Charlie, you're absolutely right, the .223 cartridge (5.56 x 45 for the military) is roughly 3x faster than a typical 9 mm. But that doesn't mean the velocity is achieved because it's shot from an AR-type rifle. It's because it's from a rifle, with a longer barrel, period. The muzzle velocity of a 30-06 ranges from 2400 feet per secon…
Charlie, you're absolutely right, the .223 cartridge (5.56 x 45 for the military) is roughly 3x faster than a typical 9 mm. But that doesn't mean the velocity is achieved because it's shot from an AR-type rifle. It's because it's from a rifle, with a longer barrel, period. The muzzle velocity of a 30-06 ranges from 2400 feet per second to 3400 fps (dependent upon load and bullet weight). A .308 (7.62 x 51 for the military) also ranges from 2600 to 3100 fps. A .357 magnum gets 1240 fps from a handgun, but can get to 2200 fps from a rifle.
My point? Almost all rifles fire bullets that go much faster than handguns. Cavitation is not unique to AR guns.
The AR is popular because the .223/5.56 round is relatively light-recoiling, so it's easy to shoot many rounds quickly. Although semi-automatics are also made in .308 and 30-06 calibers (for example), those rounds are not as fun (or as controllable) to shoot fast.
The .223/5.56 round is also comparatively light and cheap. A 30 round, fully-loaded magazine only weighs a pound. You can buy 1000 rounds of 5.56 ammo for $500. Comparing to a .308, a one-pound magazine carries 20 rounds, and 200 rounds cost about $350.
Nobody hunts deer with a 30 round magazine. In Florida, the maximum magazine capacity while deer hunting is 5 rounds. In Ohio, 3. In Colorado, 6. (Though to be fair, some states -- Texas and Montana, for example -- have no such restriction.)
IMHO, the real human slaughter problem stems from the semi-automatic firing action plus large capacity magazines, neither of which is useful for hunters. Large capacity, lightweight while fully-loaded magazines, coupled with semi-automatic actions, are the common denominator in most mass-shootings.
I purposely did not discuss hogs, since I was aware of slaughter tourism. I've hunted hogs too, with bolt-actions in 7mm-08 and .308. Lots of viable rounds available for hog hunting, not just .223. Although I understand the varmint control angle, I don't consider volume shooting from a helicopter to be "real" hunting. That's just killing. Call it what it is.
I completely defer to Travis over military capabilities. Although my son is a Marine now, I never served.
But the real issue of my reply was the wrongful conflation of cavitation, AR-style rifles, and mass homicide events. My point was that almost all rifles can cause cavitation. (Except .17s and .22s.) That's not why mass homicides happen. Mass shootings occur because deranged men can easily acquire semi-automatic rifles that shoot a light-recoil round loaded from high capacity, easily-switched magazines. It's rare that pistols are used in a random mass shooting (but the original article is right, those are more survivable), it's even more rare that explosive fertilizer is used, and I'm not aware of a bolt action being used since the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966.
You can load .300 blackout into something other than a 30-round magazine for feral hogs. Also, shot placement counts a lot more than ammo capacity when you're taking down wild game. You could also just shoot something other than feral hogs if they're so dangerous in packs that you need a 30-round magazine to deal with them.
Shot placement? Hunting hogs from a moving vehicle or a helo essentially eliminates good shot placement. I killed 150 hogs from a helo over a 2 day period hunting on a ranch near Laredo - right on the Rio Grande. It's volume of fire and a little but fast bullet out of a high cap mag is the only way to go. The exception is shooting the solo hog who doesn't know youre there. Not sure what a .300 blackout is but I doubt there's a high cap mag for it. Feral hogs are a big problem. A sow will have a litter of 5 and 7 will survive...
^This is why it's not really hunting so much as it is animal slaughter. Dumping rounds into packs of animals from a helicopter is NOT hunting. That shit is animal slaughter tourism.
If you don't know what .300 Blackout is and you hunt hogs then I don't know what to tell you lol. It's arguably the most popular AR round for hunting hogs that I'm aware of. It's also the best ammo for running a sound suppressor on an AR with. When you shoot 225-grain subsonic ammo out of a .300 BLK that has a can mounted on it, the only thing you hear it the action cycling.
Nope. It is not tourism. Its varmit control. Hunting/killing in maas is the only method. Texas is over run with feral hogs to the detriment of vehicle, farms, ranches and native species. Killing hogs is sanctioned by Texas Parks and Wildlife and every other wildlife conversation org. I've hunted and killed a lot of hogs. Never seen ANY other rd used that a 5.56. Can your bias. You're not the expert you think you are.
