School murder

[Magdalena]

People who can do something about it, have become desensitized. I don't think the senseless death of so many children touches their hearts anymore.

Life is cheap, and getting cheaper. That's a bit of an unfortunate "side effect of the times," let's call it.

True. Sad but true.

Personally, I do see tragedies for what they are - even before, say, looking at pictures and/or reading stories of those affected. It's people much like me, and of whom I may one day become one. I don't have children, but I do understand loss and can step into the shoes of people who experience it - to a degree. Enough to matter.

Good.

That said, the motivation to react may very well come from the heart, but the reaction itself should come from the brain alone, I think. I'll never get my sociopathic paradise though, so... Settle for balance of reason and instinct, I suppose.

[Magdalena]

Mags, I agree with your post. When I said the culture was not always like this, I should have confined it to around here in Texas. There were guns, but there was not the obsession with them that we see today. I hardly ever heard "2nd Amendment" growing up. Of course, mass killings started in Austin with Charles Whitman in 1966, so there was always a nut or two doing crazy things. But the average person didn't talk that much about weapons.

Then we had the Luby's massacre in Killeen in the early 90s, and that is when the laws changed about concealed carry. So that was a step toward the gun obsession. But it was when AR-15s were legal again in the early 2000s that the NRA started really screaming about gun ownership, and you began to people thinking that they needed these guns.

We have to do something. At the very least we can have more thorough background checks. We have to go through training and pass tests to get a driver's license. We should have to do at least as much to buy a high-powered rifle.

I agree with you, something has to change. But someone somewhere is making sure mass murderers in the US have access to the best weapons that money can buy. They are better equipped than "the good guy...with a gun".

People feel afraid and insecure and more guns are bought. It's a never-ending cycle. I doubt I'm gonna see changes soon.

[Tom62]

It might be a good idea to restrict the purchase of new guns, but that doesn't solve the problem of any existing ones. Unless Biden wants to take them away from their owners, which would probably ignite a civil war, there are still more guns around than the total number of people currently living in the USA. The chances that they may end up in the wrong hands could be quite high. What probably would happen is that Biden's team come up with more gun laws that won't solve the problem. Something in the line of changing the minimum age for buying guns or making AR-15 type of guns illegal.

[billy rubin]

most mass shooter killings are not assault weapons-- theyre handguns, rifes, and shotguns. assauilt rifles are guilty of fewer shootings that kill lots of people at once.

to minimize deaths from masd shootings, we re better off ignoring ar15s and working on other stuff.

i would implement 100 percent background checks and an aggressive red flag program.  i thonk that wpuld both reduce total deaths and might have a chsnce of passing.

thrre are 20 million ar15s loose in america. no law will make them dosappear

[Magdalena]

...

thrre are 20 million ar15s loose in america. no law will make them dosappear

--Good to know.



--Look at this guy, you think he has enough guns and ammunition to kill...whatever it is that he wants to kill, so bad? 

Question:
Is that how you do it? Two at the same time with your eyes closed?
He cant see, or hear.
 

Maybe the law won't make them dissapear, but this guy looks like an accident waiting to happen.

 Darwin Award?

Should he own this stuff? Is a contract signed about being safe and responsible after one buys this stuff, or is it more like, --who gives a shit who I sell it to and how stupid you are while you use it?
 

[billy rubin]

no youre right . i think that guy is an idiot.

but hes not breaking any laws. it isnt against tbe law to be an idiot. look at our government.

im interested in stopping people from getting killed in mass shootings. i personally favour banning tbe manufacture and sale of guns like that guy is shooting.

but even if that happened, like i said, there are 20 million of them in circulation.

australia did a compulsory buy back of guns years ago. i may be wrong, but iirc only about a third of australians have complied, to date. the government keeps offering new amnesty programs trying to get them to comply.

red flag laws and background checks actually have a chance at passi g. id support them, becausr ill take anything i can get.

[billy rubin]

theres been another one, too.

oklahoma.

semiauto rifle and a pistol, apparently.

when i was a kid in asia people were always running amok and killing people. but they always used a knife. if we could persuade people to do that instead wed have lots fewer  deaths.

[Ecurb Noselrub]

Here is actually a bit of good news. Florida has a law where a judge can take guns away from people. It's called a Red Flag law. So far, several thousands of people have had guns removed from them.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/01/politics/florida-red-flag-law/index.html

This is actually a positive improvement.

