Bullshit is in the Eye of the Beholder:

Maybe scroll back up a bit and look again those pictures of silly people using pistol grips to look cool. Here’s another from the US Navy to save you some thumb work:

Vertical foregrips, but especially when combined with the rear pistol grip as well (it's a system!) make the weapons more maneuverable and also increase control of muzzle to prevent climb from recoil. This impacts aiming, and re-aiming - both very helpful when shooting at those fleeing targets, and help keep a gun on target when firing rapidly.

They also serve other functions, such as housing a bipod for greater accuracy in some situations, and providing a secure place to hold the gun and avoid getting your hand burned as the barrel heats up with the successive shots.

On that note, just giving a place to hold on at all can be a value-add. When someone has gone full commando or added most of a SOPMOD kit they start running out of places to hold onto the damn thing, so the vertical foregrip can be handy just for that.

The rear grip is similarly functional and for basically the same reasons. They make aiming faster and more intuitive and make rapid and “assault fire” much easier.

That also helps a lot when you want to use bump firing to turn your semi-automatic assault rifle into what is functionally a full-auto weapon too. Here's a video with a clear example - and as a bonus it is using the same Ruger civilian assault rifles featured above. Note how the Tactical model’s “cosmetic” adaptations improve this little trick:

This may seem like a lot on just pistol grips, but I hope it makes the point very clear that everything about these guns has implications for their potential lethality. Not the least is just plain ol’ making shooting a lot of bullets a lot easier.

Lowering the Bar on Mass Murder:

Features like pistol grips, and like everything about assault rifles, have been specifically designed for increased lethal function, and perfected over many years and many millions of rounds fired. It’s all about improving effective, sustainable rapid fire, and that's all about making it easier to shoot fast moving and fleeing targets.

How much easier? You make recall from the Scalable Lethality section that it is child's play. Literally:

And here's a video to make it even more clear (and to show this is not uncommon either):

It is so easy to shoot a well-optimized assault rifle like an AR that even children can do it. That is not just being a smart-ass: that low bar is hugely important to the risk potential and should definitely be factored into understand the risk profile of assault rifles.

Watching children fire these weapons just highlights how little “input force” is really needed when using a force multiplier like an assault rifle. (See Scalable Lethality ) if that doesn’t make sense to you already). They can turn small, physically less-effective, and not particularly well-trained shooters into vastly more dangerous killers, and that adds a great deal to their overall risk profile when it comes to public safety.

So people who say these optimizations are just glitter and stickers, or argue that these features and enhancements don’t impact civilian use, or very rare situations, are entirely full of shit.

I’m going to hammer this home - it’s really important:

All those “cosmetic” optimizations matter, and they have actually have an even greater impact for civilians, and especially for typical lone-gunman type mass murderers.

It Isn't Cosmetic: On Assault Rifles it All Matters.

The M16 was built with small-framed shooters in mind: the South Vietnamese allies during the Vietnam War. They needed guns that didn’t rely upon on large, powerful, or well-trained killers to be effective. The history of these weapons, of their development and usage, is fascinating and informative, and is crystal-clear on the subject of form-follows-function, and how design features interact to produce massive changes in functionality.

The history there also tells us much about many other aspects of the weapons and culture around them. You can learn a lot by reading about the AR15’s background. Here is a great read is from Rolling Stone but if you prefer your gun facts more from gun people Gun Digest has an excellent version that tells the same story.

Back on point though, if anything, the weapon matters less in the hands of large, well trained, well-organized, well-supported soldiers. At some point it becomes almost like sharpening the tip of a rhino’s horn: a touch of overkill, to say the least.

Weapons are force multipliers, so the less input force you have, the more the weapon is going to matter, and the more “little tweaks” on the gun, the bigger that multiplication is going to be. This matters far more when the average civilian shooter is no rhino. They need all the help they can get to achieve large-scale lethality. It's hardly an accident that these people turn up at movie theaters, concerts, and schools full of children and not as often at police stations or in crowds of soldiers. They are not looking for challenge, they need it to be easy.

The bottom line is that the core features of assault rifles and the optimizations and accessories make them supremely dangerous in the hands of murderers like the killer in the Las Vegas shooting. Remember: more than 400 people shot from 1000’ away in 11 minutes. By a 64 year paunchy gambler.

He didn’t do all that with a bolt-action hunting rifle because he couldn’t do all that with anything but assault rifles. Assault rifles that looked just like those big, scary, black guns.

There are far too many other examples, but what more needs to be said?

As a bullshit strategy this has all worked extremely well. The number of people that should know better, but still fall for the idea that somehow the “cosmetics” don’t matter, is shockingly large. I hope there are a few less after all this reading anyway. When someone adds a pistol grip to a long gun, that is about making a gun better for killing people faster and/or killing more people faster, regardless of what they say about it.