Agreed on all. The lighter bullet weights are specifically why the US military went to the M16/M4 over the M14 that fired 7.62x51mm on full auto. Pound for pound, an infantryman can carry 40% more ammunition on his back by carrying 5.56 instead of 7.62x39mm, and roughly 60% more ammunition when compared to 7.62x51mm. When SLA Marshal did his study on the effectiveness of infantryman in combat across multiple battlefield types, he found that the majority of gunfights take place inside of 200 yards in combat--the majority being less than 100 yards--and that the side that carried the most ammo typically inflicts the most casualties on their opponent because accuracy plummets once ground combatants get the adrenaline dump. The side with more bullets wins a gunfight via inflicting more casualties on the other side via the volume of fire it can dump onto the other side before running short on ammo. That's why we won just about every gunfight in Vietnam but lost the war. We were really good at winning gunfights, but we couldn't understand that the number of enemy combatants we were killing wasn't keeping up with the rate of replacement enemy combatants getting recruited every year. Same story against the Taliban in Afghanistan. We always had more bullets, it's just that the other side had more bodies getting recruited into its ground combatant forces every year than we were killing in gunfights. That's how an insurgency outlasts a numerically and technologically advanced invading force. You just recruit more people than they can kill every year, and eventually the invader gets tired of killing you without making progress and decides to leave.
The proliferation of body armor made that round a necessity in near-peer conflicts. China has body armor on their troops that can stop 5.56. More militaries will adopt body armor over time because it's getting very very cheap for governments to do so. We've been lucky to only be fighting soft targets since the 5.56 round got fielded. The 6.8x51mm round also has way better ballistic coefficients for its ammo, meaning that shot placement will improve across all distances and have less bullet drop at range (the minute of angle tightens up basically).
Even against soft targets, when you look at typical engagement distances in Kunar/Nuristan in Afghanistan, there's a reason that the grunts started packing designated marksman rifles like the M14 and the Marines' modified M16A4s that they fielded in Helmand. The enemy got wise and realized that if they start engagements from 400y out or more, they can lace the groundwork in between the point of ambush and the enemy with IEDs and make the enemy come to the IEDs they buried in cover/concealment spots between where the Marines/Soldiers are and where they needed to advance to. It also made returning fire more difficult because positive identification of the guy shooting at you from 400y away is made more difficult, and you can't return fire without positive ID, and even if you can, your minute of angle is going to open up quite a bit at that distance and the return fire will be less accurate.
I guess all of this is to say that I'm a fan of 6.8x51mm in terms of where warfare is heading. Volume of fire means less when there are civvies around and the enemy wears ceramic plates that you need to bust through to kill them.
No it's not. There is no military in any country that uses the AR-15 as it's battle rifle because it's not suitable for military use without having a full auto capability. Multiple states prohibit the use of the AR-15 with its 5.56 rd for deer hunting because it's not "powerful" enough to consistently kill a deer upon initial impact
Our standard issue M16A4 and M4A1 rifles fire on single shot or burst. If you move it to burst, your fireteam leader or squad leader will hear it and promptly chew your ass for wasting ammo and pushing accuracy down. Only machine guns and the rifles special forces use have full-auto capabilities. Everyone else mostly uses single shot or a crew-served weapon (machine guns and automatic grenade launchers usually mounted to vehicle turrets).
Fill me in here. During my time in USMC, our M-16's had a full auto option and single shot (I think we also have a 3 rd burst) You're saying todays M-4 doesn't have full auto, only 3 rd burst? That was 50 years ago for me.
Travis covers the technical side, but I suspect that some of the reason for the difference was the different types of combat US soldiers find themselves in in recent times vs. Vietnam.
The currently issued M16A4 and M4A1 service rifles are set to single shot 99.9% of the time, and if anyone switches to burst fire they get yelled at by people in their chain of command who know better. Been that way since I went in in 2004. Current M16s don't even have the full-send option on the fire select control. It stops at 3-shot burst and doesn't let you move the lever the extra click for full-send. The M4s that special forces use have shorter 10" barrels (the MK18 variants) and have full-send capabilities. The magazine goes to zero in about 3 seconds if you dump on full send, and most of the bullets land not where you were aiming, especially at distances greater than 25 yards. That's why even special forces doesn't use full-send at distances outside of 50y unless they are suppressing something but don't have an M240 or M249 to suppress it with.
Speaking of M249's. During the BLM protests one of the boogaloo boys gave his name to a journalist, for quotation. Looking at his Instagram, there was a page with probably 50 images of a semi-automatic only M249's for sale, $7 to 8k. Yikes.
