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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
You know, as an American libertarian it is far easier for me to say that in this fashion America is far more similar to Brazil than the UK. A total gun ban would just mean that Glocks get auto sears like they do in Chicago, but the entire US.
Huh. Somehow I’d never heard of these.
I’m assuming this sort of low-capacity machine pistol is impractical for anything other than killing densely packed people.
They're useful for any scenario that one is willing to trade off accuracy for rate of fire. When it comes to murdering a rival gang member in a drive-by, that makes them just plain useful. They're only impractical for scenarios where you care about accuracy and risk to bystanders, which aren't likely to be the primary considerations for the sorts of people that are doing drive-bys.
My thought was that the main tactical advantage of machine guns, suppression, was poorly served by small magazines. Wikipedia seemed to agree:
It does mention that one of those “special purposes” is close-quarters, indoor combat. And notes that the more practical machine pistols sort of converge on submachine guns, adding foregrips or detachable stocks.
I’d overlooked shooting from a moving vehicle (drive-by, or the mythical Texas helicopter hunting).
The trick with handguns is that they aren't actually all that great at ending threats- they aren't quite powerful enough to do this reliably and tend to require multiple rounds (the price for concealability). So you give a pistol more rounds per trigger press; this was the idea behind the pistols that fire limited bursts rather than dumping the entire magazine, but they're more mechanically complex (whereas the Glock solution is just engaging a tab that pushes the sear back down when the slide closes all the way).
Basically, machine pistols give you a less powerful but far more compact shotgun equivalent (shotguns themselves fire the equivalent of 8 rounds of 9mm per trigger press- this is usually enough) that by its nature is pinpoint accurate when needed. The best example of this is Eastern European criminal use of vz. 61 Skorpions- they're even smaller than a cut-down double-barrel shotgun is yet offer just as much firepower; dump half the 20-round mag into something and the results are not meaningfully different from what a single shell of #00 buckshot does. You have to be closer to the target for this to work with 9mm handguns, though.
Guntube doesn't really understand that point and tend to be more "dump the entire mag to blow up some watermelons, also magdumping means half your rounds are over the target" though- they're specialist weapons that basically don't exist outside of rental ranges and video games and as such the knowledge base about how they're actually used is limited to a book I've only read a review of. There are a couple things that should make the community's understanding of this concept a bit more mature, but one of them is limited to 3D printing and the willingness to file SBR paperwork and the other one isn't on the market yet.
Hm. Thanks for the write up.
Out of curiosity, from that Reddit Skorpion link…is “bottle opener” a euphemism?
There are a few ways to convert an AR-15 with one or two drop-in parts such that it will fire in full-auto. Most of them superficially resemble the plane-type or the claw-type of bottle opener- the former also has a piece that sticks up to be pushed by the bolt carrier.
The general solution to achieving full-auto fire is "hammer must stay back until the bolt is fully closed, once it is, trip the hammer"; these parts are a mechanical linkage that makes that process possible.
It's possible to prevent this, but while it's a very low technical bar to go from semi-auto to full-auto, that trivial inconvenience is generally sufficient to stop criminals from doing that.
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