Remember that the core functionality is the key that makes sustainable, effective rapid-fire possible, and that there are a lot more rifles out there that are capable of this than what we think of as assault rifles. The only thing that some lack are exactly those “cosmetic” upgrades that help make sustainable, effective rapid-fire so easy that even children can do it. Do not make the mistake of treating them as non-important.

The way the gun lobby focuses on the "looks” is partly a distraction, as noted, but it is also an attempt to devalue people’s opinions, to try and embarrass them into silence. This allows that vocal minority to dominate an important social conversation, and that needs to stop.

But not everyone wants to read pages and pages about guns and learn how they work. So the question here is simple: is there good reason to be wary of these weapons, even if you don’t understand them, and just know what they look like? The answer is yes, and the reason is also simple: because their story and associations are very clearly about using violence towards people as a method of solving problems, and about killing people - and lots of them.

If we want to know why many people are nervous around these guns we just have to look at where we see assault weapons most in reality. Who has them? What are they being used for? What’s the prevailing cultural context? With assault weapons - unsurprisingly - that is war (obviously) but they are also steeped in a shit-ton of aggressive culture and mindset - and a lot of that comes directly from the gun industry and community.

Let’s start with this little gem. It paints a pretty good picture of the type of person that might make the "you are just a snowflake" kind of argument:

If you don’t know this brand, Bushmaster is one of the major manufacturers of AR platform rifles. Their models are quite popular, and with mass murderers actually, like the DC Snipers and the Sandy Hook shooter, to name only two.

The ad speaks volumes really. It very nicely captures not just the bullshit dinosaur version of “manhood” that still exist for some people that embrace assault rifles and have a certain approach to gun ownership, but it encapsulates the mindset that runs the “you are afraid of the big scary guns” bullshit campaign almost perfectly.

This is a clear example what is actually very common passive-aggressive (or just outright aggressive) shaming tactics that some gun advocates will use to demean and silence opposition: if you are afraid of these guns, never mind if you just don’t own one, you are not a “man”. It’s tempting to just say “fuck those guys” and move on, but it is important to call out this particular bullshit and to not ignore and dismiss out of hand. It’s part of the larger gaslighting campaign - and the “no single most important factor” principle holds here too. If we don’t sketch the big picture we don’t realize how nasty this really is. You can say this ad is just “toxic masculinity” or if you swing the other way that people being overly sensitive to that, but given the connection between that, misogyny and murder, that alone is a reason to call it out. Gun guys might think that connection is bullshit, but it is most definitely not. Most mass shooters start with their intimate partners. Far more women have their eye on this stuff than they know, and for damn good reasons.

So let’s carrying on and start peeling this bullshit even more open and seeing why this tactic of demeaning and mocking people for fear of deadly weapons is not only offensive, but the position itself is actually just stupid - at best - and gaslighting - at its worst.

Forget what gun lobby people say about the guns and simply look at just a very few examples of where the general public usually sees assault rifles.

In the News

Warfare, mass murder, and dangerous yahoos who not only bring weapons to a “peaceful” protest, but cannot even do that half-assed safely.

In Film and Television:

I barely have to anything about this stuff - it’s self explanatory.

Just a tiny handful, and far from the most “demonizing” movies or shows one could pick from. Note that Extraction and John Wick - both well loved by gun people for the weapon techniques used, feature a great deal of semi-automatic rapid-firing to great effect, and in both shots they have weapons with dual pistol grips, and more of all that supposedly “cosmetic” stuff.

And last, but not least - and for sure my favourite:

In the Gun World’s Own Marketing and Publishing

The “mancard” ad is a good indicator of how the gun world has gotten a little cagier, if you can call that one cagy, but still without losing their core audience I guess. Back in the day before the US Federal Assault Weapon ban it was way more straight up: they just called them assault rifles and showed people dressed like soldiers using them:

There is more about this in the Birth of the Bullshit section, but you get the idea.

Today the mentality is still there, but toned down -- sometimes -- because the game is now about selling assault rifles without calling them assault rifles, all in order to dance around legal restrictions and bad PR. What was once blatant is less so, but it's not gone - not far anyway. It is now more common to use insinuation and pictures of people that are suggestive of "off-duty" warriors, or what people picture special forces-type operators to look like.

All this is quite clearly designed to walk the line between the military and assault rifle associations that help sell the guns to those that want them, but to avoid the "assault weapon" legal fiascos that have plagued them since the 1994 ban. They also pivoted again to avoid some of the later blowback that came from what remains petty blatant militarization of gun industry marketing.

Combat, military, etc. etc. Not a lot of happy hunters and plinking at paper. Some marketing materials are borderline cases but for different reasons. For example the Xm-15 image, but only because the target market for the same civilian assault weapons also includes military and police (what does that say?). In any case, the connection is clear and the influence is hardly accidental.

