The Washington Post Misfires—Again
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Kevin Williamson deconstructs the WaPo's article about the AR-15.
The Washington Post’s claim that the AR-type rifle is “uniquely destructive” is categorically false.
The physical metric that most matters for tissue damage from a bullet is not velocity alone but kinetic energy—which is to say, speed and mass. (To be precise, kinetic energy varies proportionately with mass and with the square of velocity.) That’s why a Nerf ball going 110 feet per second out of the Nerf Hyper blaster bounces off your chest but a Mack truck going the same 110 feet per second—75 mph—does not bounce off your chest. From time to time, you get hit by a very small object moving incredibly fast, and you won’t even feel it, because it is infinitesimally small. This isn’t an outside-the-box argument or an obscure technicality: The experts the Post consults themselves mostly identify energy as the critical issue, though the Post does not, insisting that it is a matter of bullet velocity. That is good propaganda but bad physics: The bullets typically fired by AR-type rifles do indeed move very quickly, but, because they are relatively small compared to most rifle rounds, they do not carry a great deal of kinetic energy compared to bullets fired by most common hunting rifles or target-shooting rifle.
You don’t need a lot of physics to understand the factors at work: Drop a piece of gravel on your foot, and then drop a bowling ball on your foot—they’ll be going the same speed when they land, but one of them is going to hurt a lot more. This is not some kind of arcane ballistic knowledge. These are measurable metrics.
You will not be surprised that the Washington Post completely ignores that consideration when writing about the “uniquely destructive power of the AR-15,” which is not uniquely destructive. Or, to be more precise, it ignores that consideration when it suits the paper’s rhetorical purposes: For example, an illustration of a notional 9mm wound shows the bullet simply passing through the body in a straight line with no expansion or fragmentation, even though handgun rounds intended for purposes other than target shooting are typically designed to do just that. (If you’ve wondered what a “hollow-point” is, that’s what’s meant—a bullet designed to expand in tissue, which serves the dual purpose of maximizing tissue damage and reducing overpenetration, an important consideration for self-defense shootings in the home or in public.) If you are interested in what a 9mm round actually does after impact, you can go to YouTube and watch any number of videos of 9mm handguns being fired into ballistic gel. There will be a variety of outcomes, because there is a variety of bullet designs.
If the editors of the Washington Post really believe that speed is what makes a bullet lethal then, by all means, I invite them to take one of those high-velocity squirrel guns mentioned above—or a 5.56mm AR-style rifle, for that matter—up to Alaska to hunt some coastal grizzlies. I’d recommend doing some thorough estate planning beforehand.
It simply is not the case that the 5.56mm rounds typically fired from an AR-type rifle do more damage to the human body than do common rounds fired from common rifles, especially hunting rifles. (It would be a neat trick to design a bullet that is useful for killing a 1,000-pound bull elk that is not dangerous to people.) As I have argued at length here and elsewhere, the focus on particular exotic-looking or aesthetically charged firearms is pure culture war, having very little to do with the realities of American murder. And what are those realities? One in 5 U.S. homicides involves no firearm at all, and of the ones that do involve a firearm, AR-type rifles are used in so few instances that the FBI does not even bother to break them out in the crime data, though we do know that all rifles combined make up about 2.6 percent of the weapons used in homicides. U.S. murder victims are more than four times as likely to be stabbed to death as to be shot to death with a rifle of any kind, more likely to be punched or kicked to death, more likely to be beaten to death with a blunt object, etc. (You can consult the relevant FBI data here.)
On the other hand, we tend to ignore very strong correlations that are politically and culturally inconvenient for Democratic politicians and their media allies: For example, the vast majority of murders are committed by people with prior criminal records, usually extensive ones. In Chicago, for example, the typical murderer has 12 prior arrests before being brought in on a homicide charge. In New York, prior offenders account for nearly 90 percent of homicides, and a quarter of those who commit murders do so while on parole or probation for a prior offense. And yet in many jurisdictions, the great majority of gun-charge cases are dismissed without trial—60 percent of gun cases are dismissed in Philadelphia, up from 30 percent as recently as 2016. All this bloodshed doesn’t come out of nowhere.
I have pointed out many of the Post’s errors, both here and in a letter to the newspaper. For example, the Post claims: “The deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history focused attention like never before on the destructive power of the AR-15.” That is not only untrue but impossible, given that the deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history happened in 1927, decades before there was an AR-15 to focus on. The Post presumably meant Newtown, which was a shooting, as opposed to the 1927 massacre in Bath, Michigan, which was a bombing. As of this writing, the Post has declined to correct these errors. You can get a pretty persuasive story if you exclude the facts and events that do not harmonize easily with your prejudices.
But that isn’t journalism.
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Kevin Williamson deconstructs the WaPo's article about the AR-15.
The Washington Post’s claim that the AR-type rifle is “uniquely destructive” is categorically false.
