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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7270 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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claimed, and three other judges sign onto the claim, that "semiautomatic weapons are unlikely to aid in hunting for food or trophies given the destruction they cause to the target"

Reminds me of listening to the local NPR affiliate round table talking about how you can't use an AR-15 to hunt because it'll scatter the deer into pieces all over the forest.

Presumably both the round table and these judges are working from the same talking point distributed somewhere, but I can't be arsed to find the origin.

I hunt with an AR-10, but it is indeed correct that you cannot deer hunt with an AR-15- although they are wrong about the mechanism.

but it is indeed correct that you cannot deer hunt with an AR-15

Depends on the state: https://www.huntingnet.com/forum/whitetail-deer-hunting/227252-legal-rifle-calibers-state.html

While legal in some states, you probably can’t do it as a practical matter; thé bullet isn’t big enough.

I mentioned this in another comment to gattsuru, but here's some light reading for you:

https://rokslide.com/forums/threads/223-for-bear-mountain-goat-deer-elk-and-moose.130488/

Up to almost 700 pages, lots of pictures -- and not limited to the titular species either; some guys are a bit overboard and going after grizzlies and African game too, as I recall.

It's not something I'm planning on doing myself anytime soon, but they do make a compelling case that with heavy-for-calibre bullets the 223 kills pretty much anything pretty damn well!

I read years ago that the Inuit were extremely fond of the .222 Remington, and used it for hunting anything and everything up to and including bear and moose. I don't think they were worrying about one-shot stops, though...

I've hunted whitetail effectively with a .223 round in the past. A 77gr monolithic copper bullet, out of a 20" barrel, will do the job at ranges less than 150 yards.

If you try to do it with a standard 55gr round out of a 16" barrel, you're correct, but modern bullet construction can do a lot of work.

You can also just drop a larger caliber upper into an AR-15 platform.

There's a lot of fun stuff like that. The supposed explosive nature of an AR-15 round on deer is traditionalist fuddlore, and you could at least imagine it's a bit messy if you try to use it for squirrel, but here I'm just more impressed that it's not even talking about the right concept, or plausibly talking about the right concept. It's a nitpick to say that AR-15s come in .22LR variants, but in the general class of semiautomatic rifles, the feed mechanism has nothing to do with the round and .22lr is very common and might even be a majority option. So there, the claim's not even wrong.

For an even better one, I'd like to highlight the 'ten times the energy of a musket ball' one, since I did chase its origin down. Because if you've ever been to a public range in hunting season, that's the sort of claim that makes you double-check: there's always some asshole with a 'realistic' antique muzzleloader, and they're actually pretty similar in muzzle velocity and boom to a modern centerfire rifle. And while a musket ball is much less aerodynamic than a modern bullet, it's also much less likely to overpenetrate. An order of magnitude difference in impact energy is pretty implausible for any practical range.

The actual specific claim appears to be downstream of this paper, having gone through several layers of citogenesis and the guy providing an 'expert declaration' to several court cases. Notably, the guy only publishes this claim in opinion pieces, and the procedure seems hilariously bad.

Like not every trying bad (cw: powerpoint slide deck, yes, really). He somehow found a 'musket ball' that had a lower-weight bullet (3.531 grams) than a 5.56 NATO bullet (3.564 grams). I don't know how he managed to do it on purpose; even pistol balls were two or three times that weight, and a small rifle musket ball would be almost an order of magnitude bigger. There's a ton of other methodological errors, the use of a broken sensor like an actual data point, standing wave edge effects, yada yada, but they're almost besides the point when he's not even doing a real comparison of the thing he claims he's comparing.

He doesn't even seem to think it's worth hiding it! Forget academic misconduct, let's just go lie in a sworn declaration before courts!

The 223 fuddlore is dying fast -- there's a whole subculture of wimpy, recoil sensitive millenials serious hunters (see: Rokslide forums) promoting the use of 223 on literally all kinds of game; they do this by posting pictures of the results of lungshots in hundred-page forum threads. (impressive internal organ damage; frequent lack of an exit wound is actually one of the main complaints)

It would be pretty hilarious if somebody tried to defend the "223 not good for hunting claim in court" -- the Rokslide guys are pretty autistic and very prolific -- I'm imagining one of the mods going through the fine details of a 1000 page powerpoint of dead animals as an expert witness!

Presumably both the round table and these judges are working from the same talking point distributed somewhere, but I can't be arsed to find the origin.

I believe the talking point1 was distributed all over the forest via shooting it with an AR-15. If you see bits of deer, you'll know you're close.

1It was a hollow talking point.

You are supposed to use hollow points for big game, although it’s not necessarily the law in every jurisdiction.

More likely soft tip or polymer tip. Hollowpoints are usually built to fragment too fast for deer-sized game. Great for coyotes though.

How many people using that talking point would you estimate know that?

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