Three Keys to the AR-15 and its Kin
Devastating, easy to use, designed for war
Defining the AR-15 is not a trivial task, a fact that its supporters have at times used to their advantage. The AR-15 (originally the ArmaLite Rifle AR-15) is modular and highly customizable, and once Colt’s patents on it expired in 1977 it became a highly lucrative field for knock-offs, imitations, and accessories. There are hundreds of different names for its kin now, including the euphemistic “modern sporting rifle,” coined in 2009 by the US National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a firearms trade association.
While “AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle” might be the best descriptive label for these weapons, perhaps a better approach is to define them by their potential damage.
The damage done
Most gunshot wounds are the result of handguns. Reports from surgeons and others who deal with wounds from firearms make it clear that AR-15 style rifles, however, are very different from common handguns in terms of their effects.
Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone in 2018, said:
The AR-15 assault rifle was engineered to create what one of its designers called “maximum wound effect.” Its tiny bullets — needle-nosed and weighing less than four grams — travel nearly three times the speed of sound. As the bullet strikes the body, the payload of kinetic energy rips open a cavity inside the flesh — essentially inert space — which collapses back on itself, destroying inelastic tissue, including nerves, blood vessels and vital organs.
“It’s a perfect killing machine,” says Dr. Peter Rhee, a leading trauma surgeon and retired captain with 24 years of active-duty service in the Navy. Rhee is most famous … for saving the life of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords after she was shot point-blank in the head with a handgun fired by a mass shooter in 2011.”
Dr. Rhee has a way with words:
“A handgun is simply a stabbing with a bullet,” says Rhee. “It goes in like a nail.” With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15, …“it’s as if you shot somebody with a Coke can.”
The consequences of an AR-15 injury versus a handgun — for the victim and for surgeons attempting to repair the damage — are vastly different.
Writing on Wired.com, Sarah Zhang wrote:
“These high-velocity bullets can damage flesh inches away from their path, either because they fragment or because they cause something called cavitation. When you trail your fingers through water, the water ripples and curls. When a high-velocity bullet pierces the body, human tissue ripples as well — but much more violently. The bullet from an AR-15 might miss the femoral artery in the leg, but cavitation may burst the artery anyway, causing death by blood loss. A swath of stretched and torn tissue around the wound may die.
“Asked to compare the damage that an AR-15 and a 9mm handgun can do to the human body, [Dr. Peter] Rhee says, “One looks like a grenade went off in there, … the other looks like a bad knife cut.” That’s why, he says, “a handgun wound might require only one surgery but an AR-15 bullet wound might require three to ten (italics added for emphasis).”
Easy to use
Early attempts to combine a rifle with a machine gun produced weapons that were heavy, difficult to reload, and hard to keep on target when firing. The AR-15 has none of these problems.
… multiply the damage from a single bullet by the ease of shooting an AR-15, which doesn’t kick. “The gun barely moves. You can sit there boom boom boom and reel off shots as fast as you can move your finger,” says Ernest Moore, a trauma surgeon at Denver Health and editor of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery.
Devastating and easy to use? Such a deal!
In 2018, columnist and author Mike Kelley, writing for NorthJersey.com, visited a local gun store to find out more.
The rifle, priced from around $500 to $800 for most models, is relatively cheap compared to more customized semi-automatic rifles. It is also exceedingly accurate, with little recoil, and can accommodate large magazines that hold dozens of bullets, or rounds. And it is lightweight. Even fully loaded with a 20- to 30-round magazine, most AR-15 models weigh less than 10 pounds.
Such attributes make for a perfect fit for soldiers on the battlefield, who are trying to fire as many rounds as possible at the enemy in a short period of time.
Kelley, who had never fired a rifle before, set out to see for himself, “What is it like to fire an AR-15?” At the store’s rifle range, he was coached by a certified NRA training counselor (watch short video). After some test shots, Kelley loaded a fresh magazine.
I aimed again and fired — and kept firing.
In less than five seconds, I squeezed off 15 rounds, most of them striking the target near the bull’s-eye. I was shocked as I stared at the bullet holes in the target. After all, I am exceedingly inexperienced as a shooter. Plus, my eyesight is extremely poor. How had I shot so well?
“That seemed too easy,” I said, setting the gun down on the counter.
The trainer smiled and said, “You could have fired faster.”
The U.S. military chose the AR as its infantry rifle [the M-16] for the same reason it’s a clear and present danger in the civilian world: It is uncannily easy to use. — Dickinson
Kelley notes in conclusion that “one reason the AR-15 is so lethal — and is used far too often by mass murderers — is that the gun is extraordinarily easy to reload. With enough high-capacity magazines, police and gun experts say, mass killers can keep up a steady stream of fire, making it difficult for victims to escape or for police officers trained to subdue ‘active shooters’ to fight back.”
Designed for war
The AR-15 was clearly well designed for the purpose and the context that was intended: military combat in the Vietnam War.