[Asmodean]

theres been another one, too.

oklahoma.

semiauto rifle and a pistol, apparently.

when i was a kid in asia people were always running amok and killing people. but they always used a knife. if we could persuade people to do that instead wed have lots fewer  deaths.

Knife wounds can easily be worse to deal with, repair and survive than bullet wounds.

I do agree though. While you can be very effective at a mass stabbing, it may require some close quarter battle at an earlier stage than a shooting/firefight. After all, there's a reason wars are generally not fought with swords and spears these days.

[Icarus]

^  Gray One, I seriously doubt that knife wounds can be more serious than a single gunshot from an AR15.  The AR bullet makes a small hole in the front of a human torso. The exit hole is not even a hole it is a destructive area the size of a dinner plate.  Survival from a direct hit from one of those guns is damned rare. More than one of the kid victims at the Texas massacre were almost entirely beheaded with one shot. Muzzle velocities of near 3000 feet per second does that kind of damage. Those bullets are traveling at about Mach 2.5 or more. 

Pistol impacts are not even in the same league as AR 15 shots. Those projectiles are moving at much lower velocity than the rifle shots.  Even so, a 45 calibre pistol bullet can make one quite dead and somewhat mangled. Maybe not quite as mangled as the result of one of those Viking Axes, but just as dead.

[Tom62]

You can also run people over with a car, like what happened in Berlin two days ago .

[Asmodean]

^  Gray One, I seriously doubt that knife wounds can be more serious than a single gunshot from an AR15.  The AR bullet makes a small hole in the front of a human torso. The exit hole is not even a hole it is a destructive area the size of a dinner plate.

Any expanding round (which I may or may not refer to as "hollow point," though specific designs may vary) of sufficient power will do that. (Pretty much "anything" above .22, but even that will do the same sort of job - just not generate an exit wound)

You can also load your AR with full metal jacket/AP rounds for penetrating power - the back side of hollow points is that they are pretty much useless against heavier armour.

Survival from a direct hit from one of those guns is damned rare. More than one of the kid victims at the Texas massacre were almost entirely beheaded with one shot. Muzzle velocities of near 3000 feet per second does that kind of damage. Those bullets are traveling at about Mach 2.5 or more.

It's the case of concentrating a relatively small amount of force (Pretty much the same as you feel in an uncompensated single shot/bolt action gun's recoil) on an even smaller area. Flesh will give before metal, but the gun part of the equation is just in accelerating the bullet.

The damage said bullet does is largely due to the type of it and the type of target, rather than the weapon's muzzle velocity. Yes, it matters, but expanding ammo is expanding ammo. And even "very" slow, big (or clustered) projectiles can be as- or more devastating (Think shotgun slugs/pellets)
 

Pistol impacts are not even in the same league as AR 15 shots. Those projectiles are moving at much lower velocity than the rifle shots.  Even so, a 45 calibre pistol bullet can make one quite dead and somewhat mangled. Maybe not quite as mangled as the result of one of those Viking Axes, but just as dead.

Depends on what you are shooting with what.

Yes, the gun makes a difference, but at the ranges we are talking about, with the type of target... A unarmoured eight year old will fare as badly against a hollow point round fired from a .45 handgun as against a similar type of round from an AK-47 as against a deer slug as against a knife to a kidney.

Maybe an expanding .45 round would leave a prettier corpse - it would still leave a corpse. Even a 9mm would, when shot "center-ish of mass" into a regular kid. The exit wound "crater" may just be on the inside, rather than the outside, then.

Conversely, they would fare better against an armour-piercing round to the kidney than against the abovementioned knife.

While the AK-47 has the best combination of range, stopping power, rapid reusability and overall lethality characteristics in my comparison, those things really come into effect in combat or combat-like situations, not "ye-olde murder."

EDIT: My "clinical" analysis is good and well, but thinking about it, our own mass-shooter of kids, Mr (then-)Breivik, used a .223 Ruger, which is a similar calibre to 5.56x45 and a weapon not dissimilar to AR-14/15 for the purpose of this comparison. Left a lot of bodies that day... A fair few survivors as well, though - not all from pistol wounds. Ammunition type matters.

...Of course, I suspect that if your intention is to kill a lot of unarmoured people, you'd want reasonable close-to-mid-range accuracy, reasonably rapid fire, large ammo capacity and/or quick reload and hollow points. Actually, screw that. If body count is the only consideration, you'd want something that makes a big boom and generates tons of shrapnel in a crowded area. A bomb. So... The competency of the would-be mass murderer. That matters also. More than the choice of primary weapon type, I would say.

