The New Republic Vs. Common

The New Republic Vs. Common Sense - The anti-gun lobby keeps going farther and farther down the logical evolution chain to build an argument. This article, by Eli Kintisch, in today's New Republic Online (registration required) proves it.

Recently I visited Potomac Arms, a gun shop on the Potomac River in Alexandria, Virginia. Making my way past the samurai swords and shotguns, I found the 17-inch Anzio Ironworks .50-caliber "take-down" rifle--named because it can be disassembled in less than 25 seconds--on display. Another brand of .50-caliber, an ArmaLite, was available in the back, a clerk told me. Buying either gun would not be difficult: Under the Brady Bill, I'd need to show identification, after which my name would be run through a computer to check my criminal and immigration status. With a clean record, I could pay and take the gun with me-- with no permanent state or federal record of the sale required.

Note the key qualifier, tossed-off as if it's an irrelevancy: "With a clean record".

Many types of firearms can be purchased that easily in the United States. Few of them, however, would be as dangerous in the hands of terrorists. A .50-caliber sniper rifle, experts say, would be more than capable of shooting down an airliner as it took off or landed.

The author seems to think this is a new development.

The Martini .60 caliber rifle, or the Springfield .45-70 caliber rifle, are both capable of knocking down airliners by the same token. Both have been available for roughly 130 years. Yet, oddly, nobody has snuck into an airport glideway to pot at aircraft yet. Why could that be?

More later.

While a .50-caliber rifle is heavy, and would need to be positioned in line with a plane's path, it has the twin benefits of being accurate from more than a mile away and of doing a great deal of damage on impact.

The author is clearly not very literate about firearms.

There is no particular need for the gun to be "in line with the plane's path", although that makes the shot easier.

Now, picture this 911 call: "Airport Police? There's a man sneaking into the bushes down off the runway apron, holding a REALLY huge rifle...".

Absurd? Not entirely, but if one is going to go to the immense risk of hauling a large, unconcealable weapon into a position from where an airplane - something passing overhead at over 150 miles per hour, never an easy target - can be hit, one might do it with a weapon suited to do more than poke holes in aluminum and people.

Unlike a terrorist, I, of course, hadn't bought a .50-caliber rifle at the store a few miles away.

And, as it happens, either had any terrorists.

Fifty-caliber sniper rifles are a relatively new weapon, dating back to the 1980s.

That is completely untrue. In fact, the very word "Sharpshooter" comes from the Sharps Rifle - a .50 caliber breech-loading single-shot rifle introduced...in the 1840's. The weapon is still a very effective "sniping" rifle today, by the way.

In World War II, the Browning machine gun, still popular today, fired .50-caliber bullets at a high rate of speed but with little accuracy.

The author is again confused. The M2 .50 caliber machinegun has a very low rate of fire, and is famously accurate - sometimes being used itself for "sniping" in WWII, Korea and Vietnam.

Equipped with telescopic sight, the modern .50-caliber rifle shoots bullets, one at a time, with equal power and vastly higher accuracy. Up to five feet long and weighing between 30 and 60 pounds, the gun fires six-inch-long, half-inch-wide bullets that can rip through a 3.5-inch manhole from 200 yards away. In addition to incendiary bullets, armor-piercing rounds are commercially available. During the Gulf war, American soldiers used these to penetrate Iraqi armor from as far as a half-mile away, doing so much long-range damage against one armored personnel carrier that Iraqi troops in the vicinity immediately surrendered.

US Special Forces snipers did a lot of damage with .50 caliber rifles during the war. But they're a different breed of troops than your typical terrorist.

Fifty-caliber rounds can penetrate armored limousines, airport fuel tanks, and, presumably, the presidential helicopter, Marine One. "This threat is not a gun-control issue but a national security issue," writes the Washington-based Violence Policy Center (VPC) in a soon-to-be-released study on airport security and the .50-caliber rifle.

And it's presumably been a threat since the .50 Browning (technically called the 12.7x99mm) round was invented - in 1918.

The military acknowledges the gun's specific threat to planes. As pointed out in the VPC report, several U.S. Army manuals warn against the risk of small-arms fire--such as that from a .50-caliber gun--against low-flying aircraft, citing heavy losses from ground fire in Korea and Vietnam.

The author leaves out several key parts of that factoid: the .50 caliber weapons that caused the aircraft losses in Vietnam were universally machine guns - because, for all of the author's hyperbole, rifles are historically a lousy way to attack aircraft when you're still on the ground. Could it happen? Sure. But the opporunities have been there for as long as flight as existed.

So the "Violence Policy Center" is, pardon me, "up in arms" over a weapon that is immense, very hard to conceal, hard to use effectively without specialized training, and a less effective option for attacking aircraft than other, less-common but more-concealable weapons with much lower profiles...

...and that are not sold at gun shops! Which is, of course, the real target here...

The article as a whole is a smorgasbord of faulty logic. I'd urge you to read the whole thing - but if you're a firearms rights activist, you already have. Many times.

Posted by Mitch at January 15, 2003 03:24 PM