WTF Are They?

So yeah, bigger is not always better. There are many aspects that come into play.

Probably the most clearly documented example of the chicken-and-the-egg process of developing the medium cartridge and the weapon platform for it is with AR15/M16 platform and the cartridge pictured in the middle above, the 5.56mm NATO round.

That assault rifle and ammunition were literally built around each other, but in many ways the driving force was the bullet more than the firearm, and this is because the military understood the importance of the cartridge characteristics to defining the overall lethality, and the systemic nature of that lethality.

There was a list of parameters the US military came up with — lethal objectives the bullet was asked to meet — and the gun was engineered (adapted really) to fire them and help meet those, as well as other combat-related goals (like firing at those fleeing targets).

The AR-15/M16 and the 5.56mm cartridge were built to fit perfectly together, and they definitely got that right.

Detachable (High Capacity) Magazine 

Detachable magazines also make the logistics of fielding a lot of ammo much simpler and more manageable. More bullets, delivered much faster, for longer.

Detachable box mags are what most people imagine when they hear about a gun magazine, or “mag”, or “clip”. You probably imagine something like the ones pictured below - they are the most common style. “High capacity” is variable, but people usually think of them as holding 10 or more cartridges.

Assault rifle magazines more commonly hold 20, 30, or more rounds of ammunition. 50, and even 100 round magazines are available (including in Canada). Those have been popular with mass murderers in the last few years, by the way.

All-in-all, the detachable magazine greatly increases the amount of bullets that one person can effectively field and fire, and also dramatically increases the ability to sustain a high rate of fire for longer periods of time. They unlock massive amounts of potential firepower, and that applies for any weapon that uses them, not just assault rifles. 

But detachable magazine are especially important for a weapon that is intended and optimized for sustained rapid-fire, be that assault fire, or covering or suppressing fire (the prime uses for fully-automatic firing), or for just trying to kill a lot of innocent people in a short period of time. In any event, rapid-fire runs through ammo, well, rapidly. Having more is key. 

While ammo consumption is obviously higher with rapid-fire, do not be confused about how effective rapid-firing is done. Effective rapid and assault fire — and generally most fire intended to kill people — is not just high volume, indiscriminate, or wild. It is not often best served with fully-automatic fire either. That just wastes bullets.

The US Army Rifle and Carbine manual, and basically all modern military and combative training, reinforces this point, emphatically. In fact things like 3-round burst firing modes were specifically added to reduce the use of full-auto fire and the wasting of ammunition.

That is discussed more just below, but assault rifles definitely need more ammo on tap, and a quick way to reload. Thus they have detachable magazines, and high capacity ones in particular.

One point I want to really drive home though:

In terms of importance to the weapon’s lethality - both detachability and higher capacity matter, but only detachability is truly necessary to this picture.

Capacity is big, and certainly the anti-gun movements have fought to have high-capacity magazines prohibited (with moderate success at best). In what seems like a rare bit of shared perspective, the Canadian gun lobby also like to highlight high-capacity as more important (even while fighting against restriction on high-capacity magazines). That’s just bullshit on their part though.

That is because it is really the detachable factor that is vital to making weapons more dangerous. A detachable ammunition sources is what opens up the possibility of high-capacity in the first place, and creates the possibilities for reloading options that make sustainable fire remotely possible as well. The gun lobby know this and will fight forever to have detachable magazines protected from bans, even though that is where the real danger and value lie.

High-capacity is a major improvement and optimization to magazines, but that is all it is. So the gun lobby can pretend to care about a lot about it, but it’s another pawn in the game really. As well, they have workarounds that render restrictions moot anyway, so what do they really care? Polysesouvient has done a good job of breaking this particular bit of bullshit down. It’s worth a look.

Given how many different firearms, not just assault weapons, in fact use detachable magazines it is not surprising the the gun lobby has tried to de-emphasize this in favour of pointing fingers at high-capacity mags, but it all comes down to bullshit to protect guns, not people.

