A .50 cal isn’t going to take down a US Naval warship. Get real.
First its taunting. The Iranians do it all the time. If they had been so misguided as to attempt to fire on a US naval warship from 500 yards or 2,000 yards they would find themselves sitting on the bottom of the gulf in short order.
Basically it was a non event.
I was hypothetically talking about us taking out the rag-head camel-jockeys, or should I have put up a /Sarc tag? I know a fifty caliber machine gun won’t take out a navy ship, but I do know their effective range is about +- two thousand yards.
Iranians respect our navy probably the same way they respected our untrained and unprepared naval craft that they captured without any fight whatsoever.