Posted on 03/05/2018 7:29:38 PM PST by Simon Green
By now, we get it. We know that Shannon Watts doesn’t like guns. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Lots of people don’t like or care about firearms in any way, shape, or form. Kind of like how some don’t care about sports.
What sets Shannon apart from so many others, however, is that while she doesn’t like guns, she’s convinced people should listen to her opinion on the topic. This despite not understanding the first thing about them except they give her the vapors.
Take this tweet from Shannon:
Now, if you don’t know anything about firearms, that’s a scary looking assault rifle…only, it’s not. It’s a Ruger Precision Rimfire .22 bolt action. It’s literally the least scary firearm anyone could own.
To be sure, people took her to task over this one. They should have.
But what’s really important here isn’t what people said to Shannon. It’s really not. What’s important is that this illustrates so much of the problem with gun grabbers and their perpetual attempts to regulate guns. Their issue isn’t so much about the function of a firearm, but its looks.
For example, when was the last time you saw a politician standing there with a Mini-14 or an M1A using that as an example of a firearm we need to tightly regulate?
They don’t do it. After all, those rifles look an awful lot like your traditional hunting rifles, and they’re not nearly as scared of those guns as they are the proverbial “ghost gun with a .30 caliber magazine clip,” or something like that. More importantly, however, is they don’t think you will be as scared of those guns.
Shannon picked that particular gun because it’s scary looking. It has an M-Lok rail system like a so-called assault rifle, and it has a Picatinny scope base like many evil black rifles, and it has a magazine that’s a little too long for her tastes, so it must be an evil rifle.
But it’s a bolt-action .22 for crying out loud.
It doesn’t matter. Most of the Moms Demand Action crowd, like Shannon, don’t really understand the items they are pushing to regulate. They don’t feel like they need to understand them. They figure they know all they need to know via talking points and Salon articles. What more do they need to know, right?
Meanwhile, we understand what a barrel shroud does. We understand that a phrase like “.30 caliber magazine clip” makes no blasted sense. We understand the items being discussed and we have a working knowledge of what they can and can’t do.
As such, this particular rifle doesn’t look scary to us. It’s got some tactical-like features on a precision rifle chambered in a caliber that’s really too small to use for anything but punching holes in paper or taking on small game like squirrels or rabbits. That’s it.
We don’t get worked up over the looks of a rifle because we understand the basic reality that the looks don’t mean jack.
From there, we understand a lot more about guns such as how laws–particularly laws over “scary looking” rifles–accomplish nothing at all.
In a way, though, I’m glad Shannon doesn’t know this. Her ineptitude is always good for a laugh if nothing else.
That is the first I have heard of bending a powder burner rifle. The heating would worry me.
Common with soft steel airgun tubes to correct gross POI weirdness.
It is a bit of overkill to have a heat shroud on the barrel of a .22 bolt action. My Remington Nylon 66 semi-auto rifle I bought in the mid 1960s needed no heat shroud on the barrel in spite of massive rounds fired. My 1873 44-40 Winchester with no cover on the barrel. yeah, it gets hot.
The gun came with a flat straight handle bolt. In order to ditch the open ladder sights and mount a scope, the bolt handle will not clear the outside diameter of the huge scope eye aperture. I guess you could have an entirely new bolt made, but the Smith I used had done it enough to know what he was doing. New blueing and I had a $2,000 rifle for about $300. 3 inch groups at 200 yards.
Lighten up Shannon, you ditz. You’re taking yourself way too seriously.
It doesn't help when you post stuff like that.
The bolt handle is not subject to pressure from the round discharging. It was common in the 50s/60s to do that to sporterize surplus rifles.
Mark
While heat would be a factor with the centerfire rifles, it's not going to be with the rimfire. A big part of the styling appears to be to make it a trainer for the centerfires.
Mark
I looked at her Twitter account and I'd say she more than a few watts short. The obsessive nature of these people is frightening. No wonder they don't want to talk about mental health.
She is a gun-grabbing whore, bought and paid for by the fascist Michael Bloomturd.
“An M1A Gerrand actually fires a more powerful cartridge in a larger caliber than a “Modern Assault Rifle” does.” [Fai Mao, post 4]
“I believe you mean that that the WWII M1 Garand is a .30-06
round. The M1A is a civilian version of the M-14 which fires a 7.62mm round ie .308. You are correct that the .30 cal round is a large caliber than the .223.” [TaMoDee, post 10]
“US Rifle, Caliber 30, M1” is the official nomenclature of the first semiauto rifle officially adopted by any major power - in 1936. Designed and developed in the 1920s by John C Garand while he was employed at the National Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, it went through three major revisions (including two changes of caliber) before final approval was forthcoming.
All errors in spelling and nomenclature are forgiven ... ordnance-history enthusiasts don’t always agree on how John Garand’s surname should be pronounced. He was born in Quebec and immigrated to the United States at an early age, and was said to favor stressing the first syllable, as in “GAR-and,” from which Fai Mao’s phonetic rendering is easily extrapolated. Later in life, Garand’s son was overheard by family friends answering the phone thus: “Ga-RAND residence,” stressing the second syllable. Common usage among rifle owners and the shooting community in general follows the second pronunciation.
The M1A rifle, an adaptation of the US M14 rifle, was introduced in 1974 and is still made by Springfield Armory Inc, a commercial gunmaking firm in Geneseo, Illinois with no connection to the US National Armory (which was closed in 1968). 44 year later, many gun publications, hundreds of websites, and thousands of chatboard posters still get it wrong, referring to it as “M1A1” or similar mistaken designations.
John Garand not only struggled to incorporate the numerous changes and adaptations demanded by the US Army Ordnance establishment, and senior leaders of the War Dept combat arms branches. He also designed much of the industrial machinery used in producing the M1, and ultimately ironed out a number of production snarls, many of which were caused by undocumented changes in configuration of parts, undertaken by ill-informed junior engineers and technicians.
The M1 served as the primary issue rifle of US forces from 1936 until 1957, when the M14 was officially adopted. The M1 remained in military service, arming front-line units as late as 1961 because of M14 production problems. It kept serving in Army National Guard outfits and some military schools into the 1970s. When I entered the US Air Force Academy in 1971, I was issued an M1 in the 1.92 million serial number range.
Civilians may still purchase M1 Garand rifles from the government, through the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Hundreds of thousands were exported to allies. Negotiations are under way to return them to the country to be sold to the public. M14s were never released for sale to civilians, as they are select-fire and thus legally machine guns.
The M14 (and its semi-only clone, the M1A) fired the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, the first NATO-standardized item of ordnance, a round very close in dimensions to the commercial 308 Winchester.
7.62mm NATO was derived from the US 30-06 military cartridge; its case was 1/2 inch shorter and it was optimized in other ways to work better in automatic arms (including a thicker rim and a wider extractor groove). Ballistic performance at the muzzle was almost identical to military 30-06, but the NATO round offered greater effective range because it was loaded with a boat-tail bullet, a more streamlined aerodynamic shape compared to the flat-base bullet loaded in the final issue version of 30-06 (official nomenclature 30M2).
The select-fire M14 was in no sense an “assault rifle,” which was officially defined as a select-fire shoulder arm chambering a cartridge of lower power and range than the standard rifle cartridge of the day.
US Army Ordnance designers tinkered for 12 years following World War Two, but were unable to come up with anything more advanced that the M14, which is an elegant-handling, highly accurate arm, but is nothing more than a slightly-improved M1, with a fire selector switch, scope-mount fixtures, a flash suppressor, and a detachable box magazine.
The Armory had wrought an industrial miracle in its WWII production of John Garand’s rifle; per-unit cost fell to about $26.00 per rifle, at a time when Savage produced the M1 Thompson Submachine Gun for $47.00 each (both are in then-year dollars). Eventually, total production was almost 5.5 million units.
The M1 Garand was a success story the Armory naturally ached to repeat, and the M14 was sold in part on the claims by Armory staff that WWII machinery used on the M1 could turn out M14s for lower total cost than that for an entirely new design.
Armory claims proved impossible to fulfill: only a tiny number of parts interchange with the M1. M14 production was bedeviled by numerous delays and quality-control problems; production was halted early, at some 1,380,000 units, which included production runs by commercial firms Winchester, H&R, and TRW. The last company had no gunmaking experience at all but experienced fewer problems than the Armory.
The 5.56mm NATO cartridge weighs just half of what a 7.62mm NATO cartridge weighs.
SAFETY NOTE: 7.62 NATO and 308 Winchester are widely believed to interchange, but they will not, especially when attempting to fire 308s in a rifle marked “7.62mm NATO.” Max and min tolerances are different, and it’s possible to get an out-of-battery discharge, especially in semi-auto rifles where the closing movement is more abrupt. Much commercial 308 ammunition is loaded to higher velocities and pressures than 7.62mm NATO.
Users are strongly advised not to shoot either cartridge in a rifle chambered for the other. Please shoot safely.
Flu medicine Groggy mind
The point is, however, valid. Infantry rifles from WW1 & ww2 fire a more powerful cartridge in terms of range, and knockdown power than those used today. The advantage of an M-16 is that it can fire much faster, is easier to handle and lighter.
A semiautomatic AR-15 does not fire any faster than an M1 (Though quite a bit faster than a 1903 Springfield)
7.62X63 =2800/fps
5.56X45 =2972/fps (Wikipedia - Assuming a 17.7-inch barrel)
Due to the larger diameter, the 7.62X63 bullets have far more stopping power. You can make an argument that the M1 is a more powerful rifle than the AR-15
The M1 fires a more powerful, harder hitting round than 5.56X45 AR.
I have tried to have this conversation with people who keep claiming to want sensible gun laws.
And it always seems to come back down to making people who are currently law-abiding into law-breaking.
I also thought it was funny when I saw that meme where Diane Feinstein said she wanted 51 votes in the Senate so she could tell Mr. and Mrs. America to turn them all in.
That would be a unique day in US history.
She has Resting-Democrat-Face. That drops her to a 5 hot, but she scores a solid 9 crazy.
Hey - looks mean a lot. If I see a Pinto with racing stripes on it, I know better than to make any drag race bets against it......
I like that and will use it.
Oh no, you didn’t. ROTFL.
Good synopsis...
M1A is a Fine piece!
Concerning that "firearm". Uuhhh. No.. Hell no. Knock yerself out, Poindexter.
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