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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 millenialsserious 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!
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