The Daily Escape:
Antarctica – May, 2022 photo by Jason Row Photography
Wrongo shot the AR-15 at Fort Ord, CA while in the military in 1966. Back then, the US Army had its Combat Developments Experimentation Command, known as CDEC, there. Fort Ord is now closed, but its location on Monterey Bay in California, made it a beautiful place to spend a weekend, if not military training.
In the 1960s, Fort Ord was the home of the 4th Replacement Training Center, with upward of 50,000 soldiers preparing for their upcoming tour of Vietnam. As part of our training, we participated in the night fire tests of the AR-15. Those tests simulated the conditions that small squads faced in combat. The idea was to compare the performance of the AR-15 against the M-14, the incumbent weapon.
The Army adopted the lighter AR-15 in a model they called the M-16. James Fallows, writing in 1988 in The Atlantic, said this about the weapon:
“By the middle of 1967, when the M-16 had been in combat for about a year and a half, a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their unreliable equipment and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen to attract the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, which formed an investigating subcommittee.”
The subcommittee examined the problems caused by the M-16, and Fallows’ article is worth reading to see how badly the Army procurement process failed the US soldier in Vietnam. The Army made several changes to the AR-15 as it became the M-16. All of them served to make the weapon unreliable in combat conditions and less useful as a weapon of war.
But Wrongo wants to focus on the M-16’s high velocity bullet. From Fallows:
“Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers had made a discovery in the science of ‘wound ballistics.’ The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into….a human body…”
On Sunday, 60 Minutes re-broadcast a story on the lethality of the AR-15. The focus was on how the gun’s high velocity rounds cause devastating and often lethal wounds that first responders and emergency rooms have great difficulty repairing.
The Intercept brings this back to the Uvalde shooting: (Brackets by Wrongo)
“Many circumstances of this week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are incomprehensible….The [wound] damage was so severe that agonized parents had to give DNA samples to identify their children.”
Imagine. The request pointed to the obvious: Many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was impossible to identify their bodies. And that DNA identification process took hours.
Much of the damage was because in addition to the killer using the AR-15, a weapon of war, he also used hollow point bullets, one of the most physically destructive forms of ammunition. Hollow-point bullets open upon impact thereby causing more damage to their targets:
Source: Guns and Ammo
They can easily be purchased throughout the US, but the rest of the world thinks the use of expanding rounds on the battlefield is a war crime. The International Criminal Court bars their use, and they are prohibited by a declaration of the Hague Convention (which of course, the US has never ratified).
The US military has authorized hollow-point ammo. Civilian ammosexual proponents of the hollow-point ammo argue that the bullet reduces harm to nearby civilians, since it’s less likely to pass through its intended target or to ricochet. They also say that it’s useful in hunting big game, so the animal can be killed in one hit. Just like it works in 10 year-old grammar school students.
More from the Intercept:
“Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde, purchased 375 expanding rounds. In 2019, a 21-year-old gunman in El Paso, Texas, bought 1,000 of the same type of bullets for his Walmart rampage. The 20-year-old gunman in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting managed to stockpile 1,700 of various rounds, including hollow points.”
None of these purchases raised any flags with ammo retailers.
It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. Back in the 1960s during those early field tests, the military learned that the AR-15 excelled at blowing people apart. Let’s give Rod Miller the final word:
“Armed Americans are killing our schoolkids while they study. They routinely kill them by the dozens for various reasons all across our country. Let me repeat that, armed Americans are killing our schoolkids.”
Can we at least ban hollow-point ammo for use by private citizens?
Once again, Wrongo’s carefully researched blog expands the factual basis of our concerns and, more importantly, equips us to more effectively and confidently advocate politically. I plan to forward this. It may tip some folks from “thoughts and prayers” to political action.