The physical metric that most matters for tissue damage from a bullet is not velocity alone but kinetic energy—which is to say, speed and mass. (To be precise, kinetic energy varies proportionately with mass and with the square of velocity.) That’s why a Nerf ball going 110 feet per second out of the Nerf Hyper blaster bounces off your chest but a Mack truck going the same 110 feet per second—75 mph—does not bounce off your chest. From time to time, you get hit by a very small object moving incredibly fast, and you won’t even feel it, because it is infinitesimally small. This isn’t an outside-the-box argument or an obscure technicality: The experts the Post consults themselves mostly identify energy as the critical issue, though the Post does not, insisting that it is a matter of bullet velocity. That is good propaganda but bad physics: The bullets typically fired by AR-type rifles do indeed move very quickly, but, because they are relatively small compared to most rifle rounds, they do not carry a great deal of kinetic energy compared to bullets fired by most common hunting rifles or target-shooting rifle.
You don’t need a lot of physics to understand the factors at work: Drop a piece of gravel on your foot, and then drop a bowling ball on your foot—they’ll be going the same speed when they land, but one of them is going to hurt a lot more. This is not some kind of arcane ballistic knowledge. These are measurable metrics.
You will not be surprised that the Washington Post completely ignores that consideration when writing about the “uniquely destructive power of the AR-15,” which is not uniquely destructive. Or, to be more precise, it ignores that consideration when it suits the paper’s rhetorical purposes: For example, an illustration of a notional 9mm wound shows the bullet simply passing through the body in a straight line with no expansion or fragmentation, even though handgun rounds intended for purposes other than target shooting are typically designed to do just that. (If you’ve wondered what a “hollow-point” is, that’s what’s meant—a bullet designed to expand in tissue, which serves the dual purpose of maximizing tissue damage and reducing overpenetration, an important consideration for self-defense shootings in the home or in public.) If you are interested in what a 9mm round actually does after impact, you can go to YouTube and watch any number of videos of 9mm handguns being fired into ballistic gel. There will be a variety of outcomes, because there is a variety of bullet designs.
If the editors of the Washington Post really believe that speed is what makes a bullet lethal then, by all means, I invite them to take one of those high-velocity squirrel guns mentioned above—or a 5.56mm AR-style rifle, for that matter—up to Alaska to hunt some coastal grizzlies. I’d recommend doing some thorough estate planning beforehand.
It simply is not the case that the 5.56mm rounds typically fired from an AR-type rifle do more damage to the human body than do common rounds fired from common rifles, especially hunting rifles. (It would be a neat trick to design a bullet that is useful for killing a 1,000-pound bull elk that is not dangerous to people.) As I have argued at length here and elsewhere, the focus on particular exotic-looking or aesthetically charged firearms is pure culture war, having very little to do with the realities of American murder. And what are those realities? One in 5 U.S. homicides involves no firearm at all, and of the ones that do involve a firearm, AR-type rifles are used in so few instances that the FBI does not even bother to break them out in the crime data, though we do know that all rifles combined make up about 2.6 percent of the weapons used in homicides. U.S. murder victims are more than four times as likely to be stabbed to death as to be shot to death with a rifle of any kind, more likely to be punched or kicked to death, more likely to be beaten to death with a blunt object, etc. (You can consult the relevant FBI data here.)
On the other hand, we tend to ignore very strong correlations that are politically and culturally inconvenient for Democratic politicians and their media allies: For example, the vast majority of murders are committed by people with prior criminal records, usually extensive ones. In Chicago, for example, the typical murderer has 12 prior arrests before being brought in on a homicide charge. In New York, prior offenders account for nearly 90 percent of homicides, and a quarter of those who commit murders do so while on parole or probation for a prior offense. And yet in many jurisdictions, the great majority of gun-charge cases are dismissed without trial—60 percent of gun cases are dismissed in Philadelphia, up from 30 percent as recently as 2016. All this bloodshed doesn’t come out of nowhere.
I have pointed out many of the Post’s errors, both here and in a letter to the newspaper. For example, the Post claims: “The deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history focused attention like never before on the destructive power of the AR-15.” That is not only untrue but impossible, given that the deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history happened in 1927, decades before there was an AR-15 to focus on. The Post presumably meant Newtown, which was a shooting, as opposed to the 1927 massacre in Bath, Michigan, which was a bombing. As of this writing, the Post has declined to correct these errors. You can get a pretty persuasive story if you exclude the facts and events that do not harmonize easily with your prejudices.
But that isn’t journalism.
@George-K said in The Washington Post Misfires—Again:
One in 5 U.S. homicides involves no firearm at all, and of the ones that do involve a firearm AR-type rifles are used in so few instances that the FBI does not even bother to break them out in the crime data
I know it's not the point of the article, but that's a bloody strange way to say that 80% of murders involve guns
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