There is a lot more to be said on this, and of course there are other factors that come into the the picture, particularly here Canada, but that is the crux of it with detachable mags.

Capable of Rapid-Fire

For them, the third pillar of the definition is not “rapid-fire” it is fully automatic fire. If you are really unsure about what full-auto means, and how it differs from semi-automatic fire, I have a short side-trip section that explains it more fully, but the gun lobby has worked to make this aspect important as part of the effort to try and "define away" the entire category of civilian assault rifles, all in an effort to avoid having them banned. This, even though it was the semi-automatic versions that were almost invariably used in mass shootings that created the impetus for bans. Class all the way.

Full-auto, as a characteristic function, is used to deceive the general public about where the real danger lies. It is used to hide the fact that the real danger of scalable lethality resides very firmly within semi-automatic “modern sporting” rifles — which is one of the most popular euphemisms for civilian assault rifles. Military-optimized assault rifles are not the only ones capable of rapid-fire though, there are many that are less obvious and less purpose-tuned but are nonetheless capable rifles. Many of these are ones that the gun lobby misleadingly use to try and downplay the risks, for example the ever-popular Ruger Mini14 which seems to be the poster child for this kind of bullshit.

The gun lobby leans hard on the "historical" definition of the StG44 and insist upon full-auto firing for a “real” assault rifle, but as we look at in The Birth of the Bullshit , it wasn't always that way. It also seems very clear from the definitions shared above that the people that developed these guns certainly weren’t particularly focused on full-auto fire. A fair question to ask is why the change of heart and focus for the gun crowd? An easy answer there: mass shootings and bans - explored in the link just above quite a bit more. 

If we skip some serious politics and focus instead on function, then just thinking in terms of rapid-fire, and specifically upon effective and sustained rapid-fire, matches how assaults rifles are actually used, and also matches definitions the gun lobby and industry quite happily used for decades. 

Again, if you are not clear on what rapid-fire really is, and the differences between full-auto and semi-automatic weapons and firing modes, I really suggest you check the section devoted to clearing that up. For now I’ll assume you understand it and the implications of the different modes and just focus on applications here.

Full Auto and Semi-Automatic Fire - It’s all Rapid in the End.

Full-auto is when a gun will continue to fire bullets for as long as the trigger is pulled, till it runs out of bullets or has a breakdown. It is definitely “rapid-fire”. For example, the M16/M4 fire between 700-950 rounds per minute (rpm). That will empty a standard 30-round high-capacity magazine in a bit more than 2 seconds. But even full-on, purpose-built machine guns are rarely used that way, and for slightly complex reasons. What follows should get the main points across without the big slog, but all the details are covered more in Assault Rifles: The 3-Part Recipe for Scalable Lethality.

Certainly, there are occasions where just blasting away in full-auto, or at least long bursts of it anyway, are going to be an effective way of creating chaos and carnage. We’ve all seen it in movies, and even when it is not directly lethal that kind of volume of fire can be indirectly dangerous, and very unpredictable. There is no good use for it in civilian life to outweigh the danger, so it’s banned almost everywhere.

Here’s the thing though: outside of using it to make an enemy duck and cover and not shoot back at you, full-auto fire is just not that useful, and often highly discouraged by military and police training - because it just wastes bullets. It is not effective fire. It is also very hard on the gun, and cannot be sustained for long without a lot of engineering, and usually teamwork.

Outside of some use-cases in the military, and outside of “fish in a barrel” shooting situations, typically full-auto is used with careful control of the trigger to fire in short bursts, firing 3-5 rounds and then releasing the trigger. That is much more effective, so even in combat letting it rip in full-auto is rare, because it is generally less lethal, as well as being hard on the weapon.

What makes full-auto fire less lethal is inaccuracy stemming from the recoil of a shot. Every bullet fired makes the gun barrel jump around to some degree, and at 10-15 shots per second, that can be a lot of jumping, even with smaller bullets.

