As I was going to bed last night/this morning I got a notification there was another mass shooting, this time in Indianapolis. The shooter was reported at one time using an AR-style rifle with at least one large capacity magazine. This was after I had put my last post to bed.
This happens so frequently that at least one web site has a boilerplate article that changes as the location and body count differs, but is otherwise static and has had the same headline since the Obama administration. They have already run several articles with that headline this year.
At this point reports on casualties are still coming in since some people were injured as a byproduct of panic but were not shot, and other people were not critically injured by getting shot and did not know they had been shot until they started to get undressed after the shooting. To use an old joke their fracas was injured.
And some people got the news indirectly (yes I know it’s from The Onion and probably not real) after getting questions about the incident from constituents.
And at this point we are still getting reports that I won’t link to that the shooter had a sub-machinegun, or other kind of automatic weapon. So lots of bullets sprayed all over, maybe? And since the shooter is dead presumably LEO have the weapon in evidence, so since it is important to the debate release at least a description of the weapon? Even just the type of weapon would be of use in the debate on which kind of gun to ban since we don’t seem to be doing anything useful to prevent these atrocities from being committed.
Still, one has to question how this would happen if say semi-auto longguns with removeable magazines were banned and confiscated, or you had to have a special license to own one, like machine guns. There have been a few mass shootings done with semi-auto pistols, but the body count was much lower in all of those shootings especially when compared to ones with longguns. And compared to mass murders by a single swordsman there have been none in over a century. Texans just recently had the right to carry melee weapons restored after someone pointed out the 2nd did not specify firearms, but “arms” which included clubs, spears, swords and other weapons which had lost favor as the only worked in melee or ranged weapons that required much more training and practice or upper body strength to use as compared to firearms.
As has been pointed out numerous times, more than can be linked in this blog post, when the Second Amendment was written to shoot multiple people you had to have a loaded weapon for every person you wanted to shoot because the cyclic rate was measured in rounds per hour, not per second. You had to use a barrel and chamber scraper right after firing to remove possibly burning remnants from the previous round, measure out the powder, pour it into the barrel, ram in a wad to hold the powder, wrap a patch around the ball and ram the patch and ball in, and either put priming powder in the pan, or set a cap on the chamber and then cock the hammer, aim and shoot. A skilled rifleman could do that in about 45 seconds if at a stationary firing position, or about a minute while moving from one firing position to another. In the same time a skilled rifleman today could fire 30 times, remove and replace the magazine, and fire another 15 rounds. Precise aim would be superfluous since that many bullets flying downrange in the general direction of the target would hit something important in the general vicinity. And that wasn’t a joke. When you had one bullet per minute aim was important, but one or more a second makes “spray and pray” a viable tactic. And when there’s nobody to shoot back…
And enough of this rant.
Witch on a Bicycle 