Charlie, you're absolutely right, the .223 cartridge (5.56 x 45 for the military) is roughly 3x faster than a typical 9 mm. But that doesn't mean the velocity is achieved because it's shot from an AR-type rifle. It's because it's from a rifle, with a longer barrel, period. The muzzle velocity of a 30-06 ranges from 2400 feet per second to 3400 fps (dependent upon load and bullet weight). A .308 (7.62 x 51 for the military) also ranges from 2600 to 3100 fps. A .357 magnum gets 1240 fps from a handgun, but can get to 2200 fps from a rifle.
My point? Almost all rifles fire bullets that go much faster than handguns. Cavitation is not unique to AR guns.
The AR is popular because the .223/5.56 round is relatively light-recoiling, so it's easy to shoot many rounds quickly. Although semi-automatics are also made in .308 and 30-06 calibers (for example), those rounds are not as fun (or as controllable) to shoot fast.
The .223/5.56 round is also comparatively light and cheap. A 30 round, fully-loaded magazine only weighs a pound. You can buy 1000 rounds of 5.56 ammo for $500. Comparing to a .308, a one-pound magazine carries 20 rounds, and 200 rounds cost about $350.
Nobody hunts deer with a 30 round magazine. In Florida, the maximum magazine capacity while deer hunting is 5 rounds. In Ohio, 3. In Colorado, 6. (Though to be fair, some states -- Texas and Montana, for example -- have no such restriction.)
IMHO, the real human slaughter problem stems from the semi-automatic firing action plus large capacity magazines, neither of which is useful for hunters. Large capacity, lightweight while fully-loaded magazines, coupled with semi-automatic actions, are the common denominator in most mass-shootings.
Brian Stayton
(All statistics from Professor Google.)
Not "useful for hunter" except for feral hog hunters. They're essentially required for feral hog hunters. Nonetheless, I get your point.
I purposely did not discuss hogs, since I was aware of slaughter tourism. I've hunted hogs too, with bolt-actions in 7mm-08 and .308. Lots of viable rounds available for hog hunting, not just .223. Although I understand the varmint control angle, I don't consider volume shooting from a helicopter to be "real" hunting. That's just killing. Call it what it is.
I completely defer to Travis over military capabilities. Although my son is a Marine now, I never served.
But the real issue of my reply was the wrongful conflation of cavitation, AR-style rifles, and mass homicide events. My point was that almost all rifles can cause cavitation. (Except .17s and .22s.) That's not why mass homicides happen. Mass shootings occur because deranged men can easily acquire semi-automatic rifles that shoot a light-recoil round loaded from high capacity, easily-switched magazines. It's rare that pistols are used in a random mass shooting (but the original article is right, those are more survivable), it's even more rare that explosive fertilizer is used, and I'm not aware of a bolt action being used since the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966.
You can load .300 blackout into something other than a 30-round magazine for feral hogs. Also, shot placement counts a lot more than ammo capacity when you're taking down wild game. You could also just shoot something other than feral hogs if they're so dangerous in packs that you need a 30-round magazine to deal with them.
Shot placement? Hunting hogs from a moving vehicle or a helo essentially eliminates good shot placement. I killed 150 hogs from a helo over a 2 day period hunting on a ranch near Laredo - right on the Rio Grande. It's volume of fire and a little but fast bullet out of a high cap mag is the only way to go. The exception is shooting the solo hog who doesn't know youre there. Not sure what a .300 blackout is but I doubt there's a high cap mag for it. Feral hogs are a big problem. A sow will have a litter of 5 and 7 will survive...
^This is why it's not really hunting so much as it is animal slaughter. Dumping rounds into packs of animals from a helicopter is NOT hunting. That shit is animal slaughter tourism.
If you don't know what .300 Blackout is and you hunt hogs then I don't know what to tell you lol. It's arguably the most popular AR round for hunting hogs that I'm aware of. It's also the best ammo for running a sound suppressor on an AR with. When you shoot 225-grain subsonic ammo out of a .300 BLK that has a can mounted on it, the only thing you hear it the action cycling.
Feral hogs are an infestation. They have to be destroyed. It has nothing to do with hunting for sport.
Nope. It is not tourism. Its varmit control. Hunting/killing in maas is the only method. Texas is over run with feral hogs to the detriment of vehicle, farms, ranches and native species. Killing hogs is sanctioned by Texas Parks and Wildlife and every other wildlife conversation org. I've hunted and killed a lot of hogs. Never seen ANY other rd used that a 5.56. Can your bias. You're not the expert you think you are.
If the boy can't hit anything with 10 rounds, get him a 30 round magazine!
