There have been far too many mass shootings in the recent History of the United States. Two common factors in these crimes have been “assault rifle” style firearms and for the press and politicians to describe these weapons as “high power.” This is an error, which I will address shortly, but first, a trigger warning—no pun intended. I frankly think trigger warnings are overused, but in this case, I am about to describe terrible things.
Proceed at your own risk.
Firearms are built around cartridges, or ammunition if you prefer. Our story begins in 1886 in France, with the invention of the 8x50mmR Lebel rifle cartridge. I should pause here and explain that small arms ammunition is commonly described by two numbers separated by an “x,” as in “by.” Thus, the 8x50mmR Lebel was an 8-millimeter diameter bullet seated in a 50-millimeter long cartridge case.
The 8x50mmR Lebel was the first truly modern rifle cartridge designed for military use. It combined two important inventions: smokeless powder and the Spitzer bullet. The Spitzer bullet was longer and pointier than previous bullet designs, and was accurate at extremely long ranges, by which I mean 2,000 meters, if you were an expert who knew how to adjust the sights of the rifle—also called the Lebel—designed to use it. Stick a pin in that thought.
Other nations followed suit and produced their own battle cartridges along with a class of weapons designed to use them, called “battle rifles.” The majority of these weapons were bolt-action, though some nations experimented with other actions, like “straight pull.” Most of these weapons held anywhere from 3 to 10 cartridges. Weapons designers imagined a battlefield where soldiers would stand off several hundred meters and fire carefully aimed shots at chosen targets.
Then the First World War happened.
What the armies of the warring nations soon discovered is that most combat occurs at much closer ranges than battle rifles were capable of, and happened much faster than bolt action rifles were capable of handling. This resulted in several developments.
Allow me to pause here and say that I do not intend a comprehensive History of twentieth-century firearms, so if you are a gun enthusiast and I fail to mention your own particular favorite killing machine, get over it.
The first of these developments was the automatic rifle. In Russia, a guy named Federov invented the Federov Avtomat. In the United States, a guy named Browning invented the Browning Automatic Rifle, or “BAR.” These two weapons kind of bookend the type, and illustrate the problem that the assault rifle was designed to solve.
Both of these weapons used full-powered battle rifle cartridges. The Federov weighed about 11 pounds loaded, while the most common versions of the BAR weighed in at 19 or 20 pounds. Quite a difference.
Okay, I have to stop here and introduce a couple of concepts. The first is the “joule,” which is a measurement of energy. Remember our old friend the 8x50mmR Lebel? It produced more than 3,300 joules of energy. If you were hit by a 8x50mmR Lebel, it would probably blow straight through you. The second concept is “recoil,” specifically “felt recoil.” Put simply, felt recoil is the pushing back against your body you experience when you fire a firearm. There are several factors that go into felt recoil, but by far the two most important are the power of the cartridge and the weight of the firearm. The heavier a firearm is relative to the power of its cartridge, the less felt recoil there is.
Okay, so back to our automatic rifles. The Federov used a Japanese designed 6.5×50mmSR Arisaka battle rifle cartridge that produced a little less than 2,700 joules of energy. Weighing just 11 pounds, the Federov tended to spray its ammunition over the heads of its target after the first round. It was uncontrollable. The BAR used the more powerful .30-06 Springfield cartridge, which produced about 3,800 joules. But the BAR was nearly twice the weight of the Federov and had a bipod, and hence was much more controllable. So, the dilemma facing firearms designers was this: a light automatic rifle was uncontrollable, while a heavy automatic rifle was, well, heavy, and a pain to haul around the battlefield.
At the same time, a number of countries were experimenting with a different class of firearms that used pistol ammunition and fired fully automatic. These weapons became known as submachine guns in the English-speaking world and machine pistols almost everywhere else. Pistol cartridges like the German 9×19mm Parabellum are much less powerful (about 500 to 600 joules) than battle rifle cartridges. So, with submachine guns, firearms designers had a relatively light weapon that could be controlled on full-automatic. The problem with submachine guns was that, with their relatively weak cartridges they were only effective to about 100 meters.
And then World War One ended, and firearms design was mercifully put on hold for twenty years.
And then World War Two happened.
Firearms designers were confronted by the same dilemma. What to build? A light automatic rifle that was uncontrollable, a heavy automatic rifle that was a pain to carry, or a light submachine gun that had little range?
Remember how I said firearms are built around cartridges? At least three countries came up with similar ideas to address the problem: Germany, Russia, and the United States. Germany and Russia scaled down rifle cartridges, while the United States scaled up a pistol cartridge. Only the German and American weapons were ready in time for World War Two.
The American weapon was the M1 carbine, which used the .30 Carbine (7.62×33mm) cartridge which produced about 1,300 joules. Notice how much less powerful that is than a battle rifle cartridge. The Germans produced the “Sturmgewehr 44,” or “StG 44,” which used a new 7.92×33mm Kurz cartridge which produced nearly 1,900 joules of energy, or about half of the .30-06 Springfield cartridge’s 3,800 joules. The Sturmgewehr 44 is the source of the term “assault rifle”—a straight translation for the name of this weapon, which supposedly was coined by Hitler himself.
These weapons were joined shortly after World War Two by the Russian AK-47, which uses a 7.62×39mm cartridge producing something like 2,000 or 2,100 joules. The American armed forces first encountered the AK-47 in large numbers in the Vietnam War. At the time, the standard rifle of American forces was the M14, a full powered battle rifle firing the 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge generating about 3,500 joules of energy. The M14 weighs about 10.7 pounds fully loaded and as a result it suffered the same flaw as the Federov Avtomat when fired in full automatic, which is to say it sprayed every round after the first one over the head of its target.
Enter the M16, known in its civilian version as the AR-15. This is where things get really ugly. Recall: firearms are built around their cartridges, and the AR-15 uses the .223 Remington cartridge, which generates about 1,700 joules of energy. Its military equivalent is the 5.56x45mm NATO. Doesn’t sound all that powerful compared to some of the other cartridges I’ve discussed, but the .223 Remington has a particularly insidious and deadly quality: its bullet is highly unstable.
Remember how I said that a powerful battle rifle cartridge like the 8x50mmR Lebel would likely punch right through a human target? In such a case, the energy remaining in the bullet after it punches through its target is wasted—unless it hits a second target standing behind the first. This is not what the .223 Remington does. When the small, unstable, high-velocity .223 Remington bullet strikes a human target, it begins to tumble. This causes terrible wounds, despite the round’s lower power, because when the bullet tumbles it expends most of its energy in the target. I won’t describe the effect in greater detail. I’m not a doctor, and there have been many essays written by emergency room doctors describing the wounds caused by the .223 Remington cartridge in much better detail than I could.
In 1974, Russia responded by introducing the AK-74, which uses a 5.45×39mm that introduces an additional level of evil. International law requires that military ammunition have a full metal jacket, as opposed to plain lead or hollow point bullets. The Russian 5.45×39mm gets around that requirement by leaving a small hollow space inside the tip of the full metal jacket. This tip deforms when it strikes a target and greatly increases the tumbling effect characteristic of the .223 Remington. When Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan first encountered Soviet troops armed with AK-74s, the wounds were so terrible that it was thought that the Soviets were using explosive bullets.
So, here’s the irony: assault rifles are built around smaller, weaker cartridges that actually inflict much more terrible wounds. And these cartridges are designed specifically for killing people. In most U.S. states it is illegal to hunt deer with the .223 Remington: it is considered to be too cruel to shoot a large game animal with the .223 Remington. These “intermediate” cartridges are good out to about 300 meters, which is decent range for combat.
Assault rifles aren’t so particularly dangerous because they are “high power;” they are so deadly because they are high capacity. Most come with magazines holding 20 to 30 rounds, and they can be fitted with much larger drum magazines which may hold more than 100 rounds. Such weapons have no other purpose than ending human lives, and making and selling them to a civilian population should be against the law.
