking situations, which is one reason good police snipers train obsessively. Important enough that I brought it up in my first paragraph of exposition in this discussion, as well as in, say, a recent one on the quality of the firearms leadership of NYC police, who for a long while saddled their men with FMJ bullets, to the determent of everyone but the self-satisfied and grossly ignorant anointed.

by hga 12y ago

bequanna 12y ago

>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster. To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots. The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.

hga 12y ago
It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political. The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.) But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open). And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army. Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable. If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).

r00fus 12y ago

> At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind). When I served in the military, it was common understanding that Hague convention required use of "ball ammunition" was desirable because you want to inflict casualties on your opposition, not necessarily to kill them. From what I was told, a soldier wounded in service to a proper enemy army is useful to you because it takes a lot of people and effort to rescue, resuscitate and rehabilitate the wounded soldier than one you simply kill. Also having a screaming squad-mate does impact morale downwards too. Of course, all that reasoning could break down when dealing with irregulars and guerrilla warfare, but possibly not. In no way is it "Absolutely and totally false."

hga 12y ago
Here you're confusing war time operations, where for example you may only get one hit on a target due to him being distant or whatever, and deliberate killing is most certainly allowed, vs. what is ostensibly a peace time police style operation. In the latter, an order to kill the targets no matter what is likely to be illegal (but in a case like this arguably a matter of foreign policy). What ammo is used it likely to be a lot less important than how it's employed. For example, per one account a number of them were hosed down with machine guns, and the only hollow point ammo used, or plausibly used (since it doesn't tend to work well in semi-auto or full auto weapons unless they were designed or modified for it) was in .357 revolvers used by the close combat team. And strangely enough, 3 survived.... As for the Hague convention, I haven't studied it and its genesis in any detail, but the general idea was to make war less barbaric. Whatever is later said to troops who for political reasons are required to use much less effective ammo that's much more likely to get them killed is at minimum suspect. E.g. logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence.
- phil21 12y ago
  > logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence. Strongly disagree, as do at least a few military strategists throughout history. I suppose it depends on who you're fighting (if you're fighting a ruthless Ghengis Khan all bets are probably off), but for Hague convention signees in general they will put a high priority on taking care of their wounded. In fact anti-personnel landmines are generally designed to maim, not kill, for this reason. It costs far more to take care of that soldier who got his leg blown off from the knee below, than it does to bury him. Both in time, material, logistics, and possibly morale. So yes - if I'm in an all-out war, I'm going to want to significantly maim (as in make them incapable of fighting for an extended period of time and require extensive logistics to keep alive) a large portion of the enemy. This soaks up even more resources on their side to take care of them and only a certain percentage of those will return to the fight.

atavistic 12y ago

Just out of curiosity, and not because I want to single you out as a representative of your species, but, a lot of firearms enthusiasts share some common traits, and one of the more problematic ones is the obvious fallacy that there are "good guys" and then there are "bad guys", and that only the "good guys" are well-informed about proper weapons handling procedures, and that's because they're focused on "saving lives". Another frequently displayed characteristic is to become pedantic about the technical aspects of gun specifications, and the precise language and acronyms surrounding tactics for close-quarter battles, or indirect fire trajectories or... whatever. Do you guys realize the absurd cognitive dissonance of propping yourselves up with the obvious fallacy of the "good guys versus bad guys" routine, especially when you stand it up next to an appeal to authority through opaque vocabulary? It may feel like you're winning the argument, but some of us are quick to see through this repetitive display that so many of you cling to, when arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wbl 12y ago
The life they are trying to save isn't the life of the person being aimed at: it's the person behind the wall behind the target. Every bullet is going to land somewhere, the question is how far away that where is, and what it will do when it gets there.
- hga 12y ago
  Ah, the curiously named "atavistic" did bring out one thing I may have not made clear: when talking about "arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here", one idea is that the target is indeed a "bad guy", and the sooner that bad guy is stopped, the fewer (additional) people he will wound or kill. This is often critical for a "good guy" in close combat with one or more "bad guys", and generally particularly critical in the politically motivated hostage situations which prompted the discussion, where killing the hostages is a frequently desired eventual outcome of the "bad guys". Which in my opinion definitively makes them "bad guys", to the point of my not being in the least upset at those higher ups who give sub rosa orders that they'd prefer none of the hostage takers survive. The point you make is also strong, very frequently so in hostage taking situations, which is one reason good police snipers train obsessively. Important enough that I brought it up in my first paragraph of exposition in this discussion, as well as in, say, a recent one on the quality of the firearms leadership of NYC police, who for a long while saddled their men with FMJ bullets, to the determent of everyone but the self-satisfied and grossly ignorant anointed.