One of the interesting things too is the fact that in WW1 & WW2, we had a thing called a "Battle Rifle" and these were higher calibers, such as .30-06, .303, .30-30, etc...

These "Battle Rifles" were able to reach out to thousand plus yards and still be effective for a regular grunt. These rifles and their calibers were meant for killing, taking body parts off, creating gaping wound channels.

I don't remember exactly when, yet sometime after WW2, the US Forces surveyed and found that they weren't engaging targets 800-1,000 yards out. Instead, they were engaging targets in the 50-300 range.

The US military decided that they wanted to carry more ammunition and bring the engagement zone down from the 800-1k to the 250ish. This resulted in a smaller cartridge (.223/5.56). The strategy moved to taking the enemy combatant out of the fight by injuring them instead of killing them. This had a huge advantage in their eyes... rather than the main goal of killing, they wanted to injure. By injuring, it took them out of the fight, but it also took precious resources away from the enemy, which now has to care for their injured comrade.

Why don't we hear anything about the larger calibers, which are meant to be truly destructive?

I loved your write up, cthalupa and i find it a shame that people, when discussing topics such as this, don't even know about the items they're arguing about.

This "5.56 is designed to injure not to kill" thing is another gun policy canard. What's true is that the Army concluded that the ability to carry more rounds was more important than the ability to hit at a long distance, and that in a military tactical situation, any non-trivial rifle injury is sufficient to neutralize. It is absolutely not in reality the case that an AR-15 is a less lethal weapon than a handgun.

And, of course, injuries from rifle rounds are not the same as injuries from handguns, as this trauma doctor ably explains:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-...

Unfortunately, that's not the only narrative you can get on rifle injuries from civilian trauma doctors; there's also the famous (and amazing, excellent) narrative from the doctor that coordinated an ER receiving mass numbers of patients in Las Vegas after the Mandalay shooting.

Not sure wounding vs. killing was the big differentiator. As tptacek mentions, any non-trivial rifle-calibre hit is incapacitating. What determines whether the victim dies immediately or has a chance to survive depends on where it hits.

The big things, as you mention, was that real life engagement ranges were considerably shorter, so you could sacrifice long-range performance and gain lighter weight (allowing the soldier to carry more rounds) and making the thing somewhat controllable on full auto for close-quarter fighting.

The Germans figured this out, and towards the end of WWII they fielded the "Sturmgewehr 44 (Stg 44)". This fired a shortened version of their standard rifle calibre round (7.92mm). The Soviets did the same with their Ak-47 family. The price of keeping the full rifle caliber but slow round (around 700 m/s muzzle velocity) was poor ballistics and armor penetration.

Later on the US went to the other extreme with a very small caliber firing at higher than usual rifle muzzle velocity (almost 1000 m/s).

Ironically there was research going back all the way to pre-WWII times suggesting the "optimal" infantry caliber would be somewhere in the 6-7mm range with muzzle velocity in the "standard" range for rifles (around 800-900 m/s).

You might find "The Gun" but CJ Chivers very interesting. It covers the history you're talking about accurately and in depth.

Incidentally, the National Firearms Act (1934) was originally meant to ban handguns. The current regulation on short barrel rifles and short barrel shotguns are vestigial remnants of this intent (if you ban handguns, it only makes sense to also ban somebody chopping up their shotgun to make it handgun-sized.)

Literally the one difference between the "official", Hitler-approved definition of "assault rifle" and an AR-15 is that the AR-15 doesn't support selective fire†. As, like, literally any time spent in gun and military nerd forums or "I was in combat ask me anything" AMAs will quickly inform you, the importance of more-than-semiautomatic fire in actual military operations is highly contested.

Do I concede that the AR-15 is thus not an according-to-Hoyle assault rifle? Sure, but only Hoyle cares.

The reason this debate exists at all is because of "assault weapons bans". But the semantic argument is, of course, circular: it matters if a weapon is an "assault weapon" because we might ban assault weapons, and a weapon is an "assault weapon" if we might ban it. To reasonably discuss them as they pertain to public policy --- which is what this subthread is doing --- you have to engage on the merits. The appeal to definitions is a smokescreen.

† For the advanced Facebook version of this discussion, try making an argument about the legitimacy of binary triggers; is an AR-15 fitted with a binary trigger group an "assault rifle"? Well. Let me tell you something about fully automatic fire: it occurs only when you eject multiple rounds with a single depression of the trigger, and also, with a binary trigger, you have you depress the trigger a certain way to "select" rapid fire, which doesn't really count as "selection", so...

> Literally the one difference between the "official", Hitler-approved definition of "assault rifle" and an AR-15 is that the AR-15 doesn't support selective fire.

In case anybody isn't clear on what that means: one is a machine gun and the other is not.

I mean, sort of? If we're going this deep into the weeds on terminology, a machine gun is optimized for sustained fully automatic fire; in particular, it's heavier and doesn't become impossible to handle due to heat after prolonged firing. Automatic rifles are not generally machine guns.

"Selective fire" is the gun nerd way of saying "capable of fully automatic fire".

All automatic rifles fall into the categories under machine guns and are thus banned as machine guns. A select fire carbine battle rifle such as the Uzi or the MP5 are in fact classified as sub-machine guns. The term machine gun denotes a firearm that can fire more than a single round with a single trigger pull. There are pistols that are classified as machine guns.

  Automatic rifles are not generally machine guns.

Words no longer mean things, then.