Yes, and then move away. Far away
Agreed on all. The lighter bullet weights are specifically why the US military went to the M16/M4 over the M14 that fired 7.62x51mm on full auto. Pound for pound, an infantryman can carry 40% more ammunition on his back by carrying 5.56 instead of 7.62x39mm, and roughly 60% more ammunition when compared to 7.62x51mm. When SLA Marshal did his study on the effectiveness of infantryman in combat across multiple battlefield types, he found that the majority of gunfights take place inside of 200 yards in combat--the majority being less than 100 yards--and that the side that carried the most ammo typically inflicts the most casualties on their opponent because accuracy plummets once ground combatants get the adrenaline dump. The side with more bullets wins a gunfight via inflicting more casualties on the other side via the volume of fire it can dump onto the other side before running short on ammo. That's why we won just about every gunfight in Vietnam but lost the war. We were really good at winning gunfights, but we couldn't understand that the number of enemy combatants we were killing wasn't keeping up with the rate of replacement enemy combatants getting recruited every year. Same story against the Taliban in Afghanistan. We always had more bullets, it's just that the other side had more bodies getting recruited into its ground combatant forces every year than we were killing in gunfights. That's how an insurgency outlasts a numerically and technologically advanced invading force. You just recruit more people than they can kill every year, and eventually the invader gets tired of killing you without making progress and decides to leave.
What is your take on the new 6.8 mm? It seems to run counter to the carry more bullets paradigm.
The proliferation of body armor made that round a necessity in near-peer conflicts. China has body armor on their troops that can stop 5.56. More militaries will adopt body armor over time because it's getting very very cheap for governments to do so. We've been lucky to only be fighting soft targets since the 5.56 round got fielded. The 6.8x51mm round also has way better ballistic coefficients for its ammo, meaning that shot placement will improve across all distances and have less bullet drop at range (the minute of angle tightens up basically).
Even against soft targets, when you look at typical engagement distances in Kunar/Nuristan in Afghanistan, there's a reason that the grunts started packing designated marksman rifles like the M14 and the Marines' modified M16A4s that they fielded in Helmand. The enemy got wise and realized that if they start engagements from 400y out or more, they can lace the groundwork in between the point of ambush and the enemy with IEDs and make the enemy come to the IEDs they buried in cover/concealment spots between where the Marines/Soldiers are and where they needed to advance to. It also made returning fire more difficult because positive identification of the guy shooting at you from 400y away is made more difficult, and you can't return fire without positive ID, and even if you can, your minute of angle is going to open up quite a bit at that distance and the return fire will be less accurate.
I guess all of this is to say that I'm a fan of 6.8x51mm in terms of where warfare is heading. Volume of fire means less when there are civvies around and the enemy wears ceramic plates that you need to bust through to kill them.
And this weapon is built specifically for combat. It can't be used for hunting and not likely good for protection.
No it's not. There is no military in any country that uses the AR-15 as it's battle rifle because it's not suitable for military use without having a full auto capability. Multiple states prohibit the use of the AR-15 with its 5.56 rd for deer hunting because it's not "powerful" enough to consistently kill a deer upon initial impact
Our standard issue M16A4 and M4A1 rifles fire on single shot or burst. If you move it to burst, your fireteam leader or squad leader will hear it and promptly chew your ass for wasting ammo and pushing accuracy down. Only machine guns and the rifles special forces use have full-auto capabilities. Everyone else mostly uses single shot or a crew-served weapon (machine guns and automatic grenade launchers usually mounted to vehicle turrets).
Fill me in here. During my time in USMC, our M-16's had a full auto option and single shot (I think we also have a 3 rd burst) You're saying todays M-4 doesn't have full auto, only 3 rd burst? That was 50 years ago for me.
Travis covers the technical side, but I suspect that some of the reason for the difference was the different types of combat US soldiers find themselves in in recent times vs. Vietnam.
The currently issued M16A4 and M4A1 service rifles are set to single shot 99.9% of the time, and if anyone switches to burst fire they get yelled at by people in their chain of command who know better. Been that way since I went in in 2004. Current M16s don't even have the full-send option on the fire select control. It stops at 3-shot burst and doesn't let you move the lever the extra click for full-send. The M4s that special forces use have shorter 10" barrels (the MK18 variants) and have full-send capabilities. The magazine goes to zero in about 3 seconds if you dump on full send, and most of the bullets land not where you were aiming, especially at distances greater than 25 yards. That's why even special forces doesn't use full-send at distances outside of 50y unless they are suppressing something but don't have an M240 or M249 to suppress it with.
Speaking of M249's. During the BLM protests one of the boogaloo boys gave his name to a journalist, for quotation. Looking at his Instagram, there was a page with probably 50 images of a semi-automatic only M249's for sale, $7 to 8k. Yikes.