So while the gun world cut out much of the super heavy-handedness, and tried to re-define the terms "assault weapon" or "assault rifle" entirely, the firearms industry has also continued to appeal to the same militaristic image and culture to better market weapons based on enhanced lethality. It’s just much more of a “nod and a wink” kinda game now, but nobody is fooled and this contributes to the public perception of the weapons as dangerous, and they associate them with dangerous people killing other people - not paper targets and animals.

That Dog Just Won’t Hunt: How Some Gun Marketing Has Backfired:

The by-product of both real-world exposure and marketing efforts is that people’s associations with assault rifles are all about violence and effective killing. It is actually hard to see why the average person should not be super wary of them over - say - the hunting rifles that we are supposed to believe are functionally identical. But why don't we feel that way about all the guns? (some do of course, but not the majority it seems).

Maybe that is simply because those kind of guns aren't as deadly, and maybe because experience has told us this, and maybe also because the gun world has helped teach us that by reinforcing more innocuous associations too.

If we contrast the way the gun world markets their hunting and actual sporting rifles, we can see how this has worked for them there in creating a very different impression of those guns, and against them with assault rifles:

Notice anything different about the vibe?

This is clearly a different message, and the difference is hardly subtle. These are communicating things to the world about about who we should think is buying and using true sporting or hunting rifles, and why they are.

This is a place where gun-industry bullshit has actually backfired in terms of their assault weapon game too. They have done a pretty good job of maintaining an innocuous image for the trusty bolt action or lever-action (as long as they aren’t tacti-cooled up I guess), and it reflects in how people feel about the guns. But the clear divide is not just image. It is a divide in application, function, as well as the look. In fact the gun world tried really hard to bridge that gap the other way too, and had a bad time of it.

In the Birth of the Bullshit section I talked about how Colt played around with this exact thing when bringing the AR15 assault rifle to the civilian market. Even then the associations with assault rifle was combat and killing people, and the guns were not adapted to the world and culture of hunting. None of that was going to boost sales to the much larger market of hunters and sport gun owners. So Colt sold the AR15 as the “Sporter” and tried to push it away from it’s combative applications - but it was pure marketing tactic.

That wasn’t cutting it - sales were slow - so to try and move serious numbers they tried splitting the difference more, which really just resulted in some mixed messages that probably haven’t helped the bullshit cause much either:

All that more positive imagery ads up, but it's not the big factor in why people are not as afraid for hunting weapons - just a factor. It is really the experience of guns in reality: Grandpa's hunting rifles just aren’t associated with the same kind of killing and mayhem that the AR15 and it's like are.

And please, please gun people: let’s not talk about who shot who with what in WW1 or bolt-action rifles and how many died at the Siege of Ladysmith. Yeah, we've heard it before: a gun is a gun is a gun. This is just irrelevant bullshit and we all know it now. Those associations just don’t factor into it, and the context and capability is wildly different.

Bottom line: If gun people don’t want everyone else to be afraid of people with assault rifles, and more afraid of assault rifles than other long guns, they have a lot more bullshitting to do in order to overcome the giant mountain of evidence and cultural associations, and they might want to do a better job of not shooting themselves in the foot with their own heavy-handed marketing efforts. Good luck with that.

Wrap-Up: Feel Free to Judge the Book By The Cover

You can dismiss it out of hand as a low-brow bullshit tactic, but keeping an eye on this approach is worthwhile - maybe mostly because it is good evidence that someone is part of a gaslighting effort that is directed at you, and maybe that should influence how you weigh their opinions in future.

Most of the time the “looks mean nothing” variety of bullshit is probably just someone who really doesn’t know the guns as well as they think they do. Whatever - it’s pretty safe bet they think they know more than you, and are counting on that, which is not something “responsible” gun owners should do. I believe most know very well they are lying, but that kind of bullshit is so normalized they don’t really understand anymore the ethical implications of what they are doing.

It seems wise to be wary of those people either way, but some of the people working this angle are definitely trying to gaslight the public, and those people are a different thing. They are actively deceiving people about something that has killed children, and -- sadly -- will almost certainly do so again, because they want to sell and buy these exceptionally dangerous guns.

Remember that how guns look matters. Accessories change more than look, and those changes are seriously relevant to the deadliness and risk factor of assault rifles.

But don’t worry about remembering all the details of the weapons. Trust in the logic that form follows function, and know the evidence is all around you, and in the history of weapon design. Remind yourself that the world's militaries have invested a money beyond counting into developing those tools of war. It is very reasonable to conclude that wasn't all for looks, and who has a greater interest in maximizing lethality on large scales?

In any case, knock yourself out: judge the book by the cover, you are not silly at all.

Thoughts about the article? Feel free to drop me a line.