Police say there’s an active shooter in Lewiston, Maine, and they are investigating multiple scenes
Police say there’s an active shooter in Lewiston, Maine, and they are investigating multiple scenes
Central Maine Medical Center said staff were “reacting to a mass casualty, mass shooter event” and were coordinating with area hospitals to take in patients.
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Must be an automatic weapon fired into a crowd to have that many casualties...
Automatic probably would have had fewer since it would have missed with most the shots. Lethality like that requires controlled and aimed fire with individual shots.
I believe the suspect that the police have identified was a firearms instructor at a military base down in Saco.
If it was a dense crowd, an automatic has more than enough accuracy to hit a ton of people since you do not need much accuracy at all in that scenario.
Automatics are extremely expensive, rare and usually illegal to own. They also do not have much tactical use in a scenario like this. Continued fire is primarily for suppression in squad movements. Sainted individual shots will always be more effective for portable, handheld weapons.
Not sure where I claimed automatics were cheap and easy to obtain...
I am aware how they are generally used. They are also generally used in the military where the objective is not to kill a mass concentration of people. When your target is huge, pointed, individual shots are not going to better since accuracy is not really necessary.
That being said, it does not seem to be the case here since this was in a bowling alley. The guy was a firearms instructor.
But they are the guy ur responding to is pretending sear switches arent $20 and he's pretending u need to buy a fully auto weapon instead of a 600 m&p ar and a $20 eBay part.
All you're doing is showing that you've never actually fired an automatic weapon, because what you are saying is flat out wrong. Even in a bowling alley or somewhere else with densely packed people, automatic fire is going to miss with the majority of rounds fired. Pinpoint accuracy is not required but some sort of accuracy is; in even the best conditions automatic is simply too uncontrollable and too fast. If he was actually a firearms instructor he would absolutely know this as well.
I have fired full auto several times. A bowling alley is not that densely packed. Some place like a concert would be densely packed like when the shooter in Vegas used bump stocks to essentially fire full auto and would over 400 people and kill 60. A gun with a bump stock has worse accuracy than a fully automatic gun but he still managed to do a hell of a lot of damage in a short period of time.
Vegas it was never determined by the investigation if he used bump stocks or illegally modified full autos. He also fired more than 1100 rounds into a crowd upwards of 20,000 and killed 60 with less than 500 injuries to include shrapnel. He missed with the majority of his shots in a far denser crowd and from a fixed firing position where the guns were functionally mounted versus being hand held.
Sear is $20 u doughnut. No one is buying fully auto guns
Most guns have some simple way to convert to full auto illegally but if the talk is about preventing atrocities with bans, like the general discussion here, they are already banned.
For AR-15s it’s not a sear though, you’re thinking of glocks which function completely differently.
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Yeah, DIAS aren't $20 or that easy to make and as such aren't as common on the black market. They are doable for someone with machining skills but for an AR a lightning link is the normal illegal conversion.
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Some photos I've seen show a extended clip and a scope.
He's also a firearm instructor. Fuckin rough combination for an active shooter.
All the photos I’ve seen are normal magazines, I’ve also never seen an AR that takes clips. Optics are kinda standard for most rifles these days and even many pistols too. Nothing really out of the ordinary. He seems far more proficient with the weapon and tactics though, training is a much bigger factor in lethality than equipment.
It's a magazine. Clips are for another type of rifle that allow quick reloading. You aren't looking in a scope if you're shooting a full auto weapon.
As much as USA is pro-gun, I thought automatics are not sold?
Regardless as the other comment says, firing on full auto is a waste of ammo. Back in service our first range practice we were given the Rambo-fantasy; hip firing at full auto at 10 metres out. No one hit any of the targets. It was a lesson to us that firearms, as easy as they are to use, needed at least some skill to be effective.
They aren’t.
Caveat: There are ways to simulate full automatics (e.g. bump stock), and also some guns can be converted into full automatic.
Trump banned bump stocks. It's the only gun control that's held up in court in around 20 years.
Now look up full auto sears for $25
Yes full auto weapons used to be trivial to buy, it's been more than 20 years since that was the case.
Look up lightning link and realize you're an idiot
Full auto guns can be purchased. Most often they’re prior 80s ban guns. They’re older generally, although there are some newer full auto guns that have been hitting the market lately. They all require you to have full background checks and they’re serialized to match. The ATF is the one though that you have to register through to legally acquire one and from what I’ve heard it’s kind of a bitch to get approval on them (as it should be).
How have there been newer full-auto weapons on the market? I thought everything registered after 1986 was banned (not technically, but the ATF wouldn't approve the tax stamp to register anything after 1986).
For the general public, there aren't. If you want a machine gun of new manufacture, you have to go through the whole process to be licensed as a manufacturer, SOT, FFL type whatever. I forget exactly. And you have to show you're actually doing business to get and keep that license.
Technically no. You can still get a fly automatic but they are expensive as hell. A cheaper solution would be a bump stock but that is even less accurate than an automatic. You could also illegally build your own.
As for ability to hit targets, how close together and how many were the targets? If it is a few targets spread out over 10-20 meters, yeah going full auto is going to miss a lot. Having dozens of people packed into a small area makes accuracy less important.
What's a bump stock?Went to read about them; the inventing company has stopped making them, are they still easy to get?They popped up the range targets, so not as tight as a packed crowd, but you'd think at least one would get hit. My impression was that it was really hard to control the recoil making the barrel going up, so most of my rounds just went over the targets.
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No because they are illegal. The only thing good to come out of the Trump admin.
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Were there 100 targets all right next to each other all within 50ft?
Highly unlikely unless he built it himself. Machine guns (automatic weapons) are extremely expensive (anywhere from the cost of a new car to a new house, depending on the model) and require you to submit to a colonoscopy, administered courtesy of the ATF. The result is that it's extremely rare for a legally-owned machine gun to be used in a shooting (afaik it's only happened once or twice since the ATF introduced tax stamps for them).
The thing that confuses me is why it is the government is able to restrict automatic weapons and weapons above a certain caliber through what is effectively a license system, but isn't able to restrict anything else because it'd run afoul of the 2nd amendment.
Guns should be like cars. No one should feel like they need one (except if it's part of your work, in which case your work should be providing one), and like a car, different kinds of guns should have different licenses. You want a double-barrel shotgun? Okay. You have to go through a week of training to get a basic redneck license and show you have a gun safe (not a cheapo lockbox) to keep it in when not in use. You want a machine gun? Cool. You have to get the super-ultra-deluxe gun owner's license that requires a year of training, authorization from the ATF and FBI, and proof that you have a gun safe to store it in.
Oh yeah, and if your gun is stolen and it was improperly secured and/or you fail to report it in a reasonable amount of time then your license(s) are permanently revoked and you're considered to be an accomplice to whatever crimes were committed with it.
I'd be willing that the last bit would dramatically cut down school shootings specifically.
I can buy a car with cash, no bg check, no license, no insurance, no training, no age restriction and drive it and use it on my private property...I can also move it across state lines with no issue. I can also buy any size car or truck without anything as well. So no your car analogy doesn't work.
And no that last bit wouldn't cut down on school shootings, as most are done with handguns in the inner cities using illegally obtained firearms already, and are usually gang oriented.
Tons of other things would cut down on our violence issue, but they're harder to pull off and politicians like to have a virtue signaling single voter issue to rely on.
Nah the real issue isn't firearms, it's just that Americans have a culture that celebrates having a massive hateboner for things and can tend towards violence as a result, just look at certain parts of the Middle East, same thing
You're not wrong. We're a very divided group right now.