Boys and Their Toys

If you travel to dangerous places you will meet a lot of people with guns. You should know what guns can and cannot do. But you should never carry or use one in a war zone. Television is not a good role model for those who want to learn about guns. On TV, puny handguns fire off hundreds of rounds without reloading, and bullets seem lethally attracted to bad guys. In reality guns are rather simple and deadly. Imagine throwing a pea-size pebble at someone. Now imagine using a slingshot, projecting that pea-size objective at 1200 feet per second. Ouch. Bullets are just heavy projectiles that puncture flesh, bounce off and shatter bone and turn people into trauma cases more efficiently than a club.

There are more than 200 million guns in the United States. It is estimated that firearm injuries in the States cost about $20 billion in medical costs and lost wages. Firearms send almost 40,000 Americans to their graves each year (19,000 Americans use guns to commit suicide each year, another 18,500 are murdered with a gun, and at least 1500 more are accidentally shot to death). Gun-related homicides rose 18 percent in the last decade-30 percent among people ages 15 to 24.

The most dangerous handheld weapons are rifles. Handguns require short ranges and careful aim to be lethal. Handguns tend to be the weapons of choice for domestic violence and robberies. Most handguns lose any effectiveness after 25 yards. In fact, the Western movies where men bang away from across the street without hitting anyone are not too far from reality.

On the other hand, if someone is shooting a rifle at you, you will probably end up dead.

In the 1850s, rifles were called muskets. They were smooth bore, and long barreled (about 4-5 feet in length) and could kill a man at 100 meters. Loading slowed down the killing process to about eight shots a minute.

In 1855, the Crimean War introduced the rifled bullet, a major advance that pushed the killing range out to 600 yards. The French invention meant that armies could now battle without the standard volley, advance and hand-to-hand combat. Armies were slow to adapt the deadly new MiniÈ ball, and the Civil War still saw armies facing each other 50 to 100 yards apart, firing at point-blank range and then charging.

The next big advances were in the late 1800s, when breech-loading weapons like the Mauser rifle and metal-cased bullets were introduced. The next step was the 1903 Springfield rifle and the later 1917 Enfield. These rifles were deadly out to 1200 yards and could be loaded and fired quickly.

WWI trenches were typically spaced 300 to 1200 feet apart and dictated rifle design. The ideal weapon was one that fired accurately, from rest with a minimum of maintenance and training. The focus was on careful killing of fleeting targets. When fighting got close, bayonets and pistols were the choice. Machine guns were heavy and water-cooled and used for withering fire during assaults or attacks. 1n 1917 came the introduction of the first semiautomatic weapon that could fire 20 rounds as fast as the trigger could be pulled. The simple Pedersen-device modification to the 1903 Springfield rifle was ordered too late to make a difference in the Great War but changed the use of rifles in warfare.

WWII introduced the idea of rapid-fire, portable weapons that could intimidate rather than kill. The M1 Garand (designed by John C. Garand) was a semiautomatic, gas-operated rifle that could fire 30.06 cartridges in eight-round clips. Later, it would be found that the number of rounds fired for every person actually killed was 15,000 rounds, even though the range of engagement closed to half WWI distances. Heavy bolt action rifles were still the infantry weapon of choice, but the Germans and Russians used machine guns and infantry attacks to good effect. The Germans were the first to create the Sturmgewehr (assault rifle), but the first successful version was the post-war Russian AK-47.

Assault weapons provide killing power out to about 600 meters, although battlefield results showed that 350 meters was the maximum practical range in combat. Most firefights occurred with opponents 200 to 300 yards apart.

Vietnam and a host of other dirty bush wars introduced the ambush concept of very high rates of fire, light ammunition and firepower. Ammunition had to be light, weapons cheap and easy to fix, and general tactics dictated spraying thousands of rounds during short firefights. The number of rounds per kill tripled from WWII levels to a staggering 50,000 rounds for each kill. In Vietnam, the light and deadly M-16 became the overwhelming choice of ground troops.

The future of rifle design is anyone's guess. Everything from all-plastic bullets to nonlethal ammunition is being developed. In the meantime, it seems to take a major war to change the face of battle and eventually the use of weapons.