The phenomenon of clueless people spouting uninformed opinions on every possible topic is a common occurrence in today's society, especially on social media.
One of the worst offenders its the #gunsense crowd - check out that hashtag on Twitter any day of the week, and you'll see an incredible variety of uninformed opinions, wild conjectures, outright lies, and emotional exclamations unsubstantiated by the slightest shade of fact.
There's no shortage of gun-control advocates who ignore every historical precedent and consequence, as well as basic logic, and use spurious statistics to drum up support for "even more laws", without regard to the enforcement problems of existing ones.
Sometimes, the lunacy reaches incredible proportions and people start flat-out inventing things that don't exist, such as Piers Morgan's infamous ".233-caliber bullets" and "AR-15 magazine clips". (Morgan was put in his place by the inimitable Dana Loesch (@Dloesch on Twitter), but not before his shrill defence of these "ideas" enshrined them as permanent memes, that people still joke about, years later).
A little lesson in weapons engineering: A clip, or "stripper clip", is a device that holds ammunition for purposes of organization and faster reloading. It's removed after loading the ammo, and is not part of the weapon while firing. Speed-loaders fall into the same category: you use the device to shove ammo into the gun, then remove the device.
A magazine is a spring-loaded (or, rarely, gravity-fed) container that is an integral part of the weapon while firing.
With the exception of the M1 Garand (1936-1957), whose loading mechanism allowed for the clip to be left in the weapon while firing, and thus could be considered a clip and a magazine - 1 design out of millions - there's no such thing as a "magazine clip". Certainly not for the modern AR-15!
Magazine clips don't exist in the modern world... unless you're referring to these:
Piers Morgan's level of idiocy is a tough act to follow.
So, let's have a round of applause for this precious snowflake on Twitter, who somehow managed to beat it:
Putting aside the arrogance of declaring what's "necessary" and "unnecessary", counter to the opinion of the millions of lawful firearms owners and the accumulated technical knowledge of firearms manufacturers... let's delve into the factual errors of this pile of drivel.
Now, on Earth, the purpose of a barrel shroud is to dissipate heat, and prevent the user from getting burned if the barrel is accidentally touched. The secondary benefit of a shroud is to keep the barrel from warping due to repeated heating & cooling cycles. It's a safety device, if anything.
In whatever universe Ms. Snowflake occupies, a barrel shroud gains additional capabilities far beyond anything that human firearms engineers have imagined.
Not only does it convert a manual or semi-automatic weapon into an automatic one - a feat that ordinarily requires modifying the sear, trigger mechanism, and/or receiver (and risking 10 years in federal prison, BTW - hello, Firearms Acts of 1968 and 1986), but it also increases the velocity of the bullet!
Usually, in order to increase thrust/velocity, you'd have to pack more propellant into the cartridge, make the propellant more efficient, and/or increase chamber pressure. How a perforated metal tube wrapped around a barrel could accomplish any of those, is a little unclear. But laws of physics are for suckers, right?
Not content with demonstrating a complete lack of understanding, Ms. Snowflake also invented the term "Thrust Per Squeeze", which is sure to send gunsmiths into a collective "What The Actual F**k?" head-scratching tizzy.
Thanks to a lack of physics and/or engineering education, we now have a generation of people without a basic understanding of how some tools work... but thanks to a culture of entitlement, these same people skip right over the question of "do I even have the slightest clue what the hell I'm talking about?" and go right into "I'm completely uninformed, but lemme tell you why my opinion trumps your Constitutional rights". (And as a bonus, imply that all shooters are 'killers', regardless of their actual intent. Nice attitude.)
These are also the same people who ignore basic gun-safety rules such as
"unless you can clearly see the chamber, or there's a chamber flag, treat every weapon as loaded",
"do not put your finger on the trigger unless you're intending to shoot",
"do not trust safety switches", and
"never, EVER, point a weapon at anyone or anything unless you're intending to shoot them",
and proceed to spout nonsense about guns while doing this:
Yes, we have Senators making laws regarding devices that they are demonstrably uninformed about. But, what else is new? After the "Internet is a series of tubes" statement, I'm done being surprised at Congressional Cluelessness(TM).
...Meanwhile, back when people were actually taught gun safety and proper firearms handling, we didn't have this level of paranoia, rabid fear of anything that resembles a gun (including Pop-Tarts), and utterly ridiculous "inventions" like magic barrel shrouds.
That's a High School Rifle Club, circa 1974. Yes, there were guns in schools. Yes, kids were taught how to properly handle them. No, there weren't mass shootings back then. Certainly, there single-shooter/single-victim incidents, but those were overwhelmingly due to revenge or racism. It was only in the late 80's that random shooters, unprompted by personal vengeance, and with multiple victims, started cropping up.
In response to mass shootings, the "We Must Do Something!" crowd came up with the brilliant idea of "Gun-Free Zones", because as we're all aware, the only thing that stops a mentally unbalanced person who's already decided to commit multiple acts of murder, is a poster. The genius thinking apparently went along the lines of "the maniac will see a sign, turn around, go home, and re-evaluate his life choices. Ta-daaa!" ...and we can see how well that turned out in Aurora and Newtown.
Brian Cates (@drawandstrike on Twitter) wrote an excellent exposure of the reasons behind "Gun-Free School Zones", and why they simply don't work. It's in the form of a Twitter rant, but thankfully, there's Storify to assemble the pieces into an easy-to-read stream: https://storify.com/akaplenko/brian-cates-epic-exposure-of-gun-free-zones(There's an F-bomb in every other Tweet, and some of them are a little out of order, but it's a good read nonetheless).
Until basic education regarding guns, their principles of operation, and most importantly, their safe handling, is available again, and until our lawmakers stop proposing terrible ideas that do absolutely nothing to reduce crime while massively infringing on the Constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans, mass shootings will continue. So will gun violence in Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and other gang-infested major cities.
I'm not holding my breath, though.
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- "Magazine Clips" image credit: http://ohmyfreakingoodness.com/tag/modern-magazine-rack/
- "1974 Rifle Club" image credit: http://www.arlingtoncardinal.com/2013/12/reflections-on-the-dumbing-down-of-america-high-school-in-1957-and-high-school-in-2013/
- School shootings data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
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