The knee-jerk reaction. Or, wherein I use an excuse to talk about machineguns a lot.

Most people are followers. They generally learn by being told how things are, not by figuring them out themselves, or more appropriately analyzing the data they were given for… for the lack of a better word, truth.

Years ago I realized that living my life by my feelings and opinions and visceral reactions was not a great idea. I decided that I would no longer subscribe to any ideology, but rather spend my time trying to find the truth in matters and make my decisions based on the resulting knowledge.

It’s easy to pick an ideology and simply use the rules thereof to live your life. It is much, much harder to analyze and examine your chosen ideology for consistency, rationality, and other pleasing descriptors. That’s why most people, in my experience, hand off most of their decision making responsibilities to some ideology. I say most because anyone has hot button issues that they do spend their time examining.

Let’s look at the issue of automatic firearms. I think I’m on safe ground saying that most people believe automatic weapons should be illegal. Many gun owners themselves agree. But why is that? Is it a reaction based in rationality, or is it social conditioning?

Think back on the last action movie you saw. Chances are there was a whole preponderance of machine guns and submachineguns and assault rifles and sometimes we even get to see automatic pistols. It’s rare to see realistic firearms selection and use in films because, quite frankly, it looks a lot less sexy on the screen when actors use proper individual techniques and tactics.

Legislators and police chiefs and similar politicians who are anti-gun frequently paint pictures of madmen in the streets hosing down crowds of nuns and puppies from the hip with their automatic assault rifles (redundancy alert). These are the same people who screech warnings about returning to the Wild West and blood running in the streets when concealed carry laws are passed and anti-gun laws relaxed. Such hyperbolic pronouncements seem silly to me and most gun owners, but I guess they’re effective, because most of the people I know who don’t know much about guns think machine guns are only useful for killing swaths of innocents in the blink of the eye.

In actuality, machine guns are only truly useful in specific situations, and in most others single aimed shots are far more effective and efficient.

Machine guns are most effectively employed at a distance, for one thing, due to the cone of fire. They are also typically fired in short bursts, not sprayed indiscriminately. They should be fired from a bipod, tripod, or pintle mount at distances beyond very close. Even burst fire from an M4 is not useful beyond short range unless you’re firing from a supported position.

Specific instances when machine guns, on an individual level would be the best choice:

• When maintaining a fortified position where you can guarantee that you will only be attacked from one side, and only in a narrow cone. Like… down a hallway where it is impossible for you to be flanked somehow. I guess when you’re defending your cave with the narrow entrance. Bring good hearing protection, machine guns inside caves are probably really loud. Also, unless you’re expecting a whole horde of enemies, a machine gun is overkill.
• Trying to shoot down pterodactyls outside the range of shotgun shells. Use a Z-pattern and some kind of mount because you’re not going to be able to hold a machine gun on target while firing at its cyclic rate from the shoulder. You’re probably better off investing in a 10 gauge with BBB shot or flechettes or something and not attracting the attention of the dinosaurs to begin with, honestly.
• Road rage. Forward mount a machine gun in your engine bay with a feed through the glove box (the M240C with its right side feed works well for this). Stick a couple of Mercedes hood ornaments on your hood for crude sights and some kind of servo connected to your horn so the weapon can be fired when appropriate without an extra step–you do want them to know why they just got shot, right, so they don’t repeat the asshole move they just pulled?
• You’re in your fighter jet and you ran out of missiles, so you need something with a high rate of fire so you can hit the other guy you’re trying to shoot down with a large number of projectiles in a very short time frame.

Seriously, when you’re alone, that’s about it.

In virtually every other circumstance, you’re better off with single aimed shots. Machine guns are heavy and generally long, wasteful of ammunition, expensive, and difficult to control offhand. With a machine gun, you’re dedicating at least 8-10 rounds to a particular target which you could engage just as effectively with one or two aimed shots from a semiautomatic rifle. You’re going to lose your sight picture, no question about it, and it will take longer to get back on target. Spraying rounds at a scattering crowd is not particularly efficient either, since only 10% of your bullets at best would hit, and you’d spend more time reloading than you would shooting. I could go on.

This is only examining the utility of machine guns vs other weapons. It doesn’t address the other fallacious and misleading elements of the claims, like the fact that someone bent on taking lives of innocents has plenty more efficient methods available than guns. Welding some armor and spikes and stuff on your pickup and driving through a mall three days before Christmas would kill and maim so many people so quickly it boggles the mind. Better yet, why not put some home made bombs in the back so you can drive through people to the middle of the food court at lunch and blow everyone to hell and gone? I’ve seen improvised bombs so big they blew apart storefronts for two blocks in either direction.

Oh, and I don’t recall ever reading about a violent crimes committed with any sort of machine gun. That would be big news on the gun blogs, and while I may be wrong and forgot about reading it, I’m pretty sure I’m right in saying that there have never been any violent crimes committed with machine guns since they became regulated in 1934. Same goes for 50 caliber rifles, another target of the anti-gunners. You can’t just search the news for reports of machine gun crimes, by the way, because the reporters and police frequently misrepresent weapons. Every time I’ve seen ‘machine guns’ in the news they were semi-automatics cosmetically similar to automatic counterparts.

The last, most obvious thing people don’t seem to generally understand, is that making things illegal will not stop CRIMINALS from getting them. I always find it unbelievable, the faith people have in the law, as if outlawing drugs or guns or whatever is an instant decree from God making it so. It’s no more likely for criminals to obey the law than for the rain to stop at midnight Saturday because Congress outlawed rain on Sundays.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a light submachinegun chambered in 45 ACP with selective fire, allowing single shots or a high rate of fire two round burst, in effect creating an automatic double tap… but that’s just a fancy of mine. Trigger pull always suffers when you mess around with burst fire cams and crap like that, ultimately resulting in several different trigger pulls in the weapon. I converted my M4 in Iraq to full auto once, although I never test fired it because I never had the chance–and I was concerned about ripping up the sear and having to explain what I did to the armorer when I got new parts. The trigger pull improved significantly without the burst mechanism.

This post kind of got away from me. I’m too tired to be sure if it makes sense right now. I hope it does.