[Icarus]

Impact velocity does matter.  Aside from the F= Ma equation it is the shock wave that is a determinant of overall damage.

A recent demonstration gave visible evidence of the shock wave phenomena.  A block of rigid gelatin, about 25 cm long was the target.  A projectile from a 9mm pistol showed a fairly clean hole all the way through the length of the gel. The AR15 round with its shock wave entered cleanly. Part way through the gel, the hole became ten times larger and the exit blew out a huge chunk of gel. The shock wave did far more damage than the projectile. 

Not a pretty demonstration but surely enough to persuade us to try to eliminate the AR type weapon from citizen use.  Military use OK.  The military purpose is to destroy the enemy and set fear into the heart of his brethren.  Not what we need in elementary school settings or grocery stores.   

[Recusant]

Video demonstration along the lines of what Icarus described. This is AR 15 ammo into ballistics gel (used to replicate flesh in testing ammunition).

[Asmodean]

The above video also describes what I was talking about - he even opens with it being a test of military ammunition.

A more powerful gun is more powerful, a heavier round is heavier - that's good and well, and uncontested by me. What I do contest is that the survivability of impact on an unarmoured target is due to the gun's muzzle velocity, forgetting ammunition type.

Impact velocity does matter.  Aside from the F= Ma equation it is the shock wave that is a determinant of overall damage.

That's a bit too simplistic. If it was just down to force and impulse, the recoil of a gun is your equal and opposite reaction. You can shoot high calibre anti-vehicle rounds from uncompensated bolt-action rifles without injuring yourself, while "disintegrating" your target with the kinetic impactor (Not talking about exploding munitions or any such nonsense for the purpose of this discussion)

When you concentrate the above force on a sufficiently small area, it may overcome the target's resistance. Then the projectile will penetrate. What happens then depends a lot on the design of said projectile. Some are designed to fragment and cause shrapnel damage, some are designed to deform in order to transfer as much of the impact force as possible to a soft target (even in certain less-lethal applications), and some are designed to "stay pointy" and punch through hard (herein, armoured) targets.  Others still are "just" balls of metal.

A recent demonstration gave visible evidence of the shock wave phenomena.  A block of rigid gelatin, about 25 cm long was the target.  A projectile from a 9mm pistol showed a fairly clean hole all the way through the length of the gel. The AR15 round with its shock wave entered cleanly. Part way through the gel, the hole became ten times larger and the exit blew out a huge chunk of gel. The shock wave did far more damage than the projectile.

9mm rounds are less powerful, so one would expect significant differences in performance, but I may need to ask for receipts as to the shockwave doing most of the damage. From what I understand of bullet wounds, they are generally localised to the path of the projectile. They are penetrative, (as in, puncture/cutting/tearing) not concussive (As in, blast)

That said, I don't doubt that blast/shockwave-like damage can be more severe in a gel block. It would still be interesting to see their accelerometer and impulse length data, because if we look at the above video for reference, the amount of actual force transferred into that gelatin block is... Not a lot. I suspect much of the visible damage to be an artefact of the target medium. How does it translate to damage to a human body? (EDIT: I believe there was this autopsy of this one pig what got shot with a rifle of some sort - it was already dead at the time, just so we're clear - which... I cannot find. I may not have seen it online though. May have dated a nurse-in-training for a time)

Not a pretty demonstration but surely enough to persuade us to try to eliminate the AR type weapon from citizen use.  Military use OK.  The military purpose is to destroy the enemy and set fear into the heart of his brethren.  Not what we need in elementary school settings or grocery stores. 

Eh... I'm partly with you, but I'm not that easy. When faced with a multiple variable problem, I demand a multiple variable solution. (I've talked a little about case for automatic, military-style weapons being useful in self defence. They may well have utility for other purposes too - outside strictly military use, and their increased lethality when misused is in itself a multiple variable question)

[EDIT] For background; I don't own a firearm, nor do I want one. They don't interest me much, and I live in a place where I'm very unlikely to face a robbery, much less a riot or a mass shooting. If I do - I'll do my best with whatever force- (or stealth-) multipliers I have at hand. My politics used to reflect, or rather, project that position. These days, think that given sufficient training and vetting, you should absolutely be able to get a bloody multiple rocket launcher, if you want one, even though I wouldn't, though I would ask you to maintain your eligibility as properly trained and vetted through periodic license renewal or some such system.