In 2017, James Fallows recounted the origin story of the AR-15 written in 1971 in The Atlantic, “Why the AR-15 is So Lethal.”
In 1967, during testimony before the Ichord Congressional Subcommittee, Chairman Richard Ichord asked Eugene Stoner, the designer of the original version of the M-16, to explain how a smaller, lighter bullet could do more damage than a heavier one:
“STONER: There is the advantage that a small or light bullet has over a heavy one when it comes to wound ballistics. … What it amounts to is the fact that bullets are stabilized to fly through the air, and not through water, or a body, which is approximately the same density as the water. And they are stable as long as they are in the air. When they hit something [with the density of a body], they immediately go unstable. … this is what makes a little bullet pay off so much in wound ballistics” [emphasis mine].
As the designer of a novel rifle who’s trying to sell it to a stubbornly opposed US Army on the basis of it being a greatly superior combat weapon for use in a war zone, Stoner’s gruesome enthusiasm was perhaps not out of place, but it highlights the importance of context.
The Army and Congress also wanted proof in practice, delivered in a 55-page study on the AR-15’s suitability for use by the South Vietnamese army by the predecessor of the Defense Technical Information Center. The results, culled from evaluations by American “advisors” and South Vietnamese already deployed against the Viet Cong, included this testimony:
“At a distance of approximately 15 meters, one Ranger fired an AR-15 full automatic hitting one VC [Viet Cong] with three rounds with the first burst. One round in the head — took it completely off. Another in the right arm, took it completely off, too. One round hit him in the right side, causing a hole about five inches in diameter. It cannot be determined which round killed the VC but it can be assumed that any one of the three would have caused death.”
No wonder it sometimes requires DNA matching to identify victims.
It is an excellent weapon for a war zone.
In 2016, Sam Biddle wrote “The AR-15 Was Built for Slaughter in War Zones” for Gawker.com, exploring the implications of the AR-15’s military origin.
“[T]he fact that the AR-15 is on the civilian market simply means that a military weapon is being routinely sold to civilians. It doesn’t change the nature of the product: The AR-15 is a weapon explicitly designed for the purpose of accurately killing other people, potentially at great distances [up to 300 yards, the length of three football fields].”
The AR-15 is an incredibly good tool for killing lots of other humans. — Sam Biddle
“In mass shootings across the United States, the AR-15 has performed exactly as it was built to perform. It made lethal intent into lethal results, killing and maiming human targets with efficiency and ease. It was an instrument of war, and it turned a nightclub into a war zone. Wherever we allow the gun to go, that war will go on.”
In the War Zone
Defining a war zone is no more trivial than defining the AR-15. This is not the metaphorical “War on Poverty,” or “War on Drugs,” a rhetorical device heralding an all-out effort to improve a critical social problem. This is real war, which is hardly ever an improvement on poverty or drug use — in fact generally leading to more of both.
“War zone” is often used rhetorically to describe utter devastation, but it also has a legal definition.
War Zone is a term that is ordinarily seen used in the context of international laws. In the context of international laws, the term ‘war zone’ refers to a specific designated area, on land or at sea, within which the rights of neutral nations are not respected by belligerent nations.
To put it simply, in a war zone there are no neutrals, … no innocents, … no civilians. Everyone’s a target. Every temporary or permanent inhabitant of a war zone is under frequent if not constant threat of losing life, limb, and livelihood to those who are waging that war.
Damage and Ease of Use: Two good reasons to consider whether this weapon belongs ONLY in the war zone it was designed for … and whether we want to live in one.
Do we want to live in a war zone?
I’ll go out on a limb here and say “no.” Very few people really want to live in a war zone. That’s why most people flee the area if they can — or they fight back, fighting to return the area to the old normal, in which you’re not constantly in fear for your life. One reason for waging war is precisely to return an area to its normal level of peace, whatever that might be.
AR-15’s make war wherever they go. — James Fallows
With rare exceptions, nobody wants to live in a war zone. Hence, when a weapon that is designed for war enters a civilian area, it’s a problem. Once present, it raises the possibility of instantly producing its own little war zone. If that happens, the situation requires countering action (ideally from others adequately equipped, like police, SWAT teams, etc.) if mass casualties are to be avoided.
It takes seconds for a loaded AR-15 to create a war zone.
There is ample precedent for restricting the use of weapons that may be vital in a war zone but are too destructive to be permitted outside it. Not everything that is good in a war is good in peace.
Conclusion
Unlike Ukrainian soldiers and Russian conscripts on the front lines of Putin’s war on Ukraine, we are not in a combat zone.
Not having to constantly fear for your property or your life is a hallmark of civilization, a definition of civil society and civilian life.
We have a choice. We can allow the hate-blinded, the temporarily enraged, the deluded, and the deranged to instantly turn a street, parking lot, store, school, synagogue, etc., into a war zone.
Or …
We can recognize that AR-15 style semi-automatic rifles have no place in civilian life.
