Et Qui Nolunt Occidere...

...quemquam posse volunt. That's a quote from...hang on...Juvenal, and I used it as the motto of the gunrunners in my SF book. It means, "Even those who don't want to kill anyone, still want to be able to." And today I thought I'd delve into another of my well-stocked stores of geekiness, and discuss guns. Several of these are gonna be of a reality-check nature, thanks to all the misinformation out there.

• You've probably heard this before, but the "Assault Weapons" ban was a joke. Know what an assault weapon is? It's not what you're thinking of. "Assault weapon" only has one real industry meaning, and they've been illegal to civilians for more than a hundred years. An assault weapon, properly so-called, is usually something most laymen would call a bazooka. Occasionally its meaning extends to fully-automatic small arms and to things like flamethrowers. No gun covered by the Assault Weapons Ban is remotely similar, except cosmetically. Weapons capable of fully-automatic fire have not been legal to civilians since the National Firearms Act of 1934.


• Oh, people will say, but the weapons the ban applies to are semi-automatic. Uh-huh. And this is where the gun-ban people are disingenuous—do you actually know what semi-automatic means? My mother and aunt, who are very much not the gun type but are much better-informed than most people, assumed "semiautomatic" meant the weapon can be changed from fully-automatic to 1-shot-per-trigger-pull (the latter, of course, is what semiauto really means). That is, they thought "semi-automatic" meant "selective fire." I'm willing to wager this misconception is widespread; and I'm willing to wager that the gun-ban people like it that way.
  
  Now do not misunderstand me, I am entirely in favor of controlling civilian ownership of full-auto weapons. Only that's not what the Assault Weapons Ban did. It eliminated guns entirely arbitrarily, based on cosmetic similarities to quite different weapons.


• Similarly, how the law limited handguns to 10 bullets? What the hell? I'm sorry, but every extra bullet in the magazine counts. Yeah, more bullets are an advantage for criminals, but they're also an advantage for the law-abiding. And I'm kinda pissed that Calico, a pioneer in helical magazines—a 50-shot pistol, for the love of God!—had such a tough time, in large part because of that law.
  
  I recall an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit ("brought to you by the Lifetime network") where a victim gets a .50 caliber Desert Eagle to protect herself, with a 14-round extended magazine, and the female cop (Olivia?) says, I kid you not, "It's practically an assault rifle."
  
  Snerk. No, detective, actually it's not. It's got about 1/3 to 1/4 the range of an assault rifle, but its bullets are twice as big; get jacketed hollowpoints and your opponent is not going home happy. Also, again, semi-auto means "bang-bang-bang"; an assault rifle is capable of "ratatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatatata" and then you have to change magazines. Not that you'd ever have such poor fire-discipline with an assault rifle.


• Am I the only one who tires of people who think they're awesome because they correct other people for saying "clip" when they mean "magazine"? Yeah, I know the difference, in my own writing I'm religious about it, but what's served by nitpicking?
  
  I think a part of the confusion is, the last time put-near-everybody used guns, was World War II. In that era, a lot of weapons were loaded with clips—the M1 Garand, the Mauser C96, a lot of WWII guns, all have internal magazines loaded from en-bloc or "stripper" clips (and the Pommy sidearm could be loaded from moon-clips, those crazy Brits and their Webleys and Enfields). On the other hand Thompsons, M1911s, and several other WWII-era weapons load from detachable box or drum magazines (or sometimes snail-shell, in the Luger's case). But if I have a little bunch of bullets I load at once into my M1, and you have a little bunch you load into your M1911, am I gonna bother with calling them two different things while Fritz is advancing on our position? Hell no.
  
  Wait, I just implied you're an officer and I'm an enlisted, that ain't right. Switch that; I get the M1911.


• So apparently there is a reason to turn your pistol inward. Not 90 degrees in, so it lays on its side—that's silly. But 45 degrees, inward, apparently strengthens your grip a bit when you're shooting one-handed. It's called a MacMillan turn.


• I wish someone would tell me if it'd be legal, or for that matter practical, to convert a LeMat grapeshot revolver to use cartridge ammo instead of cap-and-ball. See, the LeMat has 9 (!) .40 caliber bullets in a revolving cylinder...that pivots around a 16-gauge shotgun barrel. There was a cartridge variant of it made after the Civil War, but it was ugly—it would give you an idea of how to do the conversion, though, and just keep it looking like the older model.
  
  The problem is, would you run afoul of sawed-off shotgun laws? Because most people I've talked to say yes, but the laws themselves seem to say no. See, a gun that shoots shot doesn't, apparently, violate those laws, unless it's actually been cut down to its current length—there's no problem if the gun was designed short, that's why "ratshot" loads for pistols and rifles are legal. But our laws aren't actually enforced as written, most irritatingly.


• So, Vulcan Raven is impossible, I don't care how big of an Eskimo he is. The recoil on an honest-to-God Vulcan cannon must be enormous; average recoil on a minigun is 150 lbs, peak recoil is 300. A microgun, which was actually designed for infantry use (but from a mount) is more manageable, averaging 99 lbs and peaking at 220. Still, ouch. Raven would be a bit more believable if he was built like a sumo wrestler—then he'd have the mass to wrestle with his gun, at least, though it's still doubtful he could control it without at least a bipod.


• Gatling guns in fiction always make the wrong noise. There's a clip on Wikipedia of some sort of Gatling-type autocannon (a GAU, maybe, I forget which though) being fired, and it really sounds like nothing so much as a buzzsaw—it's a much higher pitch than you'd expect. Apparently Tommy guns sound like very angry sewing machines.
  
  Movies always soup up the sound guns make, actually; the guns that actually sound like movie guns, even the Desert Eagles and .44 Magnums, probably have to be carted around on small wagons.


• So if the "assault rifle" remark, above, wasn't enough to reveal how little Law & Order writers know about guns, how about how Criminal Intent seems to think you can identify the caliber of a gun when it's pointed at you? Oh, sure, if it's an M1911, a Makarov, or a Luger, maybe, but most guns come in a variety of chamberings. Even if you could tell the internal dimension of the barrel just by eyeballing it—is it, for instance, .45 ACP or .45 GAP? Okay, bad example, it's almost always ACP. But is it .40 S&W, or 10mm?
  
  Then there was the scene in Criminal Intent where they changed the "L" in "Luger" to an "E", as if it was a trademark. Uh, no, that's the name of the caliber, 9 mm Luger Parabellum. Lots of companies make it, just like lots of them make .45 Automatic Colt Pistol and .45 Glock Automatic Pistol and .40 Smith & Wesson.
  
  But what really takes the cake for me, about Law & Order, is the SVU episode about how all homeschoolers are mentally unstable paranoids who are hiding from the world, and potentially dangerous. In it, a kid is so terrified of being taken from his (homeschooling) mother—due to her evil homeschooling brainwashing of course—that he kills his little brother. And they know the little brother didn't kill himself, because, quote, "The gun jammed when someone tried to chamber the second round," and, again quote, "It's tough to do that when you've already shot yourself in the head."
  
  Except it's a semi-automatic pistol, not a pump-action shotgun or a bolt-action rifle. Guess what? Semiautomatic is also known as "autoloading", because firing the first round, chambers the second one.