This is one of the major reasons why assault rifles were designed around a medium cartridge - to make sustained rapid firing more controllable by reducing recoil, but they wanted to do that without sacrificing the killing potential, as was the case with submachine guns and other smaller-calibre weapons. It is also why pistol grips (front and rear) as well as other design optimizations are so useful  - but that’s not the real point here.

However, even with a less powerful medium cartridge, assault rifles still have enough recoil that long bursts of fire — typically anything more than 3-5 rounds —  just get progressively less accurate, and less lethally effective - at least directly. This doesn’t mean there aren’t uses for cyclic fire, there certainly are - it’s just that directly killing people isn’t really the big one some would like you to think.

The primary alternative to automatic weapons are semi-automatics, where the gun fires one bullet per pull of the trigger. This is as fast as you can manage, one shot at at time. Non-gun people might tend to think that this is equal to slow. Nope.

The gun lobby often like the public to think it is slow too, but it isn’t - it is just slower. Usually. Sorta.

More on that soon, but for now: people typically consider semi-automatic rapid-fire to be about 45-60 rpm. That is pretty quick, but most shooters and semi-automatic rifles are capable of much higher rates when shooting in short rapid bursts, easily getting up to 200-300 rpm with no tricks or trouble at all. The less one cares about accuracy, the faster one can shoot too.

If a weapon has the option of switching between full-auto and semi-auto modes, which is far and away the most common for military assault rifles, it is called a selective-fire weapon. Because it is so common, “selective-fire” is how most gun people will refer to what many think of as "machine guns”. You may hear "automatic weapons” a lot too, but never "machine guns" from those in the know (unless they are actually talking machine guns)

Full-auto versus semi-automatic fire is based on mechanical differences, very small ones actually, and the physical mechanics of how the trigger is used. The point here is that those are the clear bright lines that divide the two types of guns - but the mechanical bits are the only place the difference is actually binary. Functionally, how the guns are used and how they can be used, is a lot less clearly defined. This is due to the limited effectiveness of full-auto fire when it comes to killing people, and also to the speed at which semi-automatics can fire. Those are fuzzy lines, at best, and this is why, in order to be more sensible, the definition of assault rifle has to be broadened back to something more viable - like the one DARPA used, for example.

Selective-Fire Isn’t Very

Despite how the term may sound, and without care, full-auto is about the least “selective" you can get without just closing your eyes and firing away - which takes us back to the idea mentioned above about shooting in short bursts of rapid-fire.

The reason for both is weapon recoil, and how the movement caused by each shot makes the next shot harder and harder to aim well, especially when shooting rapidly. That difference, between how fast it can fire and how fast someone can aim and fire, is the difference between an automatic weapon’s cyclic rate — its “max speed” — and its effective rate of fire, which is a shit-ton slower. That’s how we end up with that “typical” semi-automatic rapid-fire rate of 45-60 rpm, that is the effective rate. The point to understand is that the effective rate is the same for full-auto rifles as well, except when firing in extremely short bursts.

Full-auto is fast remember  - up to 900rpm - so that recoil problem stacks up quick, even with highly controllable modern weapons and ammunition. This why you sometimes hear full-auto shooting called “spray and pray”. Depending on the caliber and design of the weapon, most experts will tell you that even with a good assault rifle and cartridge combination, at any kind of range — say 20m or more —  that anything after the first 1-2 shots is likely to be completely off target, and even if closer probably no more than 3-5 shots will be very useful - which is why the 3-round burst option was developed.

In any case, full-auto is rapid, no question, but so rapid that it can be challenging to make effective.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

But the fact is that even in those moments, this kind of fire can often be replaced, and usually be improved upon, with sustained, controlled rapid semi-automatic fire, placing 1 or 2 shots with very high speed, precision, and much better accuracy. This is exactly what you see happening with well trained shooters everywhere.

Or in any John Wick movie.

Or in the newer Netflix movie Extraction. Or, really, any good modern combat movie. 

Or just read up on a gun forum. 

Or just ask the US Army. This is not exactly top secret stuff.

Here is the US Army manual for the AR platform assault rifle on the subject of rate of fire: