(excerpt)
As it turns out, the original designer of the AR-15, working at a company called Armalite, had an earlier rifle called the AR-10, which it pitched to the military after the Korean War as a replacement for the M-1 rifle (the one they used in World War II). Armalite was using a screwy mix of metals at the back of the AR-10’s barrel (the part that is next to your face), and one of them blew up while the military was testing it, so the AR-10 lost a competition to what turned into the M14 (the wood-stocked rifle that honor guards march around with and twirl during drills). It’s worth noting that the AR-10 also fired the .308 Winchester bullets that the military was using (more on that later).
Armalite redesigned the rifle to fire smaller .223 caliber bullets, stopped using screwy metals in the barrel, and called the result the AR-15. Unfortunately they already lost the contract and had a bad reputation to go with it (their last rifle blew up), so they sold the plans to Colt. Colt, in turn, pitched the AR-15 to the military, and after using the South Vietnamese Army as a guinea pig, then-Secretary of Defense McNamara bought a hundred thousand of them. The rest is a scene from Platoon.
This means the AR-15 was definitely “designed to kill people as quickly as possible,” because it was designed for the infantry, and that is what the infantry does.
Acrobatic Ammunition
The next bit worth dealing with, which actually occurs earlier in Harris’ text, discusses the ammunition intended to be used by these types of rifles.
These bullets also tend to tumble and fragment in the body, which makes them more lethal. However, one cannot say in every case that an assault rifle in the wrong hands is a greater threat to innocent life than a handgun. Rifle rounds travel at such high velocity that they sometimes pass through a person’s body before tumbling or fragmenting—doing less damage than one would expect from a handgun round. Conversely, these bullets are so light and frangible that they are sometimes stopped by barriers such as doors and wallboard.
Before continuing, I think it’s worth talking a bit about the sizes of the ammunition that is being talked about. The .30-06 round (the big cartridge on the right in the sidebar image) was the ammunition used by the semi-automatic M-1 rifle, which is what the infantry carried in World War II. The .308 Winchester round (in the center), was used by the M-14 rifle, which replaced the M-1, and 5.56mm NATO round (on the left) is what’s used by the AR-15/M-16.
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