The Firearms Thread

Against that: the gunman in Orlando had to change magazines a bunch of times. I think the effectiveness of this is exaggerated. A lot of it depends, too, on whether the shooter has a lot of experience in swapping magazines under pressure. Someone who's been plotting for a while is likely to practice this a lot.

It's also worth noting that the Orlando shooter had no need for a rifle; it was all close-quarters killing, and the reason a semi-auto rifle was chosen was likely that Florida doesn't impose a waiting period for rifles while one exists for handguns.

 

If you count your rounds you can leave a round in the chamber while changing magazines, which means there's no unarmed moment in which the shooter can be rushed. Even without doing that, with practice you can swap mags in under a second. I don't know how fast you can run, but that's a pretty small window of opportunity. You can also keep a loaded pistol as backup in case of a jam or a reload fumble; the Orlando killer did have a pistol in addition to his rifle.

This is with a pistol but the principle is the same:



Okay, found a rifle example:



Also this is a really good video that addresses your proposal directly, especially at the ten minute mark:

 

We could certainly leave it here; I suspect most everyone in this thread has seen a whole lot of it.

So: let's talk about how we got into shooting, perhaps?

 

My step-dad! He had guns before he met my mom, but one of her stipulations on moving in together was that he get rid of them so that her eight and ten year old daughters couldn't get their hands on them. Once we were all grown up, he went ahead and picked up a safe and his concealed carry again.

He started me on a revolver and a semi-auto rifle which I can't remember the name of. He picked up a pistol and a .22 rifle later, and then a bigass heavy caliber rifle which dislocates my shoulder if I try to shoot it.

I think rifles are my favorite so far, since handguns bang up my wrists too much. I've never tried on a moving target (this may change sometime in the future if I get a chance to shoot again) but I was pretty decent at hitting paper on a range?

Step-dad makes his own ammo these days. He really loves his guns.

 

I have vague memories of being allowed to fire a shotgun when I was under 10. My parents never had one, so it must have been someone else my parents knew. Probably one of my dad's co-workers. Didn't get to shoot again until I was a member of the British air force cadets at about 13 or so. They kept a bunch of guns in the drill hall's storage, in a safe at the back and chained and padlocked inside. All long guns, if I remember right. About a dozen .303 Lee-Enfield rifles, a couple of shotguns, an old Lewis Gun (First World War air-cooled light machine gun), and about half a dozen air rifles for cheaper practice. We could practice with the air rifle in the drill hall but every so often they'd take us down to the local RAF station to shoot off the real guns at their firing range.

So I guess it makes sense that I would like to own all the types I got to fire then. The .303 Lee-Enfield Mk III, the L1A1 self-loading rifle (SLR) which was an Imperial-measurements version of the FN FAL, the Browning Hi-Power pistol.

Then later on I got to use a few different shotguns. After coming to the US I have gone shooting every couple of years, and want to more often, generally indoor pistol ranges.

 

I'm thinking of printing an extended magazine for my "sniper shotgun". It's It's a scoped bolt action rifle in 12 gauge for slugs, and the only mags available are 2+1. It's a really fun gun for punching holes in water heaters and concrete blocks, and would also work well for deer.

 

2+1 is certainly a bit small. I'm guessing because of the bulk of a magazine for 12 gauge. Is the barrel rifled?

 

The barrel is indeed rifled, and ported. It's intended for deer hunting, hence the three round limit (legal requirement while hunting deer).

 

AFAIK you have to put in a block to limit your capacity to three rounds for deer hunting. The logic is that you get your aimed shot and two followup shots to finish it off in case you just wound it with the first. If you can't do it with three rounds you're being irresponsible. From what I hear if DNR catches you with more than three round capacity while deer hunting they can take your guns and your vehicle, and give you a hefty fine on top of that. Any hunters correct me if I'm wrong?

 

I hear Caribou Gun Club in Le Sueur is good and (relatively) cheap.

 

I feel like this thread will appreciate this channel of some guys shooting all sorts of stupid shit and weird bullets out of a shotgun: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE4AC0C59947E7A9

 

Late as hell, but yeah, I'm in Wisconsin and we also have massive white-tailed deer problems. Particularly because we've got Chronic Wasting Disease, a prion disease like Mad Cow Disease, which makes a lot of local deer inedible. You have to ship them off to get them tested, before you can actually eat them. And if they turn out to have CWD... welp, no sausage for you.

Which means fewer people want to hunt, which means the prion disease continues spreading. It's kind of a clusterfuck. We need people to hunt them; it's a highly transmissible disease, so high population density makes everything worse.

(No evidence on deer-to-human transmission of CWD, but given that prion diseases are a horrific way to die and symptoms can take decades to show up, nobody wants to take the chance.)

Yep, my relatives have guns for those purposes too - pest control, basically. Dad's friend Bill got fifty-four raccoons in his barn in one summer, the other year. Because of all the city-dwellers who catch raccoons in live traps and dump them out in the country. Where they make their way to the nearest barn and start eating insulation and shitting everywhere.

Like... for certain animal populations, even if they're not ill, live traps are just kicking the can down the road and hoping it becomes someone else's problem.

(Though it sounds like times are changing around here. From what I hear, back a few decades ago, it was pretty normal to shoot like, feral dogs that were worrying at the cattle. And now it's a lot more likely that it's someone's pet that got loose, not an active threat to the livestock.)

A lot of my relatives are rural types who hunt regularly. I've only gone target-shooting once, mostly because I'm busy and I'm too softhearted to go hunting myself. I can't kill moths and ants in the house, I am fluffy to an absolute fault, and I recognize the hypocrisy in the fact that I still eat meat. It's... very interesting, and I'm glad I've done it so I have at least a little understanding of trigger discipline and how to handle a gun, but I haven't invested the time to get decent at it.

I know they also have hunting rifles and shotguns, and probably some other old guns from when my relatives were in the military, sixty and seventy years ago. I'm not sure if great-grandma Mildred's revolvers are still kicking around; I think Duffy got them, so they probably are.

I feel like that's one thing people don't bring up much, when talking about gun control. Guns last a really, really long time. Which is both neat and a little bit freaky.

 

i'd love to learn how to shoot someday but that's not going to happen for a long time because i panic easily

 

It's not as scary as it sounds, for what it's worth. Noisy, but there are earmuffs for that.

 

Sidenote, on a tangential subject: Do we have a thread for like... Just Rural Things?

I feel compelled to ask if Stihl really does make the best chainsaw, and tell stories about how Duffy keeps getting impatient on burnday and getting the fire department called because WHOOPS THAT'S A TWENTY-FOOT-TALL HEADFIRE GOING TOWARD THE BARN. (Good job, Duffy.)