Xequecal wrote:
Aizle wrote:
Actually I was thinking that this is the real reason why the Chinese are dominating the economy. American slack asses need fully automatic firearms to get this kind of kill list.
Honestly, I can't remember the time a gun massacre actually occurred anywhere in the first world with an automatic weapon. People who try are usually hilariously ineffective for some reason, like those two guys who tried to rob a bank in Hollywood. All the gun massacres are done with a semiautomatic pistol or rifle.
DING!! WE HAVE WINNER!!
As to why, it's simple: Automatic weapons are hideously inaccurate and burn through ammunition very rapidly. When your cyclic rate is 600 rounds per minute (AK-47), it takes only 3 seconds to burn through a 30 round magazine. It isn't liek the movies where people fire burst after burst after burst and eventually reload.
Not only that but each round creates recoil, sending successive rounds higher and higher into the air. Semi-automatic allows the shooter to recover from recoil after every shot.
This is why the Army went to 3-round-burst on the M-16 from the A2 model onwards; the SAW, which is much heavier (reduces the recoil problem) and belt fed (fixes constant reloading problem) takes the suppressive role of full automatic. Soldiers, as a practical matter, use semi automatic 99% of the time anyhow.
Full automatic has its place in weapons like the SAW and crew-served weapons, which aren't used by criminals because they're
crew-served. They're big, heavy, impossible to conceal, expensive, hard to come by, require lots of careful and complex maintenance, and just generally aren't worth it.