by Crimson847 » Sat Oct 07, 2017 12:17 am
Maybe the NRA wants them regulated like automatic weapons because A) if used "properly" they more or less turn a semiautomatic firearm into a makeshift automatic, and B) automatic weapons are garbage for just about any lawful civilian purpose. Firing a gun on full-auto makes it substantially less accurate and wastes ammunition at an alarming rate, which is the exact opposite of what you want for just about any lawful purpose. If you're target shooting, full-auto wastes buckets of expensive ammunition and makes it harder to hit your target. If you're hunting, the above applies and if you do hit the animal you'll turn it to Swiss cheese, which makes it much harder to eat or show off as a prize in your living room. In a self-defense situation the loss of accuracy is even more problematic, and by spraying a hail of bullets in your attacker's general direction rather than a few aimed shots you vastly increase the risk of hitting some innocent bystander. So for almost all lawful purposes full-auto is much worse than semi-auto.
The only lawful purpose a machine gun might be good for would be suppressing a mass shooter to allow others to get to cover, but in such a situation the risk of hitting an innocent would be immense, since mass shooters by definition target public places with lots of people. Imagine if someone had tried that in Vegas, for instance; they'd have possibly suppressed the shooter, but also delivered dozens of rounds into a bunch of innocent people's hotel rooms. You don't need a machine gun to suppress a single shooter in such a circumstance, as was proven by the folks at UT Austin during the clock tower shooting in 1966, when several bystanders took cover with their own guns and took periodic potshots at the tower's observation deck to keep Whitman's head down.
(Interesting note: in Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore asks a bunch of members of the Michigan Militia what they have at home for home defense. One guy says he has an M-16 he uses for that purpose, and his fellow militia members object, on the grounds that "you have to know where your rounds are going". You'd be surprised how little support there is for using full-auto weapons for self-defense even among the most diehard "gun people".)
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn