The Gaming Den

Sir Neil wrote: You misunderstand the purpose of hollowpoints. They are designed to reduce overpenetration.

Gotta call bullshit on this one given that hollow points reduce overpenetration mostly by expanding and wounding the hell out of whoever you hit. At the very least it should be admitted that hollow points have been around for a long time and the justifications and logic behind their use has changed many times and that they were not principally designed with controlling penetration in mind. There's a confluence of factors that go into choosing to use hollow points but the notion that they are pretty dang lethal has been one of their primary selling points since the advent of the FMJ.

Whipstitch wrote:Gotta call bullshit on this one given that hollow points reduce overpenetration mostly by expanding and wounding the hell out of whoever you hit.

Don't reducing overpenetration and increasing wounding go pretty much hand in hand? The energy has to go somewhere, and if you're not overpenetrating, that means you're dissipating it on the organs of the person you shot.

Pretty much, yeah. Implying that hollow points aren't intended to cause great wounds but rather to hit high velocities and reduce penetration is rather akin to saying that brake pads are designed to create friction and that stopping cars is just a side effect. That it won't ding up your backstop too bad is largely just a bonus and wasn't really considered a design feature for most of the round's history, which is why we still have people working on things like glaser rounds and frangibles.



[EDIT]
Oh, and for the record, I'm not even a gun control advocate and hollow point rounds don't really worry me that much given that I already assume that shooting someone is a bad idea if you're concerned about their safety. So I have a degree of sympathy for the people who believe the whole hollow point ban is a bit soft-headed, but not enough to feel comfortable fudging things about the round's performance.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Don't reducing overpenetration and increasing wounding go pretty much hand in hand?

To an extent. But limited penetration is more guaranteed than a kill.

Hollowpoint rounds do go faster (the first hollowpoints were marketed as "express bullets" because of this feature). That's simple physics: if you reduce the mass and leave the cartridge the same, the bullet will go faster. And that means it will make more noise. Armor piercing and incendiary bullets also make more noise, although for different reasons.

Note: I do not think this is actually a meaningful argument for why something should be banned or not. But people saying that hollowing out a bullet doesn't make it go faster are simply factually wrong. F=MA and all that.

-Username17

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:First off, when it comes to guns protection IS killing. Guns literally have no other purpose than to kill.

Guns have lots of uses other than killing; it's just that killing is the easiest of functions.

The British found out that the purpose of guns should be not just killing but actually stopping an enemy in his tracks. They lost a lot of good men to charge attacks who were "as good as dead" by the time they managed to whack the infantryman's head off. Stopping power is a major purpose to guns. Sometimes more so than killing.

Before antibiotics ... guns don't kill people ... gangreene kills people.

So, should people be carrying sharpened pitchforks instead of guns? It seems rather intuitive that they would have better stopping power.

I think a pitchfork is too short of a weapon. A military fork might be better since it has polearm range.

The only problem with either is the "highlander" effect (as in how in hell can he manage to conceal a weapon like that under this coat).

RadiantPhoenix wrote:So, should people be carrying sharpened pitchforks instead of guns? It seems rather intuitive that they would have better stopping power.

If you can swing/stab at better than eight-hundred feet a second, sure.

If a bezerk person is charging at you, the odds are they are not actively using a firearm at the same time. If the case happens to be they are, then they only thing they can do to you once they reach you is to whack you on the face with the weapon. Stopping power is not necessary, stepping out of the way is.

Maxus wrote:If you can swing/stab at better than eight-hundred feet a second, sure.

A gun needs to be fired to stop someone, but a polearm just needs to be pointed at them.

Wouldn't everyone be so much safer if they all carried long pointy sticks?

Yeah, if I ever were to shoot a gun in self-defense, I imagine I would be perfectly satisfied if I managed to knock down, knock out, cripple, or stun the attacker. Killing isn't so much the point as incapacitating someone for long enough to flee.

Openly wear a bomb-vest with a dead-man trigger. I'm pretty sure nobody will mug you. And if I'm wrong, then they still won't do it more than once.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:

Maxus wrote:If you can swing/stab at better than eight-hundred feet a second, sure.

A gun needs to be fired to stop someone, but a polearm just needs to be pointed at them.

Wouldn't everyone be so much safer if they all carried long pointy sticks?

I always thought it was bullshit that I could buy a gun from a yard sale with no waiting period or anything and carry that around with no permits required, but there isn't really a legal way I could carry my sword around with me.

FrankTrollman wrote:And that high velocity discarding sabot rounds exist and are compositionally distinct from slower velocity bullets and thus your statement that bullet composition is never relevant is demonstrably wrong.

-Username17

Sabot loads are still only going to be loud because they are supersonic, anythign you throw that breaks the sound barrier is damn loud. Throw the same thing slower and its much quieter. Unless you have a study showing noise level vs velocity for the same projectile using saboted rounds.

Best I could find is sparse but shows what looks to be an FMJ experiences a 50dB noise increase going from 1000 to 1300 fps with negligible increase after 1300 to 3100. Study here. http://www.rdsindustrie.com/images/stor ... %20tir.pdf

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:

Maxus wrote:If you can swing/stab at better than eight-hundred feet a second, sure.

A gun needs to be fired to stop someone, but a polearm just needs to be pointed at them.

Wouldn't everyone be so much safer if they all carried long pointy sticks?

I always thought it was bullshit that I could buy a gun from a yard sale with no waiting period or anything and carry that around with no permits required, but there isn't really a legal way I could carry my sword around with me.

damn that meiji era to hell!

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

RadiantPhoenix wrote:

Maxus wrote:If you can swing/stab at better than eight-hundred feet a second, sure.

A gun needs to be fired to stop someone, but a polearm just needs to be pointed at them.

Wouldn't everyone be so much safer if they all carried long pointy sticks?

I always thought it was bullshit that I could buy a gun from a yard sale with no waiting period or anything and carry that around with no permits required, but there isn't really a legal way I could carry my sword around with me.

Yah . . . It's absurd what hoops one has to jump through with blades of any kind that are not for the kitchen . .

Sheriff: Time For Citizens To Arm Themselves

SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. -- The Spartanburg County Sheriff is known for speaking his mind, and at a news conference on Monday, he didn't hold back his anger and frustration after a woman was attacked in a park over the weekend.

Investigators said 46-year-old Walter Lance grabbed a woman who was walking her dog in Milliken Park on Sunday afternoon. They said Lance choked the woman, made her take off her clothing and tried to rape her.

Sheriff Chuck Wright opened his news conference by saying, "Our form of justice is not making it."

He said, "Carry a concealed weapon. That'll fix it."

Because, that woman, would totally have been able to draw her weapon from her purse, take the safety off, aim and shoot the guy, while he grabbed her and shot her.

You can't just have guns, you need combat/self defense training. Otherwise, you get maybe the gun out of the bag, and then the guy takes it from you and now he's raping you at gun point.

And even if guns did work like that, that means the sheriff is now out of a job.

Personally I would have though a conceiled carry of some sort of incapication spray would have been easier and more effective in that situation. You might be able to get it to the point where you can wear it under your wrist. Clearly by the time you searched your purse for the gun you would already be dead.

sabs wrote:Because, that woman, would totally have been able to draw her weapon from her purse, take the safety off, aim and shoot the guy, while he grabbed her and shot her.

I also wonder about chambering the first round. I have no idea about stats on this, but I wonder how many people who carry semi-automatics do so with the first round in the chamber. That extra step probably adds at least a second to the draw-to-fire time, but it also makes it a lot less likely for you to accidentally discharge the thing, too.

Power fantasies aside, the cold statistical reality is that people who carry a gun are shot and killed more than people who don't. However many situations guns save people in, there is a substantially larger number of situations where they get your ass killed. You can argue hypothetical scenarios all you want, but people without guns are safer than people with guns.

I actually have no idea what carrying mace does to your chances of getting attacked, injured, or killed. I seriously have never seen any statistics on that and can't make even a strong guess as to whether pepper spray puts you in more danger or less.

The closest thing I've seen was some studies about the use of Pepper Spray by Police Officers. But those people already have guns. So while they show a reduction in injuries and deaths after people start carrying pepper spray, I have no way to tell whether that is simply that pepper spray is less dangerous to you and the people around you than firearms and thus putting the weapon that is less bad on your belt dilutes the harm of carrying the firearm, or whether the pepper spray actually has net benefit. In short, I can't tell if it is acting as a competitive partial agonist or a competitive inhibitor.

-Username17

One could have people carry taser guns.

Though with regards to safety and chambered round - you don't use automatic pistols if you're not very well trained, you use a revolver. No safety, no round to chamber, just pull the trigger and it goes off.

Ha. #4 is spot on: Cracked: 5 logical fallacies that make you wrong more than you think.